at 8:00 p.m. brad meltzer and covers the story behind presidential assassins. and fred kaplan describes the changes use by the u.s. military under the leadership of general david petraeus followed by our weekly afterwards program. john mackey's book is conscious

capitalism. we conclude tonight's prime-time programming at 11:00 eastern with james votes's book freedom national taking a look at slavery 1861-1865. visit booktv.org for more on this weekend's television schedule. >> next on booktv, barbara matusow, editor of scooped it recounts the life of her career pulitzer prize-winning reporter jack nelson who died in 2009 at the age of 80. barbara matusow is joined by former president jimmy carter, former mayor of atlanta and u.s. ambassador to the united nations andrew young and former justice department spokesman terry adamson. it is a discussion of jack nelson's memoir "scoop: the evolution of a southern reporter". it is about an hour. >> good evening, everyone, good

to have everyone here. my name is hank klibanoff and i will be moderating this wonderful panel tonight, as director of the journalism program at emory and co-author of the book about coverage of the civil rights movement, featured tags quite prominently. first of all i want to thank the carter library and museum for hosting this and cosponsoring this and also the emory university library, particularly the manuscript and archives and rare books library. which costs -- papers and wisdom of a great number of journalists, white, african-american, of all sorts and we are so pleased five of those are pulitzer prize winners and the latest among them is at the 11. barbara matusow is so generous

and made jack nelson's papers in our position and there is some rich history and i encourage everyone to take a look at them. we are here to celebrate the life, memoir, papers of jack nelson with people who knew him extremely well. jack is a man of the enormous influence and consequence in the nation. the story of jack nelson for those who don't know is a story of news reporting and the latter half of the 20th century. if you look at his career, starting off, he was born in alabama across the state line, moves as a child from biloxi where he starts telling newspapers, he was a newspaper boy, and honorable way to begin, how i got my start. he gets his first job at the daily herald, afternoon newspaper in gulfport, purely serendipitously where i got my

start. he portrays himself quite openly as a very gullible reporter and i certainly hope when you bought the book and had a chance to look at it you will be as entertaining as we were by some of his early stories of falling for cruises and having great faith that everyone was telling him the truth. as you find out later they were not always telling him the truth. he didn't develop such a reputation as a hard-nosed investigative reporter which gets him beat up a couple times and sent him fleeing to the atlanta constitution where he continued to get beat up. he did some breakthrough investigative reporting that we will hear about tonight but beyond that he was a terrific gumshoe, he was a great reporter, easy to overemphasize that was investigative. his career was also about standing for the first amendment

and he worked with a number of organizations, helped create a number of organizations that to this day are quite prominent. the reporters committee for freedom of the press, the law center call all of which have jack's imprint on them. i want to say one last thing and we will start talking, tell a little story. as many of you know atlanta and the world lost a great editor this week in jean patterson who passed away in st. pete, jean had been the editor of the atlanta constitution when jack nelson was here and she once told the story about jack being a reporter and a celebrated reporter when gene got a call from the publisher of the los angeles times, otis chandler and mr. chandler said i am thinking the los angeles times wants to set up shop in atlanta. you have a big story brewing in the south, civil-rights story

and the emerging south and i need a reporter to staff that bureau for the los angeles times. you got any good reporter? and jean says mr. chairman, we have tons of great reporters and started listing all these great reporters and purposely left off the name of jack nelson. wasn't about to give him props and a week later chandler hired jack nelson. that is how jack got to the los angeles times, great work in atlanta, brought investigative reporting to the civil-rights story which was elevated through an all new level. most of washington, the washington bureau, and the l.a. times did not have a great imprint until jack got there. i am not saying it had none. it didn't have anything like what it had after words. it had 17 reporters, when they retired he had 57 and so i

called the washington bureau of the los angeles time the house that jack built. i will return to our wonderful guest, we have barbara matusow, jack's wife who took on completion, about 80% done, and the atlanta apart, parts were done and polished it and turned it into a spectacular read. everyone knows jimmy carter, former state senator. [laughter] >> am i going to try this one? president carter in new jack throughout his career and certainly if you did know him directly you knew his work and if i might take a moment to point out we have been joined, and by don't embarrass you, by mrs. carter, great to have you

