think barack obama is very clear about, and is determined to pursue and, god help us may it succeed in doing. [inaudible] [laughter] >> i want to add briefly and commenting on what norman said about those who love america and those who don't love america. i would like to add a quote from bill buck lee showing that how much you could love america -- [inaudible] and it's the line from the genesis of oaks in which he says, this country of ours so crazy and mixed up much of the time, and yet, still worth everything. >> well, of course it has flaws. everything has flaws. e everything human has flaws. the question is what you emphasize, and what has been

emphasized in our culture for well forty years now, it was increasing intensity, is the flaws. i mean, you've got several generations of kids who have been educated to believe that the country stinks. it was born in sin and continued to be pursue evil object is, et. cetera. that's why i keep harping on this issue. i still think it is the major issue facing us, and conservatives, at least of not all strifes, i have to sigh, are the only force in the country that can be relied upon to -- well, at los, i think stop it. this particular history, i think, we can yell stop and it can succeed. we can draw on the deepest resources of the country's tradition to fight it.

and but if we don't, nobody else will. and the battle will be lost. >> receipt me bring it back to whittaker claimers. the fact it looks like losing battle doesn't mean you don't do it. when chambers confronted communism. he was confronting the entire american establishment. everything was against him. i'm sure it looked like -- it looked very clearly that it was something he couldn't imagine he was going diseed. but he did it anyway. he the courage to do what he did, and each of the those steps, i mean, testifying was an enormously courageous thing to do, when his challenge to make the accusation that he was spy outside of the congressional privilege. he went on to see the -- yeah. an enormous courage and ultimately he prevailed. >> yes. good bid i -- he was a great man

and witnesses as a great book. but i do think that he never dropped the other shoe, and this this weekend his own fight against communism. and rereading "witness" i've been struck by how much the resistance sighing america as -- seeing america as good. you can say relatively good. he said that communism was absolute evil. i believe that. and i would not say that america represents absolute good. i think it's pretty damn good compared to everything else. [laughter] >> i would like to thank the panelists for a pretty damn good panel. [applause] intermitt [inaudible conversations] bock tv is on facebook. like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers. watch videos and get up-to-date events.

facebook.com/booktv. [inaudible conversations] straying l me. take things from me. [inaudible conversations] >> he's not safe on that bus. there. >> i've been on that bus. >> they are as good as gold. >> all of us in the country were starting to see people coming out and talking about their experience of this phenomena that so many of us had experienced in one way or another. and have had no words for other than adolescence other than growing up. finally people were starting to stand back and say, hold on, this isn't actually normal part of growing up. it's not a normal rite of passage. i think there was a moment where there was a possibility for change, and the director lee hirsch and i decided to start the film out at that feeling that voices were kind of bubbling up, coming up to the surface to say, this isn't something we can accept anymore

in the normal part of our culture. >> film maker followed up the award winning film by gathering essays and together in "bully." hear more tonight at 10:00 on after words and find more booktv goon online. like us on facebook. next in light of the recent school shooting in connecticut on friday, award winning journalist david cohen presents his book columbine. the comprehensive account that took place in ninth. it's about forty minutes. dave cohen who are eric and dylan. >> the two killers at columbine. >> and eric was a psychopath and dylan was not. they were completely different people. and, you know, as i spent ten years on the book, and the question i get asked most often

is why do d they do it. it took me a year to figure out it's in the wrong question. there's eric why he did it and there's dialynn. they are different people. do you want to talk about each one? eric was a psychopath. >> eric harris? >> yes. he was the mastermind of the plot. he spent a couple of years trying to figure out how he could destroy the entire world. that was his "fantasy" as a 16-year-old boy. wipe out humanitarian. only leave three or four or five people. the power of life as well as death makes it more powerful. a god can give life as well as take it away. and they are not delusional where they think there is god. there's a important of god. it's referred to the messiah complex. the key to them is no compassion

or em pa think. no regard to the welfare of ores nor

it-- that's how we saw it in dylan try so hard love the world and felt the world wasn't loving him back. in gradually he takes a slow evolution, he wasn't aggressive. he easily diagnosed as a classic

