a challenge to the federal defense of marriage act. ..

we are going to put them down as undecided. laughter mr. chairman, as i listen to those comments, it struck me what a wonderful thing free-speech is. >> that was the hearing when donald rumsfeld was making the justification for attacking iraq. what we didn't hear in the clip or questions that we had a chance to ask him which is how much money is halliburton going to make from the war, how many u.s. soldiers will be killed? how many iraqi civilians will die from this adventure and i would like those questions answered now from somebody like donald rumsfeld.

published in 1963. next a forum on the book's effect over the past 50 years. from the new america foundation in new york, this is an hour. >> we first want to thank the new america foundation for having us. on the in particular am very honored to be a moderator because up until now no one has ever found me moderate in my views, so i am very happy that tonight to moderate a panel. it's great to talk about betty briedan's feminine mystique and it is a book that has put this spark under the culture and

really it's that very rare book that wants to make the argument that actually change people's lives and actually changed the culture. it came under criticism more recently for not only reflecting the lives of small business people, for not talking about a working-class women that have no choice but to work all along and not talking about people love of their sexual preferences who may have already found themself out of the conventional life. but what i want to do a little bit today is talk about the ongoing power of this classic. i recently talked this book at nyu a couple of whom are here in this audience who do not ever hesitate to tell me if something is boring and they're important

attention. it is amazing to me that the class comes to life and the book spoke to them and interesting ways. i want to talk about the war the feminine mystique and whether it still presses and it's complicated because we live in a world that has been so transformed in this book and in the movement that followed most of us in the room who were born after "the feminine mystique" came out. it's hard to imagine those days at all and i think about the activity of change in my own family. when my mother was a child her father told her they become lawyers and that's the world she

grew up my mother told me 1970's new york city and then my daughter -- we were watching the obama and hillary presidential election and she was a big supporter and i said wouldn't it be cool if there was a woman president and she looked at me and was like mom of course there's a woman president. it's amazing in that short time and we went to of course there has been a woman president. but that said, it's very hard for those of us that grew up in the world in which our feminist class books have names like the richer sex or the end of men.

we live in a world in which more women than men get a college education and for a majority in the workplace, which women are in the majority of the managerial positions. so it is hard for us to look back at the other times. and i was -- even though we abstractly understand that things were different, we don't know -- we can't really see and feel it. she told me when she was in college she had not a single woman professor and i was shocked even though i know that life is like that it is kind of astonishing. the first question i was going to ask the two panelists who were alive to just described for a moment your experience when you first read the book and to

say this book changed people's lives. >> i don't think there is any question. it's still changing people's lives. it is passed down through the culture and was the greatest social revolution probably since the suffrage act and that movement took 100 years. this movement will take a hundred years. we are only halfway through and we have to count on the younger ones to really push it along. but i remember reading of the feminist mystique in my mother's bath room. it was one of the few books that she read. but it wasn't possible for her to move on it because although she was a gifted singer and she was quite attractive and natural businesswoman and was eager to work out a living in a suburban housewife role with two children and my father refused to let her work because it would have suggested as it was many men

fought at the time that he couldn't support his family. so she was frustrated. you know, it was either volume or vodka that these women going. it wasn't until she was in her fifties and they were divorced she met another man and became a business woman. but she lost half of her life. i thought i was going to be totally different from her. i loved her. i was compassionate. but certainly i saw that that was not the right one. i married a man who loved, but she was starting medical school, so i thought ah-ha. this is cool i have to support us so i have an excuse to have a career and that was my strategy. i was rejected by the other law gives of medical students because i was such an oddball.

that was just so ballsy. then we got divorced. having been through, i was a single mom. and then that changed my whole trajectory. and i really became a feminist. but add that time i started the herald tribune. i was in the women's department because of course that was the only place you could get a job as a women's right church. i had to sneak down the stairs and go across the sitting room where women were not allowed, to get into the office of the sunday magazine editor and pitching the story there by i developed a mentor who allowed me to move ahead. he was a little older than alladi and much more politically sophisticated. what did she do? she had to take a job to get a

story in the death hung on her. but it was only clay starting the new york magazine who had a mother who was a journalist and so he really had no attitude about women. they will also pay them a little less. he gave laureate the very first column written by a woman in politics which lasted for many, many years and then when she wanted to start of course she couldn't raise money who was going to give a job to a woman who wanted to publish about starved women. so he said this is a great magazine idea. let's put it inside so he midwifed this building, i mean this magazine, 40 pages with the cover on the outside and is sold

out. she couldn't find it in california where she was leading a great stride. there is no magazine now here. the was a great exhibition of the collaboration between the mentor which i think we sort of lost sight of. i think only women can help women. why not seek a sponsor that is already at the top. >> when you read the summons how did it affect you? >> i don't remember where i was. i don't even remember for sure how it affected me. but i do know how everything came before affected me. and i can only say that.

they were expected to be married by 21 or 22 and expected to raise children. we were not expected to raise money, and we were not protected against what would happen if we were divorced or someone died. we had no resources, and the vulnerability lead us to behave towards men as if they were demagogues. some of them or maybe, and some of them or not. i think that when the feminist movement came out, betty friedman, herself, we have to really remember this, change and put into words what was on so many people's hearts that they couldn't so articulate, they couldn't have said.

and she managed to say at and the effect across this country was like an electric shock. it was as if somebody -- i don't think that it is anything else but perhaps martin luther king. but i can't think of anything else that happened in my lifetime that actually you felt this together. we were going to change the world. we went on a feminist march to washington. we went on peace marches together, groups of women. and suddenly we had a voice. we were different. somebody had to pay attention to us, and it was overwhelming which is what made me vigilant. so, i remember going to the book in the museum to see judy wooful different plates dedicated.

i'm not judging this as a work of art. that's not my field. but i can tell you why was there with tv and her younger sister. and i felt as if the world was turning. we weren't going to do this thing. now i may have fought it was simpler than it turned out to be kidding if i may not have anticipated what would happen if we had a corporate lawyer job. there were lots of things we didn't figure out completely. but the extraordinary -- i just want to say one more thing and then i am going to stop. i took a class the year was 1956. the professor was a poet and was an old girls' school at the time and we read our paper.

some girls had gone to reno and she came back with a detailed report on everything that happened during her six weeks and i was spellbound by this report. the world she was describing. what makes you think anybody would be interested in your divorce? and there was a silence because i couldn't have been the only one who was visited. but there was also the possibility women can't write because we don't have subjects. but with the subject mean? i wasn't in a war. i can't write like hemingway.

this sense that we were pushed aside and i just have done something. the voices that everybody had now, the voices i really believed were liberated into the world are so many and i am so grateful that i lived to at least see this happen. [applause] >> no matter how radically this transformation occurred and when you think about it in terms of the history of how rapidly the change occurred and how unbelievably fast the world

transformed so that we went from the feminine mystique yet to the idea of a woman working in so subversive and trans aggressive and all of that for the women are a majority in the workplace etc. we can say there are problems to be addressed. but certainly in terms of opportunity, women have a kind of opportunity that could not be imagined when she stepped down. so whether we really cast aside a totally the feminine mystique she was writing about and the reason i ask this again is have we given that this position, have we given up this idea of family that's kind of all of that fantasy of what the conventional life is supposed to be like and what motherhood is.