here tonight. [applause] and ambassador andrew young who is part of the movement but jack covered, subject of stories jack would have written as ambassador to the u. n, jack would have covered them, got to know him and it is a real honor to have you here as well, ambassador young. [applause] >> terry adamson who worked at the atlanta constitution, got to know him later, got to know him extremely well, frequently and emory graduate, editor of the emory we'll which we are very proud of, and went on to a number of different jobs including working in the justice department of the carter administration as special assistant to attorney general griffin bell as spokesman, and objective editor of national

geographic and it is of pleasure to have you back here. [applause] >> so i will start with barbara. i want her to tell us what is it like? this is a moment others have faced. when jack died and you are faced with his papers and starting to go through them, what kind of an emotional experience is that and i will end it there. tell us about the experience of going through jack's papers. >> i must say what a pleasure and privilege it is to be on the same stage with president carter, ambassador young and my old friend kerri and another pulitzer prize winner. [applause] >> also to say how pleased i am that jack's papers are here.

this is where they belong. you may not know it but emery has -- has an astounding collection but the curator here, pursued jack with a special deal because they made a specialty out of southern journalists and they have quite a distinguished lobster, claude sydney, john smith's her -- i knew that would -- marshall for 80, many of you know celestes -- i am very proud that jack's papers are here where they belong to. now to return to hank's question, initially i had a very negative approach project's papers the experience didn't start very well. when jack retired he came back,

brought home with him about 20 boxes of the biggest mess you ever saw. jack wasn't just disorganized. he was opposed to this organization. i started out to help him sort papers and i had bought all these file boxes and folders and everything, pick up the paper and say where do you think this one goes with the atlanta constitution or the marvin griffin administration and he said give me that and started reading it, he read every piece of paper, so after two days i gave up. i said it is all yours, and the second reason i had a negative impression was they brought silver fish into the house. after he died and i decided that his memoir needed to be completed, it was a wonderful

read, an important book, but i knew that meant attacking his papers. i couldn't do it any other way. with a heavy heart i got the story going through them and to my astonishment i found these pearls, these gems, articles he had written, articles about him, oral history, speeches that he gave which were a mother lode of information, and i began to see that it was really going to be possible to fill in these polls that he left and not only possible but pleasurable. it became like a treasure hunt. i compared it to a jigsaw puzzle when you are down to the last pieces and you see they are going to fit and it really was actually a very enjoyable experience far from what i had expected. the deeper i got into his papers, the more i learned about

him. i didn't think that was possible. mike most wives i thought i knew everything about my husband. i really didn't know him in the days when he was covering the south and carrying out georgia and making a legend of himself on the civil-rights trail. he was married to somebody else at that time but as i say i learned a lot by reading all these things. one thing i learned was the told that his brilliant career took on his family. his kids and grandkids are sitting out there. one great grandchild is out there and i think they could tell you better than i, karen whose daughter told me he had been gone so long, they put a sign on the wall that said welcome home, daddy. there were constant telephone threats, constant interruptions, no dinner practically went on

without the telephone ringing. sometimes the tips send him out into the night again. there was a serious episode after he broke the story of a police protected lottery ring and the fire engine came screaming to the house in the middle of the night. one time policeman was drawn guns started to approach the house saying they heard a report that he murdered his wife. so there were lots of things that must have been very difficult to live through. another thing that surprised me and shocked me was the patients he displayed as an investigative reporter. he was the world's most impatient person. from my point of view he was. and his granddaughter who was supposed to be driving up from florida today, stuck in traffic somewhere, said to me one time

bar bark, i don't know how you stay married to papaw, he is so impatient. it is totally different when he was on the job. investigative reporting requires enormous amount of patience. jack one time took two years to track down a lottery ring and when he finally found, he was looking physically for the operation, found a neighborhood he went door to door knocking on doors until the woman told him there was an honor repair shop next door without much of a repair going on. then he proceeded to spend 11 days in her kitchen, not very far, just looking down over supposedly auto repair shop and spent 11 days documenting the whole thing watching cops come