adolescence diagnostic. that doesn't tell you enough. watching for two years how the kid would never kill under the influence of eric harris turn the anger inward out at rest of the world. instead of blaming me, it's blaming all the rest of the people that did this to me and i'm going take a loud view and show you on the way out. he committed suicide but took a lot of people with him. >> in your book, "columbine," you write's dylan's mind raced night and day analyzed and deconstructing. he was 15. he had a mission he was eric's number one go-to guy and none of that mattered. what was the missions? >> the missions were -- they were early symptom of something going airy. the soft more year, they started doing -- they were pranks. but eric called them missions

because he was grandiose about everything. he saw them as big thing where we are showing how people great they were. shooting off fire crackers and super glueing mailboxes shut, and so forth. in what is interesting to me about the missions is that you see a progression with eric going from pet i did vandal to petty thief, to theft to murder. you didn't just start out a mass murder. he had his own garage -- he would have being a career criminal of some sort. he had a sadistic streak. he wanted to kill people for simple reasons. and because he enjoyed it. he wanted to have fun and he wanted to show us. you know, i would say it's understanding a psychopath, it

doesn't take a lot to understand what one is. it's a fairly simple complex. it's hard to believe it's true. that somebody will kill someone, kill he wanted to kill hundreds of people but will do that for the most petty gain to himself. that was enough. >> april 20, 1999, was the date of columbine the massacre at the high school there. but eric startedplay planning this 1997. >> yes. >> how can you discover that? >> well, they kept lofts records. eventually, after seven-year legal battle, jefferson connecticut released nearly a thowbd pages of writing that the killers left. they each left a journal, they left school assignments, also eric wrote on the website about what he wanted to do. and then they made video tapes explaining themselves in the last month. they decided that wasn't enough. so the fbi agent in the case was a major character in the book

the unwinding of the detective story. he said that . >> what was his name? >> supervisory special agent gain. 2009. a brilliant psychologist. happened to take over the case. we he said in the entire fbi career he had never seen killer who died leave this much material explaining themselves. we have an extraordinary amount of information together the last years digging through all of this information and talking with various psychiatrists and psychologist that the fbi brought in the case to understand them. it's clear cut once you have doctored the information. it's hard to make up the handwriting. it took quite awhile to be able to designer. once you understand the psychologist con. it's easier to understand them too. you have towns what a psychopath is and how they tick to understand how to interpret

eric. so he doesn't sound -- he was follows a classic pattern. >> did wayne and kathy harris recognize that eric was in trouble. >> that he was troubled and got in trouble. they had no idea of the extent in the trouble. almost nobody recognizes a psychopath. if you think of somebody like han ball -- they never tell you they going eat your liver. you would be the last person in the world to know they are a sky psycho. the first book published in the '30s he titled it "the mask of sanity" because there are two clusters of the characteristic of the psychopath. one is the lack of em pa think and lack of compassion for anyone. but they decided even more important characteristic was that the ability to disguise that lack of em pa think as if

wearing a mask. they are nearly always charming. they are the people we turn to to trust. in bankruptcy court or divorce court, they are the person you turn to help nap is most likely the psychopath. so parents never recognize they have a psychopath in the house. they knew eric was acting out. he got in trouble sometimes. they were having him see a psychiatrist, psychiatrist put him on do lot of. that wasn't strong enough. they put him on other things. they disciplined him strongly. they knew they had a kid acting out. they had no idea what. i want to though up another idea for people to consider. eric was gobbling up shakespeare writing papers on king leer and macbeth, he would write the most amazing apologies. picture, you have a kid he acts up and gets in trouble. when he explains himself he

shows deep utter remorse. he quotes shakespeare in when he's talking to you and in king leer he learned a similar thing. you give a kid like that a latitude. you have a brilliant kid that seems to be doing well. he gets in trouble sometimes. they knew they had a problem child. what kind of parent thinks he acts out sometimes. i wonder if he's considering mass murder. >> did sue and tom recognize anything in dylan. >> they recognized depression. they knew he was depress. they had no idea how bad it was. ..