>> i don't think we walked away from that. >> what interests me when we are talking about this it is so exciting we really thought that we could do this because you probably will did. but when you started talking about all of the things that have changed is what we couldn't do then and now her daughter is asking her but what i think is remarkable is the single most striking thing to me looking at the book now was this notion that we don't appreciate all the change. that blew my mind that she said we spent the first half of the century fighting for the rights and the second half not appreciating them. they have people that have gone up after they've been one. this is exactly the reaction mal

of course, and i think -- i think that we have done all these rights and if there is a feminine mystique now you can do everything and that isn't the fault of feminism, this is an opportunity fifth feminism has enabled the fact of the matter is you cannot do everything at the same time it cannot be done. >> it's the feminine fallacy. >> i don't think that we have given up the idea at all. >> i think that all that we have done we can do it all at once. >> i'm glad that we haven't given up. it is and a fantasy to have a family. it's a wonderful thing. and i think that the vast majority of women do want to

have a family at some point, but also the educated women, something like 40% of educated aspirational women have chosen not to have children by the age of 40 which is pretty dramatic. but we have a parent thing that kept in the last decade where women were encouraged to be very close to their children for at least the first five years. and interestingly, even studies that have been done about women who once they were educated to the idea that if you really dropout if you go off ramp has put it if you go off grant in your job in your forties to have children and be at home with them you will get back on where you left off and you will pay in

all kinds of ways, seniority positions and pensions. women are still choosing to do that and a majority are still choosing a nonlinear path. the great encouragement is to stay connected in some way and to become an entrepreneur where you can work from home. >> that's true. >> look, i think we may have forgotten that after speed was published, we had a war. i won't even call it the feminist movement. it would have been between women who made different choices. i have to say we better not to glorify this between the women who had jobs and careers or were

perhaps threatened by the women who were baking cookies. the women who were baking cookies were livid and humiliated by the women who were climbing up from the kind of professional ladder and it was extremely unpleasant. >> it never left much. that's what hillary clinton said is i could have stayed home and baked cookies and people are appalled. >> i just want to read a quote from "the feminine mystique" that shows how betty friedman laws. she wrote about as women move into the work place in her last chapter she wrote another challenge a woman faces out of her house with is the hostility of over housewives. >> she said over and over again she was fer choice. she didn't say you must get a

top-level job. she said you need to be free to choose the kind of life that you want which may work or may not. even though when i looked at "the feminine mystique" again, she wasn't very kind to the housewives that were staying home, i think that politically she's all very quickly that you cannot dismiss many, many hundreds of thousands of people's life traces. you have to respect them and make it possible for them to have pride in themselves. >> you don't want to be denigrating. i don't think -- i don't think it is in the feminists interest of reality to be denigrating how difficult child care is. >> i'm very encouraged on the

millennials. i think they really haven't. one of the things i found interesting. melanie started out at 22 joining the only investment firm in the country, and she was identified right away by the president as being a person of great talent and promise. when she was 24 she took her to meet one of the biggest ceos in the country and he said i am having the president of ariel and she was then elected to be his grandfather. she jumped whenever he spoke and everything in putting my thank you notes to the parents of his children sleepovers and then at 28 made him president kim and

she was completely reoriented suddenly she looked around and said it might be nice to have a date once in awhile or meet men and she went out with, you know, somebody fairly prominent. the film maker of star wars and they are now engaged. she is 43 and will probably never have children because she didn't have time. what she says about young women who come to her to be mentored is if they talk about work life balance, she knows they will never move out to senior positions. and probably any other because they will have to be unidirectional for released the first ten years of their career. now there really are not an awful lot of women who find that appealing to, you know, also be a ceo where you have to give 100% of your time.

for those who aspire to that, more power to them and i hope to get more and more of them, but it is a very narrow portion of i think as the population finds that appealing don't you agree? >> that's because we only have half of the revolution. if we have actually changed the world, then we would have the world that would make this possible. what we have is half. >> we are not satisfied with half and it isn't going to work. but i think that it's not because the failure is not permanent. it's something that is happening now because we have not change the whole society. now we have to change what men want and what the society is willing to do for the family for the universal health care. we have to make the world completely different for ourselves.

>> i think that is an important point. one of the things that make me so sad is that we were close. that 1971 thing that walter mondale post was a bipartisan where they were going to have universal preschool and take care like the in the scandinavian countries. it was nixon who did that who said we don't want to put the authority of the federal government behind a nontraditional family structure and an unconventional. that would have changed. i think that that would change so much. >> paid maternity leave. that would be nice. it's going to have to come through private companies because the government is gone to -- is not going to be able to do it. we can't wait for marching on

washington. we have to work on companies. i think there is enough pressure if young women coalesce in a new movement towards that i think that that can happen. there is a lot of precedent in the companies like google that expanded to 12 weeks, i think 12 weeks of paid maternity leave because they had too many women that were leaving. well, that's what happens. and once they got -- the improved the rate and it is paying off for them. >> her name is in the air already, talk about cheryl already and what she has been attracting because when we talk about how to solve these problems there are women ceos that have stepped forward and she has received a kind of

astonishing amount of vitriol. on one level -- and i've written about this recently on the one level we want more women ceos. we kind of hate the women ceos that we do have and we really can't stand a million things about them and it's worth thinking about a little bit about why. some of the critiques or interesting. yet she is trying to do some of the things that we think about on the stage of this kind of betty friedman revolution. she is trying to talk to women about how to succeed in a kind of really high level business structure while not sacrificing family. that kind of to a great deal of anger from women critics and

feminists and nice thinking the liberals, so i am curious what we think of her effort and the kind of possibility for her in trying to fix the way through this. >> it seems to me working at a job can anyone really to to the corporate job? i have no idea what it entails. [inaudible] >> the reason your mixing them up is our giant he tried. >> they've written a book about leaning in and she is talking about how women shouldn't leave the work place before they leave the work place, we have a lot of

really practical advice it's not a kind of low-key tone in spite of some of the critiques. it is a pretty practical way she goes home at 5:30 and it's a factor because she has this privilege iain she is obviously very rich. one of the kind of weird things -- >> it's kind of the same thing and it's a valid what a lot of the criticisms of the "the feminine mystique" were. this is a well educated elite situation and that is a valid truth in the book. if you are besio then you have the power to say i'm leaving at 5:40. and then they have power. somebody in this position is putting things in a good

direction. it does make many women who are struggling to figure brought the balance. the turtle beebee hunger that women feel at six months went unpaid maternity leave is over because they have to work and they don't want to. forget it if they are going to move up. to say you are not working hard enough, figure it out. it is a great piece in the new yorker that argues the people that were criticized in this book haven't read this bill.

but i do think that she isn't quite staying without working hard enough i think that has been unfair distillation of what she is saying. >> i don't know who remembers but lois said that in this culture of someone raises their head takes a deep breath and says something someone will throw a rock at their head. [laughter] it's also completely true of the hostility of women towards went that i think we have not begun to deal with. any woman that says anything on what it says you should say like tv will get viciously attacked

by another set of women and it's not a question of one life side, i'm not saying that. i'm saying. i don't know what we do about it. i don't know how we can cover it down and i certainly don't want to send the method that we all love each other that's not doing it. it's just something about how social movement, any kind of movement, anything that moves. representing the position as how we came to view her. there were prominent journalists who irresponsibly started a quotation of her and one of them was on maureen dowd if saying i

saw myself running a social movement and they stopped the quote there but it was mainly like working for a nonprofit or something. and by taking that first part it may sound like she has these grand visions and aspirations of her life and she wants to be gone before betty friedman and so of course people pounce on her and it's very telling to quite well fall of journalists in "the new york times" would do something so borderline unethical they put in a correction because it was wrong to misquote somebody like that. but let's just say she had said the original quote i want to run a social movement should we all take our guns and shoot her. they automatically cause a lot

of anxiety and anger and hostility. >> i want to point out that speaking of women who were all in love, betty friedman was a piece of work and she warned against a man hating brawl burning segment of the movement when there was no such thing as bra burning. she wasn't somebody that said you are fine with me. there was a group within the feminist movement that was the disapproved on the family side of the feminist movement. so it got to be a lot of hostility.