and go, take money, brought a photographer. when jack finished reporting the story it was reported and it took patience that stunned me. i knew that he was tough and tenacious but i actually didn't really understand the scope of his reporting particularly in his days as corruption buster you might say at the atlanta constitution. wanted to read you a list of some of the scandals that he broke. exposes on illegal gambling parlors in savannah, police protected or houses in athens, election fraud, trucks stop in rome, marriage mills in south georgia, state payroll padding, embezzlement of tax funds, use of conduct for private work, nepotism, purchasing schemes such as the time they bought those with no bottoms or lakes

with no water. i could go on. many of these exposes took place during the clinton administration which president carter can will attest was notoriously corrupt. i think it was the reader's digest that sedna had never had so many stolen so much. marvin griffin was a forgiving sort of crook. quite a few years later he and jack and some other reporters were sitting around drinking and marvin griffin said to jack i used to think every time i see you walking into a press conference with a notebook, jack said what? he said i used to think i wonder what that be the eyed son of a bitch has on me today. jack left the constitution in

1965 to pursue the civil rights story for the l.a. times and he was always -- we have to watch our time so i will just end by saying how happy i am this book is published because he had such a wonderful career in washington, tended to overshadow this earlier phase of his career in the south and this book also ends halfway through his career, doesn't cover his career in washington except in an epilogue, and helps the reputation, beam roberts, one of the most important journalists, and may be the story of his wife to cement that place.

[applause] >> president carter, and given jack's reputation would you be afraid of him? tell us about your experiences please. >> the remarkable events described in the book and i hope -- how many have read the book? how many are going to read it? i knew jack when i was just a peanut farmer and no no interest in politics at all. when he came to the atlanta constitution. the first president was city editor of the atlanta journal, they counted competition, and everyone in georgia came to know jack nelson as one of the most incisive and aggravating reporters who ever lived. i can say all the epithet's i heard described, one was his and.

that has a connotation that is always burrowing in where they ought not to be. they should not be exposed to different people. jack would do that and was incredible success and sometimes under unbelievable danger. the first time he came to georgia he was inducted, went into the national guard, inducted to go to the korean war. he went to fort stewart, georgia and became a staff sergeant. if you read the book you find out he never learned how to shoot a rifle, never had any basic training at all, he was promoted above the other people who came with him from biloxi to the army and did that because he was a reporter and expert at publicizing his commanding officer's great exploits. he did this by becoming friends with all the editors of

newspapers up and down the coast from savannah to florida. he ingratiated himself there and finally went back over to biloxi, mississippi but at the time he was asked to work for the atlanta constitution and never got back to mississippi but stayed -- that is how he first got there. he was given a crash course in how to shoot a rifle. the last week he was in the army just like -- so they could get rid of him. he would get involved in the most exciting and dangerous events in a community and at that time there was practically no legitimacy in the georgia political system. it was shot through with absolute corruption. most of georgia was so-called wet, circle drive. you couldn't buy liquor in most of the county's but every county

had plentiful liquor. the sheriff and all his deputies supported and protected liquor dealers. that happened in my county as well as the jack would find out about these ongoing crimes as well as prostitution which was already mentioned and other things like bribery and he would investigate and find out people who gave him information and would certify the information was accurate and provable in court and he would bring it to the attention of the public. so vividly that law enforcement officials would have to go down and do something about it and when he got to atlanta he had the whole state as a target and he would single out individual places to shoot and he would go in and find out the most horrible thing going on that hurt the people of georgia and he would expose those embarrassing things that were

not embarrassing until jack told about them because it was generally accepted and the same thing happened in the cases of vote fraud. until -- it was a hold up -- he and his son became very famous. you suppose how corrupt the vote fraud was, i think about 15 people died and names were never revealed. another thing that happened was at that time in 1962 when jack had been absent the atlanta constitution i decided to run for state senate and that is how i became famous. [laughter] >> to distinguish -- like jack over here -- the election was stolen from me and i didn't know