that is kind of the scary thing about columbine is that dylan klebold was a typical high school kid and a kid like that who gets involved with an eric harris, that could happen in any high school in america. >> host: you write in your book that eric harris was very typical, i guess. he had a lot of girlfriends and he was smart and he had friends. >> guest: he led a difficult wife but psychopaths really lead a double-life. what's going on inside, whether they're ripping you off or whether they are planning to kill you, they lead a life as a cover. it's what they need to do -- think of ted bundy. he was working on the crisis

hotline helping suicide people. he wasn't interested in helping other people but that is what they do. eric was feigning a normal life but different things going on inside there. >> host: who was cathy berdahl? >> guest: cathy bruno was the christian martyr who believed in god. it became one of the biggest stories in columbine and one of the biggest redemption stories and there are a lot of great redemption stories in columbine and i try to go through a lot of them in the book. that particular one didn't happen and it was a misunderstanding, because the story went that cathy was hiding underneath a table and dylan came up and asked her if she believed in god at that point and she said yes and then was killed and it became a huge christian martyr worldwide. there was sort of a following of her. it turned out there were two girls in the library involved. what happened with cathy is she

was hiding underneath the table praying for her life. eric walked up to the table, whacked it with his hand and said he could do, because the shotgun under the lip of the table and shot her in the head. she died instantly, never had a chance, died terribly and tragically. meanwhile in another part of the library there was a second girl who dylan shot her with a shotgun and she was bleeding, crawling away. dylan came across her and started talking to her. asked if she believed in god and she said yes and then they have this exchange about it. he asked her why and then he got distracted by something that eric was doing and walked away. he didn't care who lived or died. he let. so she lived to tell. which is also an uplifting story actually. a girl who was asked if she believed in god, professes her faith and lived.

there was another boy under one of the tables who overheard this and didn't know either of them and somehow mistakenly thought that it was cathy who said it. he started telling people, completely honest mistake, the story spread and we reporters really never did our job of checking in and asking grieving victims, how do you know it was cathy? how well did you know her? do you recognize her voice and those kinds of tough questions. that has become one of the biggest myths in columbine. >> host: speaking of myths there was a headline in the posted day or two after and this was "the denver post" from that day. healing begins, april 22, 1999 per l. >> guest: i think that was an unfortunate thing that they regretted and everyone involved in columbine regrets because if i could give one piece of

advice. a community goes through these tragedies -- and when he talked to in the mental health worker or any pastor who has done funerals or worked with people, it takes months and years for people to deal with their grief and we tried to rush them into it. it was a day and a half. heel now, you get a couple of weeks and then back. many people really didn't start understanding their own grief until a year or more out. the crisis group that was brought into the high school to deal with the students with post-traumatic stress disorder and so forth didn't even expect to reach their peak utilization until six months out and stayed at that peak level for a year and a half. so trying to take a grieving person a day and a half after and say okay, start getting better now, they're not ready to get better get and really needed to back up and give them . they felt terribly rushed into it and they felt bitter and

resentful for years because of that. >> host: dave cullen how did you approach the writing of this book? >> guest: i first took a stab at a book a year after columbine and it was going to be a small b book and i approach it that way and just based on the killers and also unraveling the myth. there were so many myths and the things we know about columbine is wrong ,-com,-com ma the basic things about them targeting jocks and even been a -- 's shooting. i was trying to unravel those myths and i wrote it the first draft as a protagonist trying to unravel all of this and figure out how it happened and the detective story of what really happened in columbine. meanwhile i was trying to understand the killers better and really understand what happened to them. that took me a couple of years in the story just wasn't ready. it was really the five-year point where i did a piece called

the depressive and the psychopath where we have the fbi for the first time diagnose the killers and i started over at that point and realized i wanted to stories, but before story in the after story. the before story of the killers and how they evolved as killers this killers because it was such a -- process. then i wanted to do the after story, the victims and their stories and what it did to them. you get both stories simultaneously but i wrote them separately. i wrote all of the eric story at one point over five months and all the dylan story after nearly five months and when i was working on eric, all i did every day was read his journal, listen to the music he listened to, watch the films that he liked and immersed himself in his world reading his daytime ran then writing about him and talking with psychiatrist about him, trying to work out the puzzles i didn't understand

about him that a complete eric immersion for five months in and the same thing with dylan. i actually got depressed in writing the dylan story. i ended up kind of channeling some of his personality. i wasn't able to i think convey dylan's depression and his loneliness, so i got that way myself. what i was trying to do was nod as if i were describing you and sit here and say you are in a chair and wearing a light blue shirt. what i tried to do is turn the camera around and be beside you and project what the world look like to you, what you were seeing and what you are thinking and what you are feeling and present the killers and all the characters in the book from his side and that is what i try to do. >> host: you said you got depressed when writing about dylan. how serious was it? >> guest: well, that was not actually the worst.