devotee i don't remember which one of her books was greeted at various libraries buy not only tickets but bomb threats. they didn't come from the terrorists, they came from women's groups that were very angry at her so i don't believe -- i don't know who started that. it's true that she wasn't a woman's woman. if there was a roomful of men and women in the quarter, betty was going to go over the to the corner to talk to the young men. that was a part. but that is what i really think for a while before it dies down.

for those of us that were there, it wasn't a matter of family women are right or any sort. it's what are you doing to our movement. there were a lot of man haters and they were given the blockbusters and the the whole movement bought that in the mainstream and it is very threatening. i didn't become a feminist until 1970 and neither did gloria namely because i didn't want to be part of that and they were scared that the man i loved what think i was. i ran on the marches and i did these things but i had a struggle between i don't want to give out the loving compassionate nurturing sexy man

loving side of myself to be part of this movement. do i have to? and that was a struggle for many of us. >> she must have said it in an interview that some women or some people read her as join the revolution all you have to lose is your man and they said all you have to lose is your vacuum cleaner. [laughter] fabulous marketing. i want to think a little bit more about how we can identify our own problems which have no name in our own feminine mystique which is by definition quite hard to recognize when you were living in a culture with how you talk about it and i want to think a little bit about that. one of my students, my amazing undergraduates said its kind of like we have that feminine mystique and then we have all of this new stuff in the system

which kind of speaks to the having it all section that we were talking about earlier. there was a book called the conflict in which she talks about our new style of parenting. she calls it ways in which we appear and which are taking this kind of ominous amount of energy that could be spent on perhaps other more fulfilling or intellectual pursuits. what do you think are the new problems that don't have a name? >> i think it's funny the joy and best seller. i don't think this is the most important problem but it is i do think it's a misconception to some extent from the culture

means we are sexually liberated. i don't think that's the most important thing that i do think it is a myth. i interviewed people on why are you bashing people from girls gone wild in your experience and sexual desire why is it your responsibility to look as skanky as possible as one girl said to me. i think there is confusion about the difference between -- i think there's confusion because it's confusing the difference between filling a new role, the antithesis of the angel of the house and being totally sexually liberated and the degette is confusing and was another issue it was pretty factious.

>> we had many demonstrations against it. >> i am not clear why this is a feminist issue that divides. >> i think that first of all and serving from the assumption that there was such a thing as it got changed if women want to participate in pornography or watching it that is choice, so that is where this is starting. and i think that no american -- i think that antipour fattah

feminism felt as spectacular as the shakers. if you look at them now you cannot say does that mean they've come so far they are free to express themselves living in a sexually liberated world or have we internalized our obligation to be sex objects our culture still wages i don't see this precisely as a feminist issue because surely because it affects -- >> but that is the feminine

mystique. the one she was waiting for. it's just the issue which i imagine every generation struggles within a slightly different name, but i would be happy if we were able to solve the question of health and the women get through her work life and her family life without losing her mind. if we solve the problem that would be wonderful then we could go to what can we do about the human nature which i think is another problem. >> i want to ask last question. i want to ask one question about

broadening it out. betty was a marxist. she the various political life yes but she was not expecting overtly. she talks about our country. she calls it study resistance to political ideas which she is very aware of. she was critiquing this lonely clout america and the ideal life that wasn't just about men but everybody living in the commuting culture in and that's what i'm wondering what she would make now because i think that if we think of betty friedan as the subtext i wonder what she would make the idea of

a successful family life it was different than it was in 1965. >> i would say that it is very different because both men and women spend much more time preparing themselves educationally and occupationally postponing from when the women married at 21 and men at 23 and now is more like 28 and maybe the mid 30's, late thirties from having children or reproductive revolution and a lot of people to postpone that was fantastic and we were in an entirely different economic situation. we are somewhat some would say a declining country economically. the job opportunities for young women coming into this long

recession are so truncated that one of the good things i see now is women who are aware and coming out of college having worked through college coming out to be for their own college and graduate school they come out in their mid to late 20s with 100,000 or 200,000 college loans so wanting to be a social entrepreneur which so many do they can't. they then have to take a job in some high-paying position. and if they went to law school they are granted going to corporate law and they may be bored to tears but maybe five, ten years to get the money to then be able to do their passion. and that is a big difference. when i read passages in the 1970's, the most famous business

book, and it remains through today is what color is your parachute and the thesis was start out following your passion. who can afford to do that as a 25-year-old whose finished college? they have to work and gain and get some -- it takes a decade to pay off those college loans and they came from a wealthy family. so, i think there is -- the other thing that i think is a big advantage is the boomer generation which is a generation that inherited we actually started when we were a little bit older it inherited the feminist revolution to push it forward, 80% white. the generation of young people today, thank goodness, is far more diversified. and there are a lot of young african-american, asian-american, in the american, hispanics who voted for obama and were very much responsible for the reelection of obama and

who are helping to mentor younger poor women which were left out of the first feminist revolution. poor women who really didn't have a lot to do for them or even lower middle class nguyen minh triet there was a lot of argument and tension out that they didn't get included a lot and neither did the women of color. but now it is much more, you know, horizontal in that way. one of the things i find exciting is women starting at like 18 and 22 to try to help young for poor women to learn code, learn how to do code and build web sites like the typing of the past to get into a position because they know the technology of the future.

>> betty friedan would have been ostracized and killed in 1963. remember joseph mccarthy there is no way that she could have expressed anything that could have been principle to the marxist position in any book that was going to be led by. >> look at her class critiques then even though we are not reading back. >> that's probably true but when we use the word marxist let's remember one of the things that happened in the whole country was that we saw what marxism brought in russia. having seen what it brought in russia it becomes a dirty word, and the idea isn't so good either. so what now happens is i think we are in a very imperfect

world, but it is a in a perfect world without ideology that we can hang on to. so i would imagine most people here are not sitting around having coffee fighting over ideology. you may be fighting over the various sort of things you want to accomplish word disagree to try to find out what is going on in your world, but you are not sure that you have the answer and that is the thing that has changed i think. >> we should open up for questions. to anyone. >> i want to make a sort of comment. i was at a panel in the conference on women analog and actually my mother was a speaker and she was a past president of the association of women employed years and started an

annual survey first a sociologist and she was told she had to be a teacher but basically at the age of 40 gradually it from law school and ended up going it was a major partner in two major law firms, and then she always felt very upset by what she saw and how the treatment of the women in law firms and even though she was raised to be managing partner she started the survey of national law firms across the country, and what she found is that 15% of women today in 2013 make equity partner across-the-board in her annual survey about roughly 15% of women are able to make equity partner and that is actually really sad. somebody in the audience said well, you know, looking for

michelle obama she was the associate and law firm says people leave our firm and go on to do great things. well, you know, that isn't really the great point. you can climb the himalaya of the question i think that we need to focus on is why are they leaving the small firms? i'm sure michelle obama would have this great life but what is it about the structure of the law firms and not allowing the women to advance to become partners? there are plenty of associates the end up in law firms for five years and they're basically forced to leave in one way or another so i just want to ask you my question i guess is what structurally needs to happen concretely in america's workplaces. >> i'm no lawyer. >> i would like to address for law firms.