jack nelson personally but the editor of the atlantic journal, john pennington was the other investigative reporter from the afternoon paper of the atlanta journal to help me and eventually i became a state senator. jack always resented that i didn't call on him instead of having jack do it. i knew jack pretty well. at the time that i knew jack he was not in the forefront of reporting on civil rights. he was basically finding out crooks in georgia. even at the top level of government and exposing them in such a way that their depredations or the people of georgia were corrected and that is what he did, concentrated on those individual things. the people of georgia and new if they had experience in their own community of someone who was cheating or violating principles of human rights they could cause

jack nelson -- their own state police, there sheriff, called jack nelson and take care of it to the top levels all the way to the county commission level. he went to harvard, i believe the second year that i was in the state senate and came back for my last start in the state senate and from there he went on to be an employee of the l 8 times because they offered him a 50% increase in salary and this was something he couldn't turn down if he had a white and three kids to take care of. i have experience those kinds of things myself. when i got to washington i was not particularly afraid of jack nelson. one reason, jack will give excuses, jack was not a crook.

[applause] >> i haven't had as much opportunity to be a crook as some people have. haven't been in washington before. i had nothing to conceal from jack nelson. i can recognize him for his true words and before jack passed away, told the newspaper reports i had done, i have known as many newspaper reports as anybody in georgia he had the most integrity and the most human personal courage and the most ability to expose the truth when it was difficult of any human being i have ever known and i am proud to have had jack nelson. [applause] >> take it away. >> talking about another jack nelson. i didn't know this jack nelson. our problem in the civil-rights

movement was that people who were writing about us were making us the problem and jack never did that. i was just down in albany just before christmas because it occurred to me that it was exactly 50 years ago that i was down there and i started driving around and remembering things and the new york times wrote a south. he wrote the obituary of martin luther king that non-violence was dead, it was rejected, martin luther king couldn't defeat -- and the story really was that the kennedy administration wanted carl sanders to win in 1962 and there was a federal injunction that

was placed on martin luther king. so we weren't up against lori pritchett in georgia. we really had to take on the federal government and we chose not to do that. jack always seemed to understand that we were not a problem. i used to quarrel with the new york times quite a bit because i think they were being polluted by information they rear getting, distorted information they were getting and they would come to talk to us like we were the ones that created all these problems. jack never did that. jack understood where the problem was and i always saw him as a friend. anything he ever asked me, i

knew i could answer him candidly and truthfully and there would be no downside to it and there were quite a few, actually those days were rough on reporters. in 1964 in mississippi the abc reporter who was the first one to suggests -- the story was these three civil-rights workers were in hiding and the students were doing this just to get publicity and the abc reporter paul. , who i associate with jack nelson, these were some gogood o knew we were not a problem. i think that is still a problem.

the press spends all of its time analyzing the players, the democrats or the republicans and nobody is talking about the issues. that was a danger in the civil rights movement also. and jack was not one of those that has been trying to find the popularity, who was winning the popularity contest, was black power going to defeat martin luther king. he would not write a story like that. he understood what the problems were in the south and he bored in on them and i guess i met him with carolyn paul muller and my staff later on in congress, even in washington he would always invite me to come to talk -- he had a breakfast where all of the

staff of the los angeles times and anybody else could come in and we talked candidly and openly about anything and everything that was going on in washington that we knew about and it was that kind of trust and integrity that i remember. [applause] >> he was a deer close friend of yours and terry was the emcee at the giant memorial service that he had for jack where a lot of the stories got hold. there is a blog site, scoots nelson -- >>@wordpress.com. >> if you want to read additional stories go to the site. why don't you tell us? >> i will. i have to observe this panel

started, barbara, hank, and me and then president carter came along, and out of sheer politeness we are still here. >> no way. >> i started to feel like the rest of the pitching staff. following these guys. i did have the privilege to know jack well from several different perspectives, just really a couple of them. the first, i started as even more green, more cub reporter, with the atlanta constitution. i was 21 years old in 1969. i had just come out of germany. jack had started when he was 23 years old in 1952. these dates are interesting because the book is called "scoop: the evolution of a southern reporter".