the more serious was writing about the victims actually. i had a bout of secondary post-traumatic stress disorder which medical workers and sometimes cops get dealing with tragedies. i had to the first year. i got a relapse seven and a half years and when i wrote two of the most difficult chapters. i wrote the chapter about -- for over three years. coach sanders who was the heroic teacher who died saving children. and then died tragically and he was one of the main characters in the book. there's a lot of uplifting things about him in the book but that was hard to write and then unexpectedly the chapter about dylan's funeral and his parents and their grief hit me and shortly after that there was a wave of copycat shootings.

there were four in 10 days. there was the on the shooting in pennsylvania and one very close to columbine at flat canyon in colorado and i couldn't take that. for about a month, i couldn't work and i was in pretty bad shape. but it helps to have studied post-traumatic stress disorder for the book, and i was still naïvely slow to understand my own situation and that i needed to get help but once i did i realized, oh it's what i've been writing about, it's the same thing and people would get help. it helped that i spend time with the world's foremost authorities like dr. frank oz berger who was in the book who i spent a lot of time with was on a committee who created the diagnosis about 30 years ago and is one of the

world's leading authorities on it. i had gotten to know him and i actually called him and he talked to me for an hour on the phone. frank really helps me and he was also an expert on columbine and had been through it. so he understood me and he got me through it. there were a couple of dark days but also i loved writing the book. i love writing so i don't want to complain about my job. i love what i do, but there were some periods doing this book. >> host: talks was a little bit about some of the survivors and victims the victims families. >> guest: okay, the survivors and the victims are all across the map. one of the things i wanted to tell with this ideal of the universal victim or the universal response in one of the things that bothers me with all due respect to the victims, whenever he see a plane crash or some other tragedy that gets a

lot of news coverage, when they are interviewing the person who was on the plane, they will go to the second person and they will start saying, when you first hear the thud you panic and you start doing this and i think a lot of us internalized it that there is this universal thought and now that i've been through this i think you know, i start thinking out that there was somebody behind you who did not panic at all. out that there was somebody on the plane who thought, this is kind of exciting and what's going to happen now? everybody is thinking completely differently and with a tragedy like this ,-com,-com ma columbine, the responses were all over the map so i chose 10 major characters to follow through this and i tried to get a boy and a girl, and adults, people were injured in people who died in the family and different kind of responses. there was the angry dad who got

very angry and linda sanders who was the widow of david sanders who really fell apart. dave sanders was her rock and she was put in a horrible situation and without the person has supported her. this amazing uplifting experience of having a daughter that they thought was a martyr, writing a book and getting tremendous gratification and having that pulled out from under them. i talk about patrick ireland, the boy in the window who, he went out the window in live tv and millions of people saw him tumble out of the second story window just in time, all bloody. buckshot traveled six inches into his brain and he was half paralyzed and he dragged himself to that window window over a three-hour period on one side of his body. he was never expected to walk or talk again and made an amazing recovery. in the first week or two,

extraordinary so people are all over the map and how they dealt with their grief and how painful it was and how the principal let kids out of there. mr. d, this person is like business person is like this and give you many different facets of this and also each one of these people had a really interesting personality and had a fascinating story so i also wanted to make it interesting for the reader. i didn't want this to be a book that you have to read about columbine to learn something. it would be like being your vegetables. i wanted it to be in detail and luckily for me as a journalist and as a writer, thousands of people were involved in the story. many thousands of people were involved in different ways so i brought out 10 of the most interestiinteresti ng people who who had fascinating experiences and who were very different from one another to kind of give you