i think when betty friedan works on the fulfillment many people don't work for fulfillment. i think a lot of people working in law firms in particular may not be working for fulfillment. and sometimes -- i'm not going to say the himalaya question, but i wonder if the small she has for these educated women should be using their brains in some way there is something in the culture for both men and women that is pretty distorted and punishing. that i feel that the question of whether you can have a life outside of the law firm for either a man or a woman if you are and junkman at 34 and to have the newborn baby are you ever going to see that newborn baby? i think it is a pretty difficult punishing culture and we need to work all the time and the way that we work, the role is

occupied in our lives of those men and women it is complicated. >> the night we got back from school about 15 years ago it was an all girls school and had a career day and the principle was a fine and feminist and invited a lawyer partner to come and speak and she came and spoke at talked about all of the wonderful things she did as partner and then there was a question period and these four girls between 14 to 18. the first question is what time are you getting home from dinner? the second is what happens if your child is sick? fervor how often are you able to spend the whole weekend with your child? not one of these girls asked her a thing about the law firm or her political beliefs or corporate beliefs. so, the pressure on women who

are corporate lawyers is enormous because underneath them for generations they are complaining with justifications. something needs to be done but it's not so simple we can't say what them have a move to success equally because it isn't going to work. >> when we are talking about corporate law firms and betty friedan living in the culture that women couldn't have careers we write about how we 1960 there were as many women who were married working as there were at the height of world war ii when all of the men were away and they had all the jobs, and what that tells you it's not that women didn't work when she wrote this book its that they didn't work to fill met. plenty of women had to work and

did. >> thank you so much. i guess my question is twofold. feel free to answer one or the other. >> i have the privilege of teaching and talking to my students about this book and i guess my first question is whether you think that today there's been sort of -- there is a sort of backlash against the idea that staying at home or being a stay at home mom is bad, there is a dirty word about that and to entertain the goal or respiration. then on the other side of it, when i talk about this book or other feminist topics they say i am by no means a feminist. so i wonder whether you still think this visual stigma around the word feminist and what we can do to fix that.

>> i still say maybe we shouldn't fix it. when we look at most recently marisa mayor doesn't consider her feminist and one of my colleagues argued maybe the fact that she doesn't consider herself a feminist themes the term is no longer useful which doesn't mean she's not a feminist. many of these things when you're talking about your students that believe all of these feminist things. shouldn't he where something like i am a feminist or just view the fact of actually finding the success of the movement. find a tremendous success of betty friedan and the women who have been on the marches. is it a sign of succeeding that we don't need that word anymore and these ideas have been so snl lead it into our dna that it is

not needed anymore. that is just my idea. >> i think that we could call ourselves women's advocates putting it is a much more mutual term. i think that feminists became a dirty word among gen x. we do have to get away from that in order to -- >> but you have to have a brand. >> we still want to see how women understand how to succeed in their lives, and we need to do that. we need to help. >> i wish i knew. >> i wish i knew, too. >> gloria steinem was saying how this woman, her daughter didn't

call herself a feminist and didn't know who gloria steinem was and she suggested she knew. i think that's why, you know, if your daughter is saying to you there has been a woman president, if she doesn't say i'm a feminist, there's more than one way to look at that. that said, i still think it is a perfectly nice word. >> i think we have to end and there's a lot more to say to the we can talk among ourselves. one last one. go ahead. >> devotee always advocated to change the workplace and of values and the ethics not changing the structure so people could penetrate the glass ceiling although she was for that also would change the values of the work place so that men and women could have it all and that hasn't really come up here. i don't know if it was in "the

feminine mystique" or future books i learned growing up coming and of the women and now if they want to have it all they do it by somehow navigating their workplace and designing their own sort of solution and it might be the lateral tract and not the direct upward track. they advocated we shouldn't have to do that but we should have a title structure that should do it for us. ..

and she certainly played with leftist ideas and everything. and -- does everybody see the way we work? everyone who was intelligent at that time. she would be what you would say a limousine communist. okay? >> and that word has certain residents. what i mean by that is a very strongly developed consciousness. she shot -- bob more seriously about class and a more rigorous way that her peers. maybe that's a better way to talk about it. i guess we have to -- do have time for one more question? one more question. >> -get one. >> this is more of a common based upon the last thing with identifying as a feminist, but i feel like it actually has to do

with a lot of what ariel levy writes in her book. this hesitation to a, you know, stand up for yourself in a sense because you don't want to be that woman. i think that especially in a class that, you know, you are reading "the feminine mystique" and that person says something very feminine, a refusal to identify as a feminist in that sense shows that there is this backlash and our culture that still exists. did you guys see the oscars? ammine, i think it is just like to say that we are beyond the word feminism is may be wishful thinking and lovely, but i don't think it is actually true. that's all. [applause] >> thanks, everyone.

>> the supreme court heard arguments tuesday in the case regarding the constitutionality of california's ban of syntex marriage. one of the attorneys argue a is the ban was theodore olson. he talked with reporters across several ways behind the way the courts could rule. >> if they were to rule that the decision, and that would be -- >> yes. i will mention briefly and then david can. there are four ways in which we can succeed in this case because the state of california decided that proposition aid was unconstitutional and although they were enforcing it, they quit defending it wants the district judge ruled that it was unconstitutional. then you have the argument that no one could have appealed this case and the proponents were in court today who were the authors of the measure did not have the right to carry it forward. if that is the case, the district court decision finding

that proposition eight unconstitutional and the government and officials of constitutional would be enjoined from enforcing it and that would be the end. or the ninth circuit decided that because of the circumstances in california, proposition eight was unconstitutional because of those circumstances in california. the third way is that there are many states who have a note to seven acknowledged the rights of gay and lesbians to raise children and to live together in households. the court could decide that structure is unconstitutional because california and those states have admitted that gay and lesbian individuals can live together and have families and raise children and they don't have any defense on that. finally, the broadest argument that we made is that it is just wrong. it is not consistent with the ideals and the laws and the constitution of this country to a take our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and put

them in a class and denied their rights that we give to everyone else. that is the broadest possible outcome. any one of those four outcomes would be a success in terms of overturning proposition eight. >> the supreme court will hear arguments tomorrow in a case concerning the constitutionality of the federal defensive project. c-span tv and radio cup coverage begins at 2:00 p.m. eastern time end of c-span.org. as soon as the audio is released. the argument will reappear on c-span at 8:00 p.m. eastern time. >> especial book tv and primetime continues with a forum on of whitaker chambers autobiography "witness". in an hour, a panel of authors

>> what do we do about the israeli-palestinian conflict? it took the president until 2002 to develop an answer and it was to states for two people be jewish and palestinian state, but it will be a decent, stable, peaceful , democratic, and corrupt government . so that means -- >> an insider's view into the accomplishments and failures of the bush a administration's policy on the israeli-palestinian conflict sunday at 10:00 p.m. eastern. part of book tv this weekend on c-span2. >> now from a conference on the 60th anniversary of the

publication of whitaker chambers "witness," a panel discussion titled the history of "witness" from yale university this is a little more than an hour. >> thank you. thank you. thank you buckley program at yale and thank you all in the audience for being here today. last semester here at yale i had the privilege to teach a course on intellectual legacy of william f. buckley jr. this course, dedicated a couple of weeks to of bill buckley's anti communism as a principal and philosophical position. bill buckley once told me late in his life that is most important book may have been odyssey of a friend, the book in which he uncharacteristically barely says or writes anything but in which he creates a sort of literary and philosophical interview with whitaker chambers

the odyssey, we see chambers again. so, this time directly to young admirers, friends, and colleagues. parts of these two books, i was struck most of all buy and that deep and emotional intensity and brought humanity close out of so many of these pages. a man is trying to account to himself and to the world hell he made his choices, where he fell and where he blundered, but also that there is no going back, how doing the right thing can still lead other things and not just for his own soul, but his family, country, and generation. someone who was a dramatic and emotional man, very much so. and so it is the surprising to me that the chambers have moved

profoundly. as my students know, he had many formative influences, but they, and in his life certainly ranks as the most unexpected and mysterious and intense. so i applaud the choice of this work, "witness," as the one to follow last year's god and man at yale for this, our second annual buckley program conference. to help us this get started today we have produced three distinguished gentlemen who know much about the subject. lee edwards sitting in the middle. a distinguished fellow at the heritage foundation's diamond center for principals and politics. dr. edwards has enjoyed a career as one of the leading historians of american conservatism ranging from viagra visa president reagan to a recent biography of william f. buckley. the founding director of the institute of political

journalism at georgetown and is the fellow of the institute of politics in jfk school of government at harvard. john gaddis next to me one of the leading historians of the cold war. he won the pulitzer prize for his biography of the diplomat george tenet. his work has influenced the works of cold war historians of the world and has played a major role in uncovering the role of personalities in determining cold war policies. the influence of his work on the cold war can be seen in the 24 parts cnn television series. finally, a graduate of yale university, class of continue help me? 1955.