the word evolution is really an important part of it. jack was 23 years old. at 29 he won the pulitzer prize. in 1970. and 75 as has been mentioned we went to the l.a. times and in 70 he went to washington, a young man. 65. sixty-five, 70. he was a young man in that period of time and he accomplished those wonderful stories. when i arrived he was lower in atlanta ocala still based in atlanta. wasn't really in atlanta but traveling all over the place where the movement was at the time. those stories were not racially based stories. this i learned from the book, i never knew this, i learned it

from jean patterson. the last story jack covered for the constitution was in little rock when eisenhower had the federal troops out and they rear desegregating send central high school. as jean patterson said at a memorial service jack was never the same after that. the common theme running through the stories about corruption in government or state officials, incompetent doctors, the movement, what he really did and what i would like to do in washington is battle injustice and expose it. he found in justice, whatever was, and exposed it. started when he was 22 and went to the time that he died and you know there is an old myth shattered by this book by the way, when i arrived at the constitution, both cuts and wrote about this, it was gospel

truth and we believe that, jack did not stay at the atlanta constitution. the management would not give you a $5 raise. that is stated as true and as president carter pointed out he was paid $10,000 that the constitution and got $15,000 from the los angeles times. wasn't so bad as all that. the other law was the athens house which was well-known to a lot of people and jack in this book tells a wonderful story of the evening he spent their. i won't say any more about that. [laughter] >> i met jack a couple times that he doesn't remember that

but i remember him. one of them you will appreciate this and we don't need to go into it, there was a certain candidate for governor in 1966 that i was giving some attention to a we had a youth leadership retreat, brought a lot of people from all over the state to the american hotel and downtown atlanta. >> i didn't own the hotel. >> i had a pilot that you later got. but jack came and spoke to that group, wonderful group that i have a picture somewhere that my sister tried to find of jack speaking at that event but my first encounter was not the most pleasant after president carter was elected president. attorney-general for whom i was working directly was in a very contentious hearing confirmation

senate hearing. my instructions were no press can ask any questions to griffin bell during these confirmation hearings. jack is climbing over some chairs trying to get to judge bell and i am standing in his way making it difficult for him and he and judge bell are old friends but judge bell didn't know this was going on but i successfully brought this with the former golden globe fighter from getting in the room. he had the last lake. next day i got a call from bird labs, director of the 0 and me, and counsel to the president, i was just waiting for the call to come that i had mistreated their friend. and so it got a lot better after that but one thing that should be said from that for particular perspective of the carter years

is jack with a great bureau chief and built a great bureau. i want to emphasize that because the one thing that always came across to me in that period, he was promoting the reporters of that bureau. he had those breakfast sessions and they are famous. people use to run around block not to see jack, how about coming over for breakfast mr. attorney-general? there was a time he got judge bell to invite chief justice burger who had never been to a breakfast to come and participate in the jack nelson los angeles times c-span, which got invited at one time to elevate the whole process even more. >> they came regularly. they were there at every -- >> that award no longer exists. >> the idea that people can get together and have an honest

discussion over breakfast and c-span can show it. [applause] >> nobody felt the need to sensor themselves. i want to close one last story which is really a carter/nelson story. in 1973 president carter just to conclude his second year as governor of georgia, he had made a decision and communicated to his family, very few friends that were his supporters, he was going to run for president and communicated over christmas and in february it shows he accepted invitations to go to the national press club and make a speech. congressman young was in the audience among the other people and jack nelson was asked to introduce this governor of georgia.

the president bought his first speech on the national stage trying to strike some of the themes from hamilton's memo from his own riding of the book and other things trying to stress when he came out of the closet on this presidential campaign and ambassador young as the ambassador wrote on his place card this son of a gun is going to run for president. and there was a nixon and zero based budget and all the things you govern and all the things you hear about and closed by quoting the sole duty of politics to establish justice in a simple world and chinese philosopher named kwon do, demand for fish, he has one meal, teach him how to fish he can feed himself forever but after he told this to the washington press he was cured. he apparently said peter bourne

to call in three days who probably told him he would run for president and jack -- never wrote a story about him and presented governor was concerned that this may be a little pretentious for if first term georgia governor to be quoting neighbor and at the end of his first speech to a national audience. jack said don't worry about it, nobody gives a damn anyhow. that is a good story. [applause] >> the most generic thing about jack nelson's career is to some degree he follows the pattern of the south except he was always trying to find out where corruption was and where people