if possible the whole story of columbine in one place. >> host: did the victims and the survivors, the victim survivors and their families the families willingly talk with you while you were writing "columbine"? >> guest: most of them did talk to me and again i had met nearly all of them at certain points along the way for different reasons. saw him early on were resistant to talking to the press and some were more open about talking to the press, but over time nearly all that needed to talk to the press for their own reasons. for example there was a huge controversy over the library where most of the killings took place, and the families of the 13 dead wanted that library torn down so no one would ever step foot in it again. during the press conferences and meetings with the press, over time a lot of them wanted authority so i got to meet them

through various means along the way and once i selected the different people i was going to focus on, all of them except for the burn all family, cathy's parents, agreed to participate and i had otherwise been -- there was a great deal of information there and one journalist actually gave me her fieldnotes, which really helped. i talk to friends and a few characters who were not willing to participate there was a great deal of material to draw from but for the most part i spent a lot of time with them. >> host: are most of the family still in littleton colorado family? >> guest: most of them are. i'm not actually sure if they'll live in the same home because i have kept closer with the families they dealt with closely. i know the bernall's left and really wanted to come back to the area.

a couple of different families, couple of them left early on because they felt they needed to get out of that pressure cooker and some of them are credited and came back as they felt their friends and support base was also there. that was their home and that's where they felt comfortable and they ended up coming back. a lot of kids went to college and some of them came back. >> host: what about the harrison's and the klebold's? >> guest: the klebold's are shown the same house they lived in the harrison's for many years lived in the house and then sold it and truthfully i'm not sure where they are. they have kept an extremely low profile and have never spoken with journalists. i've heard they are the same area but i'm not sure about that. by all accounts those families had a difficult time. i have frankly spoken to many people who are much closer to the klebold's. the klebold's only talked to

david brooks one time five years out and never get into any other journalist. the harrison said spoken to no one. i have spoken to people who were close to the klebold's. they had a really rough time. they lost a son too, and they also had a mass murder in the house. of course that's terrible for them and they were taken by surprise. they were in grieving in two different ways. the pastor referred to them early on as the two loneliest people in the world, because unless you think of the parents of charles manson or jeffrey dahmer or someone like that, you don't have anyone who understands what they are going through. they are in uncharted territory. they have a lot of great friends. their pastor also in the book, a wonderful man. mark tausan, pastor john mark tausan. everyone in the area looked up to him. he lost his job because he supported the klebold's and did

still in. >> no. >> host: tell us about dylan's funeral. >> guest: dylan's funeral. it was very private. it was less than a week after columbine and the family was afraid to have a funeral. they did it in secrecy. they had not been going to a church regularly but they had attended the philip lutheran church at one time. a friend got word through pastor john mark houser that the klebold's needed somebody. they didn't have a pastor and they needed somebody to bury their son. he agreed to do it and there were only a dozen people there. he prepared something but then when he got there he realized he needed to just throw that out and talk. so he had everybody in the group, close friends of the family, dylan's parents and his

brother, talk about dylan. the brother particularly was, he was strong. he didn't know what to make of it and didn't know what to do about it. so then, pastor john quoted and selected a passage from scripture. it was just perfect. forgives me, i should know how to pronounce the name but it's absalom i guess it's absalom from the old testament who at one point had tried to overthrow king david as the cane of israel or judea. but he led a revolt to overthrow david and david had to put it down. but, he gave explicit instructions to not allow his son to be killed and word came back to him that they won the

battle and they save the kingdom but solomon had died. he knelt down and cried out. i can't remember the exact quote it was something like oh lord, oh lord why have you taken up solomon my son? and john realized the entire bible, that was a passage that was the most that they could most empathize with and could understand. have him taken away and a new their son had done a horrible thing but he was still their son and they wished they could have their son back. yeah, and that is the kind of guy john is to understand people and have that compassion. to him, dylan was a mass murder and murderer and he had done a horrible thing but he was the

pastor of the parents and he had to help them in the best way he could help them. it didn't matter, they were human beings and they needed help. >> host: dave cullen, have the victims families and the survivors moved on or some holding onto this? what's the status? >> guest: they are all over the map but most of them have moved on. i just went through the 10 year commemoration on the tenth anniversary and it was actually really surprising to me. it was a little different than the other, because there have been so many different gatherings over time. a lot of them based on crises and different things that came up, and some on anniversaries, the one, two, five and 10 year and the memorial, the groundbreaking where bill clinton came and spoke so eloquently and then when the memorial was open.