i was missing that detail. one of the leading members of the conservative movement in the united states. his book blacklisted by history, the untold story of senator joe mccarthy and his fight against american enemies gives an account of the age of mccarthyism during the cold war. he has been the recipients of honorary doctorates from such institutions as syracuse university and the john marshall law school and has won the accuracy of media irvine award for excellence in journalism. please join me know in welcoming our panelists. [applause] and would you like to start a stack. >> is such a pleasure and really an honor to be here. once again, i was flattered to be asked to participate in the

first seminar last year, and i guess i did not do too badly because i am back again today. and i see some good friends out here and also some people whom i admire so terribly much including senator jim buckley. preserve the round of applause. [applause] well, let us begin with a paradox. whitaker chambers was a soviet spy who became, in bill buckley's words, the most important american defector from communism. the chamber's public witness about the seductive and attraction of communism and its treasonous adherents began in august of 1948 when he identified a golden boy of the liberal establishment as a fellow member of his underground

communist cell in the 1930's. his was a former assistant secretary of state, an adviser to president franklin d. roosevelt, the acting secretary general of the united nations' founding conference in san francisco and recently named president of the carnegie endowment for international peace. he emphatically denied chambers delegation. and a great deal more than the reputations of these two men was a stake. if his was in the sense and anti communism and those closely associated with it, like richard nixon, a prominent member of the congressional investigating committee would be dealt a devastating blow. if he was guilty then anti communism would occupy a prominent part of the political landscape and a spokesman would become a national leader.

furthermore, they each represented one side in the epic struggle of the cold war. one man symbolized the philosophy of freedom. western civilization. the other, the etiology of totalitarianism and marxism and leninism. both left and right understood that america and the world was at a critical point in history. consider the major political events that transpired between august of 1948 when chambers confronted his at a congressional hearing and may have 1952 when chambers published his managerial and magisterial more, witness. in february 1948 the communists seized control -- control of czechoslovakia through a coup d'etat. it was the first soviet seizure by force of a freak popular

government, and it stunned official washington. in china and the people's liberation army and shanghai scheck's national forces to, the communists would have soon have command of the world's most populous nation. 1950 was a particularly eventful year. in january they surrendered the british authorities admitting he was a clear spite. the statute of limitations of as the guys having expired. the fbi arrested harry gold who identified julia's and ethel rosenberg as conspiracy s in the plot to give nuclear secrets to moscow ended june number three invaded south korea and presented the u.s. for the choice, either turn back the

invasion or allow the communists to secured keys -- piece of a chessboard of asia. in 1952 whitaker chambers published with this. -- published "witness." the united states faced a transcendent, not transitory crisis. that man is of course algeria.

unable to call upon an expert witness who observed the estimated 500 hours during the congressional hearings and the two trials resulting in the conviction addressing a large audience of undergraduates at princeton. hauser hiss on foreign policy. well, what else can one say about princetons invitation but once politically correct, is politically correct. welcome your some of the things that were said to the assembled

students. you will be observing, as brilliant, as a directive as charming personality as i have witnessed in more than 30 years of newspaper experience. you will find it difficult to believe that you were listening to a man convicted by a jury of willful perjury. piquancy of his role as a traitor and despite. edwards recalled that in his first appearance before the house committee on un-american activities he indignantly denied the allegation that he was a communist. i never witnessed a more convincing display of righteous wrath, my father said as he swore that he had never laid eyes upon whitaker chambers. he blinked at a photograph of chambers in utter amazement.

less than one month later confronted with it chambers himself was to confess that he had indeed known the man and know him intimately and had even given him an automobile. but he was unembarrassed. the picture of injured innocence, profuse and explanations of why he did fail to recall a man whose appearance is exactly that of the man in the photograph shown here. he had known chambers, but under another name, that of george crossly. it had never occurred to him to think that the committee might be talking about crossly, a deadbeat newspaperman. at this point my father said i began to realize that he was a dangerous man.

it was important to remember that it was not as he announced. on the day there were sentenced said publicly that he would never turn his backfill. but it was not and if. a man of monumental arrogance to admit that he straight ever so slightly from the past. he was my father summed up a man of passionate an almost pathological convictions of his own rectitude regardless of overwhelming evidence of guilt. and as set forth by a colleague

who will be speaking to us a little bit later, his case informed the american people that there was an internal communist threat. however, in the 1948 presidential campaign harry truman called any such notion a red herring. communists had infiltrated the federal government, all the way up to and including the white house. defending him became a liberal obsession, consequently the chambers case contributed to liberalisms would still left end its refusal and inability to view the soviet objectively and to concede that it was a clear and present danger. the case demonstrated the intimate connection between communism and liberalism. when i took up my middle slang and ended communism, i also have

something else. what i hit were the forces of that great socialist revolution which in the name of liberalism had been inching its as cat the one x liberal who saw the connection clearly was president ronald reagan who awarded the medal of freedom in 1987 to whichever's. when asked why reagan replied because because 100 years from now people will have forgotten the details, but i wanted to remember that he went to jail as a trader and whitaker chambers was honored by his fellow citizens. his conviction verified anti communism as a potent element of american politics. it gave buckley and other conservatives a caused by which to unite traditionalists

conservatives and libertarians against the common enemy, liberalism. the historian george nash and others have argued persuasively that without communism there would have been no unified conservative movement beginning in the 1950's and without a conservative movement that would have been no presidential candidate, barry goldwater in 1964 and no president elect reagan in 1980. witness is an essential work of the conservative kanin. it may have a mistake war and anti coming as in any of the rock of the cold war. included reagan and could quote from memory the first pages of the forward for many years afterwards. longtime publisher of national review, libertarian columnist and author john chamberlain and the prince of darkness,

conservative columnist, commentator robert novak. whitaker chambers was one of the great men of our time wrote the conservative publisher henry gregory. why? because of his enormous talent as a writer. his steadfast carriage in the face of a ferocious liberal campaign to destroy him. his witness to god's grace and the fortified power of faith. whitaker chambers placed every conservative in his that and for all time. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you. he will ask our panelists to speak from -- sitting down. professor. >> well, thank you.

thanks to the organizers. i think it is probably fair to say that all professors have certain guilty secrets. i grew -- the big one. i have certainly been aware of the importance of the book the were talking about here. the fact is i had not actually read "witness." i take consolation in the recent confession which she made in the weekly standard. we have only just never got around to reading the bible.