were being cheated and exposing it and correcting it but he didn't really get involved as i mentioned earlier in the civil-rights movement until he went to little rock and he saw the governor and these little black children who were being abused and jack saw then the expression on the faces of the kids and i think that is when he decided he needed to move into the arena of racial relations because that was the pending story, the story he had written but not addressed before them because the constitution -- they were the champions of human rights, civil rights at the time. for the civil-rights movement started. once he got involved he was not permitted to do that by the

atlanta constitution and he had to move to a bigger arena, the l.a. times to do it, the times was ready to expand to be competitive with the new york times and he did. >> exactly. in fact to your point this is not in the book but in 1958 you will remember this, terrible carroll county there was a front-page story in the washington post by robert e. lee baker who changed his name to robert e. baker because robert e. lee baker didn't sound appropriate. discussing how law enforcement killed a couple african-american men, james frazier, willie countrymen and linda a few mothers and it was a place of great fear for blacks and they couldn't go out on the streets at night and to portray a very frightful situation on the front

page of the washington post, jack got send to carroll county to do a story that defended the south, defended the integrity of the county and of the white establishment. not saying that is what he was told to do but that is the story he wrote, that says reporter walking the streets sees a number of african-americans and no one is expressing to this reporter any fear. they wouldn't. but he later expressed great regret that he had not seen that story for its validity, washington post story, sort of became the homer, the hometown guy trying to portray the situation in a more positive light and that is the same time he was undergoing this transformation. >> he made up -- >> that is right. what does integrity mean, what does it mean to be a journalist

with integrity? particularly in that hero? we have gone through a period of time when journalists really so disassociate themselves from people in politics that they sort of lose touch with the political pulse and i understand why. there are reasons you don't want to be coopted, various reasons and when you look at how jack -- want to talk about a question he asked during your debate with president ford. he was moderating it. jack, a southerner, probably predisposed to like the southern governor, to feel little southern loyalty, maybe, maybe not, his opening question was despite the fact that you have been running for president long time now, many americans seem to be uneasy about you, they don't feel they know you or the people around you, problem is you have not reached out to bring people

from abroad background in national experience and your campaign, many people around you are people you have known in georgia, relatively young and inexperienced and went on and on and on. having said that i want you to flash forward to the camp david story if you are familiar with, after you have a few people, journalists to dinner after the camp david accords and there was one person you ended up trusting more than anyone. >> i wanted to have a meeting with a couple reporters who i basically trusted and to tell them exactly what did happen between -- among me and anwar sadat and take some time to do

in detail. i took reporter to the white house to have supper with me and spent a couple hours, a couple of hours explaining to them what had happened and how i had too much trust from anwar sadat, and how he was generous, things of this kind. i really told the truth about the whole situation and i found out later, taking meticulous notes which were supposed to be off the record and -- >> running into the restroom. >> i didn't realize at the time and if i remember correctly, adair two later asked if he could report what i said and i said if you don't screw me, or

words to that effect, when i was president bayous better language than that. >> but you don't embarrass -- >> whatever it was. i don't know what the records said but the fact is he did right in the most meticulous detail what he wanted to report from my conversation but i did trust jack and it was an honest person, i am not knocking other reporters. i don't know every reporter in the world but he was one of the reporters i trusted with my life. i knew he was -- would tell the truth and was courageous enough to stand up for the truth under the most tremendous pressure and did that in almost every instance of his life and i read the book while back. did two or three times when jack did back down on a story and regretted it until the end of

his life but those events were extremely rare. sometimes he would defy even his top bosses, in danger of his own job, i believe in this and this is what i am writing. he was a courageous man. >> before we make a saint out of jack let me say that indeed he was a man of great integrity but he was also a reporter which sometimes meant pushing the envelope. a story i always liked was -- i don't know how many of you remember the orangeburg massacre when state troopers cutdown unarmed students and wounded over 2 dozen and killed three of them -- four. jack was dispatched to that story and when he got there he went immediately to the hospital and he said to the hospital administrator he was there he said i am jack nelson from the bureau and i am here to look at

the medical records of the students. the administrator thought he can't the fbi, which jack knew that was the impression he was giving, he wore that bright hair cut and trench coat that reporter is dressed like fbi men because afforded them a certain amount of protection in the fields. was given access to those medical records and he showed that most of his students were wounded running away, they were shot in the back or on the soles of their feet and was an important break in that story to disprove what the troopers had been saying, that the students had opened fire on them and from molotov cocktails. >> years after that he would tell that story on himself. >> sounds like a saint to me.