over all these different events where everyone came back together, early on we never knew how many -- because they were crisis related and there could be five or 10 more and nobody knew. but with the opening of the memorial which i believe was eight years out, everybody knew we were just about done. that one was different. that one everybody had this feeling that we are almost done here is a group memorializing this. the faces were really interesting that day. that a service with repaired speakers in so many of them spoke about closure and sort of angry at the concept of closure, and frustrated with people trying to impose this because they hear closure as, are you still complaining about that? wrap this thing up, guys. you had eight years to grieve about this, move on with their lives. then there was this pushback of

quit telling us to quick greeting essentially that was really the main theme that day. everybody sort of knew it was the second to last one and there was one more and we wouldn't be seeing each other anymore. i think i got over the at that one, most of them. this 10 year anniversary was much more -- there was no talk about closure and there was no pushback. they didn't feel they needed to pushback on ang. most of the people were at peace now, removing on. the girl who did say she believed in god, she spoke on behalf of the victim, an amazing girl. she quoted robert frost and if i can get this right. i have not written this down. she quoted him saying that all a need to know about the rest of my life is to summarize in three

words. it goes on. she also told me on facebook actually that i bear no ill will toward eric and dylan anymore. she had to move on with her life. carrying that anger or pain or grief around was just holding her down and she's happier without it. not everybody is at that place and they don't need to be but a lot of them are. this month was really different. it was more tranquil and i think most people in a pretty good place. >> host: mr. deangelis is still the principal at columbine in 2009. has the school changed and are there exits in the doors? are there new procedures? >> guest: there are new procedures but basically it's not much different. the library did get torn down in the families won that battle. the library set up of the cafeteria where the killer's plan to destroy the whole thing.

so, the floor was taken out so now the libraries are wide open and it's beautiful. you can see the rocky mountains from there and they built an addition for the library. so that is different. it's a place where they were killed outside and it's been reconfigured a little bit. for the most part, mostly the left of the same and it was very important for the kids, the survivors to feel that they have not lost their school. the important psychological concept is that they don't want to feel that the killers one. they had to make subtle changes, so subconsciously something a little different here but they can't put their finger on it. new paint in that sort of thing so they change that but mostly

it's as if nothing ever happened here. >> host: dave cullen there had to be lawsuits and money exchange. who paid, who got sued in what is the state of that? >> guest: there were a tremendous number of lawsuits. everyone that you can imagine got sued. starting with the killer's parents, but then the school district and mr. d himself the principal, although sheriff departments, the maker of luvox, the drug that eric harris was on, anyone involved with the gun transaction. a huge list of people. most of those were eventually thrown out. the lawsuits were settled out of court where the killers families agreed to settlements. most of the money oddly enough was paid by the killer's parents homeowners insurance policy. >> host: not the school district? >> guest: the school district in the sheriff's department,

they made minor payoffs but the bulk of the money came from the killer's parents on their insurance policy. apparently their son kills, it's on part of the home insurance. that was stunning to me. there was a fair amount of money distributed them. there were five holdout families, six initially but then five who said all along it's not about money. they wanted information and when they offered them money, they said we are not taking this money. we want information. finally a deal was brokered where those five families and their lawyers sat down in a courtroom with a four appearance of the killers and were allowed to ask his many questions as they wanted and got complete answers. that was the agreement, the parents would answer every single question. it went on for about a week of depositions. the deal was that those five

families could get all the answers they wanted but the rest of the world could not. the parents would be able to talk as freely as they wanted and the record of those depositions would be destroyed. as it happened, then the transcripts were set by a magistrate to be destroyed after the agreement. been apprised arose over that in a federal judge got involved and in deciding whether they should be made public even though it was agreed they would not. for several more years, and two years ago he made the decision that those records would be released in 20 more years so in 2027, we will find out what the parents had to say. right now i believe they are in the national archives under seal and in 18 more years we will find out what the parents had to say. hopefully the parents will decide before that. that is sort of the one