and epstein said in his commentary, great stuff there. [laughter] well, that is what i felt about witness. over the last ten days i have been reading it, every line of it, sitting a plate, reading it. if he passed by my house you concealer only light in the darkness of the house. that is my ipad that actually has "witness" on it now. it was a compelling. it really kept me up nights reading. end of as he says, there is great stuff there. just for example, the things embedded within it, men must do what they think right, and i yield to what seems probable. there is weight in eight. the multiple soviet spy apparatuses that operated in this country in the 1930's.

well, the russians believed in bulk. there is faith reflected in it. without got it won only organizes the world against god. there is a this tension made about personalities in fundamental ways. there are differences in the pitch and purpose of life in the folds, the angles. and yet well before i got to the end of this long but i found myself wishing that whitaker chambers was himself a famous an excellent editor of, had hired one to work with them on this book because epstein says of the bible, there are a lot of big gaps in it. even sacred texts, epstein implies, can stand to be

shortened in places and perhaps that's true of "witness," particularly as you move through the final half of it were so. so, what i came away with was a sense of admiration, deep admiration, deep respect combined with, as i went through it and got to know it better, sometimes exasperation as well. i was hearing things, reading things that i had not read before. that sense of admiration and exasperation really resonated with me and indeed struck me as a very familiar emotion. i got to thinking, where did that emotion come from, that combination of admiration and exasperation. i thought of my yale students who sometimes merit these contradictions. i don't think it came from that. i thought of my own efforts to connect what i write with what i

think. i don't know when i think until i right. but the real reason i think that "witness" evokes these mixed emotions in meet as i read it came from the parallels that i saw two more recently published book with which i have had a somewhat closer connection. this rather unimaginative titled george f. kennan and american life. now, i am chagrined by going back and looking at my book. in its 800 pages it certainly is not brief. there is not a single reference twitter chambers and it. and i particularly appreciate the forbearance of chambers biographers for not mentioning this embarrassing facts in his long and thoughtful review of my book in the new republic last winter.

he himself did refer briefly to chambers in the second volume of his memoir. took a couple of pages to say that he had followed the case carefully the quarter century earlier bill was still unsure, as many people were in 1972 of who to believe. of course we know the answer to that question much more clearly now natalie to the biography, but also to the courageous scholarship of those who followed his work. today no one can reasonably doubt the truth particularly of the evidence that has surfaced from soviet sources in the last 20 years. although, as pointed out the other day, you can still get in trouble if you stand in the

middle of certain sidestreets in upper manhattan and shout out, alger hills was guilty. it was strongly struck me was less how well it holds up in the light of recent scholarship. what i had not expected or what seemed to me to be a number of eyrie similarities between the personalities of whitaker chambers and the man that i spent a lot of time with recently, not just recently but for the last three decades, george f. kennedy. resigned and the fact that neither chamber's nor hemet fate categories that did not fit the compartments, did not fit the pigeonholes that we too easily seek to cramp great

personalities into. it just did not fit. he wrote of chambers that he was a unique blend of religious program and political revolutionary. he goes on to say that chambers contemporary never stops. another individual so consistently driven to repudiate himself agonizingly at times. has become his admirers but also

his detractors. this got me to thinking about pluton. if there were each like so few others how much were they like each other? and that's what i'm going to spend the rest of my time talking about. chronologically there are only close in part. chambers was born in 1901, canada in 1904. chambers lived only to the age of 60. can it lives to the age of 101, hence the delay in publishing the biography. the source of profuse apologies over the years to me from the subject.

[laughter] cannon and chambers are closer, it seems to me, and having a difficult childhoods marked by family tragedies. for canada was the death of his mother two months after he was born. for chambers' it was the suicide of an 11th brother in his 20's. both had ivy league educations. chambers at columbia and kim in at princeton, but neither ever felt part of any establishment. both men were afflicted with a deep cultural pessimism that was rooted not in for seeing another world war. it went back further than that, rooted deeply in the 1920's in the post-world war one. there were times of optimism in the lives of chambers and can then, what they were very brief. for chambers it was editor of

times. i would say it was his year at the national college in the early days of the policy planning worry was able to of making work as the waste with the total support of general george marshall who had become secretary of state. these periods of optimism were fleeting. both men sounded the alarm about soviet intentions. chambers to the roosevelt administration threw it out as early as 1949 with no visible results. the roosevelt administration to his diplomatic reporting from moscow in 1944-45, which she also found to have been, in effect -- ineffective. both men found themselves as a result isolated from many contemporaries and ostracized for having gone out on these lands, although the vindication came more quickly.

self congratulations for both men in the modern age was almost impossible. that's remarkable. one reason for this was a religious faith which became deeper for both of these men as they aged, but that resided in the city of god, not the city of men, hence that faith minimal expectations for beyond bearing "witness" and the accomplishments of this life. data the capacity of their nineties, gullible country, the united states to survive in a sinister world. both were at the same time and in their own way deeply dedicated american patriots whose only slowly backs of

witness eliminated the country's path to survival through this horrible century. their despair, however, was so deep that both not only contemplated suicide but actually took steps to make it possible. as chambers describes it in with this comment was the day he would to a garden store in lower manhattan and picked up bug killer which actually was cyanide based in ticket home, open the can, and tried to up mix it with the right amount of water and threw a towel over his head and breathing fumes and hope to wake up not working out. he was saved by is don't shortsighted this. he could not read the instructions on the can and get the proportions wrong. but it was during his brief ambassadorship in 1952 when the situation was so grim that he

insisted that debt see a quick and painless suicide pills in the event of war he would be interned as he had been in 1942. so that was what the purpose of the suicide pills were in his case. he did i use them. ito meath was the gown the toilet eventually. but he ordered them i think it is deeply significant. and then later preoccupy himself and indeed overwhelmed anyone who would really listen to them with great fears, and i've been gray fears in some. chambers that the new deal and all that followed from it was part of some kind of a gigantic communist conspiracy and that nuclear weapons need not be developed and deployed without facing grave risk. both were farmers.

finding in the physical labor associated with that profession a limited refuse that made life and especially family life possible. finally, both were great writers. even if the writing is restitution, their pros has kept their ideas compelling against time and space. and as ronald reagan was suggesting that they will do that in the future which is to say that each man produced works that will be read as far as we can see into the future, one of which, of course, is right here today. now, in his review in the new criterion, jim pearson, who i think -- is see here? >> he's on the way, i guess. he summed up in a single sentence an accomplishment which i never came close to achieving in my book.

he was an independent thinker of the first order who at a critical moment in history saw something clearly that others saw but through a haze and by an act of singular intellectual courage earned absolution for any misjudgments he may have subsequently committed. i hope jim would not mind if i change only two words in that "to let it some up whitaker chambers who, through an act of singular moral courage earned absolution for any misjudgments he made previously. thanks for your attention. [applause] >> thank you very much. mr. evans, we would go until about 345 for questions and

answers. >> they keep. first of all, a great pleasure to be back. i have many class is in this building and employees to say it is exactly the same as it was 60 years ago. some things did not change. further touch of the stealth jet, i read it at the time. everyone was in a complete uproar against it. i did read it and said this is exactly what is going on here. so that was my introduction to bill buckley. i then met -- i was still an undergraduate. he was a friend of mine for all those many years until he passed away recently. and died -- the last time i took

the train up from washington to connecticut it was to see bill at stanford some years ago. i used to take it all the time to come back and forth. we lived outside washington at that time. and i always enjoyed writing. the only problem was you had to go through new york. i am always reminded of a little girl who was trying to say the lord's prayer and got confused and said, lee is not into tenths station. [laughter] en detroit or words were never spoken. it was a little better than that. i did read it with this shortly after it came out. came no analysis of more. that did not read it at the time. but i have read and reread it many times since. it was a book that rewards

careful study. i approach it and have approached it. a new book. coauthored just came out. chambers emerges as a simple character which was not my intention. again. the more i looked into matters and the more i realized that chambers was a critical figure in almost too many senses to list. his book is, among other things apart from its literary merits and tremendous gift of language, history of the domestic cold war, one of the best. it is not only history but a source. he was himself a primary source. all the work, you have to go to the primary sources. it is very risky to involve secondary sources. he was himself a primary source.