>> later it would be considered inappropriate to do such things, reluctant to go back and acknowledge he had done that but he has done it again. ambassador young, the orangeburg massacres one example of jack bringing investigative reporting to the civil-rights story and the other is the fbi environment, killing, the meridian bombing, the attempted set up by the fbi that led to the arrest of tommy terence, murder in athens. tell me if you would the impact having that kind of news coverage on the movement had on sort of the national understanding of what was going on. >> we really understood the press as educational tv.

everything that had been going on that we were involved in had been going on for 100 years. it was hard to get it out. because this is 1963, i was reminded that fred shuttlesworking to get martin luther king on the seventeenth of december to promise he would come to birmingham this year but that is because on the fourteenth or fifteenth fred's church had been bombed for the third time in 1962. there had been 16 bombings of homes that receive no publicity. fred shuttlesworth was quite frank that he needed martin luther king to come over there to give intention to this in

just this. one of my other good friends, a guy who had been with us in the movement from camera man, was quite blunt with me about it, saying you have to cut me some slack because i have got to keep a camera on dr. king because if they kill him and i don't get a picture of it i lose my job. it was almost that cold and analysis, where martin luther king knew that he was being used to focus on this injustice and did it willingly. at the same time guys like jack nelson understood that and the cameramen was lawrence pierce who had been with a friend of martin's since montgomery.

so it was -- there could not have been changed had it not been for the press. the birmingham post harold put martin's are rest on page 34, but the reason we had demonstrations early in the morning so they could fly the film to new york by 2:00 in the afternoon and make the 6:00 news and there was a deliberate needs for us to share with the press to get the story out. >> real strategy behind it too. >> it was part of the message and we knew that we didn't have

a television more than three minutes but dr. king used to say that there were three minutes on three networks. at that time that was worth $1 million worth of publicity every day and so -- there was a deliberate offering of risk that was incurred because we felt we had to trust. there was nobody else that we could get this story out and we couldn't even get mass meetings announced on black radio stations. it was -- the south was nailed

down real tight accept for these incidents. the reason -- i mean i volunteered to testify at reuben mills's hearing because i knew reuben mill was the one who got both sides of the school desegregation in a court room and said you all know more about atlanta and schools than anybody else. you work this out. when you get to recall me and i will make it a court order, there was -- there was a trust, and a realization that this was a real problem that had to be faced regardless of the risks that were taken.

compare that with right now. people are writing about stories in such a way that -- may do better reporting on the falcons. there is more in-depth reporting on football. >> i understand what you are saying. >> to your point earlier too, those who read the book i would point you to the chapter on bogalusa, no one ever would say that the press was more on the front lines of danger than the people in the movement themselves -- you can say that, but read the chapter and you will see jack and you will see the famous stinger that he used when klansmen were threatening jack and jean roberts and

several others with their life they invited him to a klan rally and the clans people started coming in saying they are not writing what we are saying and they were surrounding them and they had to call for a flying wedge to get jack and jean and these other people out and it only happened because gene was in the chest of a guy saying if you don't get us out of here alive you're not going to like what you read in the los angeles times tomorrow. anything else? we have four minutes. >> one quick fact, an important development out of the civil-rights movement, the press was the famous case in the new york times, which involved a movement in the new york times and the libel suit was brought by a public official in alabama and redefined constitutional law from the first amendment. that was a byproduct fed by guys like jack on the front lines of

the times. >> organizations like that, which he helped create depend so much on that. [inaudible] >> thank you. [applause] >> and i am going to take the last two minutes here. jack, 1959, went to the state hospital at milledgeville and found horrible conditions, found patient abuse, found people misrepresenting their skills and medical know-how, had people not qualified to do surgery doing surgery. it with a litany of problems and jack got slugged, beat up, thrown over a desk, took a lot of abuse for this and won a