i would say he was also -- his book is a guide for the perplexed. benchmarks of judgment there the stand to this state in addition to the information he provides. as i delved into some of these things myself using some primary sources, mostly fbi files, i realize the centrality of chambers to the whole domestic cold war story, not only his case, but in others. end his prevail and his service and to sacrifice. and the more i learned through him about the nature of the eternal problem in our security situation in the 1930's and the 1940's, he gave most of his testimony about the 30's. he was still around in the 40's, as you know. he was consulted often by the

fbi in the 40's. realize that i formulated what i call about that problem has lot of inadequate paranoia. [laughter] which says that no matter how bad you think something is, when you look at it is always worse. that was only the case with the penetration of our government phases of the soviet union on all of which france chambers was most instructed. he made these points that have been confirmed repeatedly by the un commission. one was the extent that has been alluded to by the previous speakers. it battling formidable in terms of members but the level of penetration. many posts of power.

but one. he was not alone. treasury department. white house. three top soviet agents a very high levels and the government. the second point, let me follow up. he told us, confirmed over and over again. the record from the soviet union , at descriptions which were secret messages sent back and forth between the moscow bosses and their agents over here which the code was broken by our cryptology speck in the '40's. there were other records from the soviet union which had come forth. kgb agents. suspects, for records in moscow. most of all, the fbi files with

saw hundreds of thousands of these cases of this over and over in confirmed everything is changed to have everything chambers said said and indeed is beyond the second major point of that was chambers assertion which this book is about that the real issue was not spying, all of the movies, all of the cloak and dagger images, it was policy influence.

tilth american policy in favor of the soviet interest. this book contains case histories, case studies, yugoslavia, the plan for turning germany to lead killed pastor. the approval of slave labor as reparations to moscow approving. a major factor. operation keelhaul which turned refugees back over to the soviets. those are examples, and there are others i know, but those i

do know, in which pro-soviet operatives with that our governments tilted policy in favor of a communist interest. the point that chambers makes over and over is confirmed by everything else which country it to his very morose temper, very pessimistic. he knew a lot and could not give other people to believe him. he, as has been pointed out, made revelations about in the '40's, but 1931 to assistant secretary of state. nothing was done. he named his men. that was ignored. at the time in the war in the post-soviet atmosphere color he then ran into greater efforts at

concealment and misrepresentation when the case surfaced. almost a decade later. extremely pessimistic. and there is kind of a pervasive sense of doom in the final chapters of witness which was personal. it did not succeed. also society. the dollar regained. one of the reasons was there were people in the government who would do nothing about it. he was right. in this respect but he himself was in considerable peril. he made the revelations, went before the house committee in august of 1948, testified in

public. things that he said in private long before the fbi. everything that he said the fbi knew in 1945. we have the records to show that not wanting to do anything about it. but right before the house committee in the white house that day argus' 16th 1948, the meeting at the top levels from the attorney-general in the various white house aides planned to indict chambers for perjury. that persisted well into the end of 1943. riding a cold war history into mets.

the rugged histories. in any case the only documents, but to a thousand pages one. the minutes, the meetings, what happened in terms of the aftermath of the altar. we discuss some of that in this book. unfortunately, when those were compiled the state department did not have the primary record for all of them. one of the papers they did not have was the papers of the secretary of state. when he left the state department in july of 1945 he took his papers with him. they then vanished, and not eat

through sinister means both were taken away and not returned. did not have them when it published the documents. the result is that many revelations that are in the papers have been secret for these many decades. these papers, it turns out, university of virginia and charlotte. i was able to get them there. you will find many things that are not in the official compilation. from more extensive than anything that is in the official compilation. one american at the altar he knew what he was doing. i say that in an almost literal sense. secretary of state for two months.

almost nothing like foreign-policy. distressing. the record shows he had a very, very intuitive issues. others were not confused. he knew what he was doing. he was personally with all the paperwork, documents, it all went through him. that was in the papers to very little of it. chambers said something very somber, very pessimistic, very defeatist. he said he was leaving. went inside. there was one point about which he was wrong. what convinced and that he was right was the unwillingness of people in authority to hear the truth.

they ignored the truth the message and the truth. this came to the floor. the grand jury session in 1947. all these communists reported. all in this book. the prosecutors said there are all in one witness. another. and there for it was out of my walk. they refuse to call him. only when he got called in the summer of 48 that built the case and led to the conviction. we have the minutes. that changed the course of history. not only lived history and wrote

history, but he changed history. to this state i don't think we fully appreciate how important he was in this pivotal episode where he broke through the cover-up and concealment to bring about the indictment and conviction. the course of cold war history was changed dramatically. my courses up. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, mr. evans. we have about 15 minutes for questions. i ask you to of come down and speak into the mike. let me also welcome governor daniel to our conference today. the microphones are ready in

your questions are welcome. >> right behind you if you don't mind. thank you. go ahead. i just want you to ask a question. >> thank you. >> okay. this is in the mixture. i was very much appreciative of the professors comparison of talk. i have to say that i was listening to the material and was rather struck by another possible comparison of extraneous to this conference. i saw at. here we have another case of an extremely charming man righteously professing his

innocence in the face of a very large body of contrary evidence. now, that evidence comes mostly from men of integrity, not as charming as lance armstrong himself in the case of the alger hiss we have -- we have later chambers. those of you have seen the pictures of these two men will have to be struck by the enormous differences in appearance just in the urbane well-dressed cut. ..

>> i am beverley. the department here and i want to say just a quick finger on the john assigned witness for many years and i just wanted to make a quick observation and then also pose a question. the observation i think for those of you that have read it, witness is a fascinating book and people tend to think what is fascinating is its indictment of communism but it's actually a fascinating account of conversion to communism about these early experiences in the 1930's about what in fact he became a communist and that is not always as obvious about the book but it's very important as

a historical document as a primary source. so my question i happened to be writing about jay edgar hoover and my question is to say that she is a figure that has gone down in history as a not particularly great reputation in terms of consciousness and some of the roles that he played on the late 40's, early 50s in terms of the battles and i am just wondering how you see the role both in terms of your own research with chambers sort of where you come down about jay edgar hoover. >> i am a jay edgar hoover fan. i spent untold hours on the fbi going through the archives and i had in my possession over 100,000 pages of fbi files which i had for the freedom of an formation and had fbi agents in

the room. this is when she went to the fbi a major witness against all of these suspects. hoover was a stalwart patriot, no question about that. he was meticulous and record keeping. the movie came out with casting leonardo dicaprio as jay edgar hoover. i don't know who came up with that. i would have preferred brad pitt frankly for that role. [laughter] any event it is a prestige of falsehood but most of what we are given as alleged history is that. i am reminded of what mary mccarthy said about william

helm. every word she writes as a fly d that is my view on what is out of their. i think that he has been smeared for the same reason. finally hoover himself was very skeptical of chambers. they didn't just accept anybody in telling them stuff. they spent a lot of time backtracking, checking the ev is a fully on people through wiretaps which there are many transcript said. once you've read these wiretaps, you never want to go back. that is the real stuff. this is an edited, and what they did over and over again is to find out who was telling the

truth and they finally determined chambers was the one telling the truth. it isn't a question though i really want to raise and it's something that puzzled me in the sinking through the new literature that has come out on all of these issues, and this is the invisibility, relative invisibility of henry wallace. this it seems to me is an interesting situation because there is a documentation indicating very strongly that wallace was regularly reporting to the kremlin certainly in 1945 and 46 when still in the truman administration cabinet at this point as the secretary of commerce but also one thing i came up with with regard to the

1948 campaign is the frustration of the secret effort general marshall had made to approach the soviets about the possibility of negotiation and that was blown wide-open in a way that strongly suggests the contact between wallace and the kremlin at the time he was running on the progressive party ticket for the president third party ticket. so as i asked myself who is the hero in this story in this whole history it's someone that has gotten a bad rap so far in whole whitaker chambers case and somebody that got a bad rap from george kennan but it is the presence of the united states franklin roosevelt who for whatever reason, and we may never know the reason, dumped wallace from the ticket in 1944 and sent him on a trip to

siberia where he confused gulags with collective farms. [laughter] now if you want to play the counterfactual game, and someone should write a counterfactual novel does just one thing. he doesn't dump will list from the ticket in 44. and then wallace becomes president of the united states at the time that all of this stuff is breaking loose. what would have happened at that point? why don't more people talk about this? we have time for one more question and i am going to use my pur doggett if and see if i can engage in this question. in the famous letter to my children, the forward to the book witnessed chambers writes the following, quote, from page 16 communism is what happens when in the name of my and free

themselves from god a little bit below that there has never been a society or a nation without god but history is cluttered with the wreckage of the nation's that became indifferent to god and died. then he sums up the crisis of the western world exists to the degree in which it is in different and exists in which the western world actually shares communism, materialist vision. so i guess i would like to ask more about whitaker chambers materialism from my three witness panelists here what is whitaker chambers materialism, how did he understand materialism and did he see liberalism as well as communism sharing that same disease? >> it seems if you listen to

that particular quote you can see why he was so attracted and drawn to whiteaker chambers. you can see why he was inspired and so anxious to enroll whitaker chambers as a member of the editorial board when he was filming if he wanted desperately to have chambers on board. and if you begin to think about what can draw together people coming and that is what i am particularly interested in and what is referred to here bringing together the traditional conservatives libertarians and others what could do that and bring it together i think at one level it certainly was the realization that communism personified by the soviet union was a clear and present danger and that they all reached out to the traditionalists like russell

kirk and libertarians like frank and said please let's come together and let's form this magazine and looks for this movement that was also part of what he was trying to do. i think at the same time that if you look at whitaker chambers life she was very in different of materialism. it didn't really matter to him at all and you can see that there are all kind of things which for example after writing a witness there were contractors he was offered. he could have made an extraordinary amount of money writing a sequel follow-up or any other number of books about it but he said what had to be said and decided to retire in westminster on the western shore of maryland so i don't think he was a materialist at all and that wouldn't have interested bill buckley at all either and i wouldn't have interested i think the conservative movement at that time and further by this

danger which became so clear to them in the soviet union and in communism. >> thank you very much reconvene in ten minutes. [applause]

it took the president until june to develop the financing. and the answer was the two states or to people, george state and the palestinian state

but only when that palestinian state will be a decent stable peaceful, space, non-corrupt. first that means arafat has got to go. an italian diplomat and philosopher who wrote the prince 500 years ago. next a boston university forum on the immediate and long-term effect of the book. this is an hour and a half. >> good evening ladies and gentlemen welcome to this evening an event to mark the 500th anniversary of the appearance of niccolo machiavelli's the prince.

i am a member of the department of history. this is the second of three moments the history department is marking of landmarks in history. we have marked the 50th anniversary of the cuban missile crisis and later this year we will mark the martin luther king speech the lincoln memorial. tonight we are talking about the prince. we have invited to guests who are eminently suited to do what we want to do which is to look at the past and its own terms and to look at the ways the past is still present now. that is edward muir, one of the country's leading preeminent historians of renaissance italy, and michael ignatieff, a thinker, writer, public figure directly engaged in global affairs and very familiar the electoral politics. "the prince" is perhaps the starkest anatomy of power ever

written. it follows its declared intent without fear and without hesitation that is to show the rulers how to survive in the world as it is and not in the world as it should be. it's only criteria is success, goodness, justice, honesty, virtue, our valuable only if they help you succeed and if not you should neglect them. it's to appear on the stand just than to be so and one should not hesitate to deceive and to do whatever else is necessary to hold power. this is a book that focuses on the means on power. people should either be caressed or crushed. if you do them minor damage they will get revenge but if you cripple them, there is nothing

you can do. if you need to injure someone, do it in a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance. this is about cruelty that is well used and that is poorly used. this is a book that talks about cultivating an enemy so that you can crush him publicly and therefore intimidate other people. machiavelli writes that to get a new hold on the territory, one needs to merely eliminates the surviving members of the family of the previous rulers. this has been called the first modern book on politics. that is what underlies human relations as power the state is purely human artifacts made for human ms and relentlessly secular.

it mentions moses and the point is possibly farmed. he is an example of a leader that came to power through his own authority. machiavelli is either of the realist or a cynic. he promises to describe how things are in the real world coming in as he writes not waste time with the discussion of the imaginary world. anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to the idea will soon discover he has been caught how to destroy himself and not how to preserve himself. the book gives a particular view of human nature. machiavelli writes that humans are ungrateful, fiscal, deceptive, of leaders of danger, eager to gain. he says it is natural and normal to take things that do not belong to you. it sketches the view of how we

can and cannot control our fate even the best prepared and a direct events half the time to control the rest but fortune favors the bold. this is a book with silences. the biggest silence is its lack of all moral evaluations. how do we read it? do we read it as a manual for success? how do we evaluate its author according to the effectiveness of the strategies or is the author himself implicated morally by writing koln lee and without this approval about the the effectiveness of assassination, the war aggression, the colonization and the necessary atrocities? there are other silences in this

book. whether there are moral walls that transcended the pursuit of power or that transcended the law of any particular states the status of what we now call universal human rights such silences take us from the realm of their states of italy to the modern global politics. a book called the independence of nations, david who is a member of this university faculty in folks to describe what he calls the jongh goal of world politics. he says if god doesn't exist than anything is permitted. he picks it up. people ought to act out of self-interest even if it leads them to crime. this is a reasonably true definition about states this is

about the beast that room politics killing when they are hungry and obeying no law the those of their own nature. the terrible words range -- reign true anything is permitted. the reports today force us to think about machiavelli in a global context about whether the rules of ethics apply in the jumble of world politics. it may recall to less the means that slobodan milosevic implied in the 1990's and the name of the greater serbia, mass murder, deportations, great as the strategy of war and political assassination. it may also make us question the grounds on which we claim that these are crimes against humanity. reading the print may put us in mind of things done in the name

of national security, the invasion of iraq, waterboarding, collateral damage, drone strikes, targeting terrorists. readers have asked such questions over the past 500 years in ways that make sense to them. many new this author only by his book and they condemned him accordingly. she was burned in 1559 and the book was put on the index of prohibited books that same year in 1559 putative was removed from the index in 1990. the english cardinal reginald called the print a book written by state in's hand. in the 20th century, machiavelli has been called the teacher of evil and associated with the nazis. but to study machiavelli in his own time is to get a full and

possible sense of the man raised by people of humble means the value the book and then who was a voracious reader of the child and wrote that whenever he took a walk he had a book by dante tucked under his arm. a man that claimed to have imaginary conversations at the end of a long day she was a scholar, playwright, fiercely loyal to the city. he was a member of the government for 14 years under the republic. he was an eloquent defender of an independent and engaged citizenry. machiavelli signed a letter to his friend this way. niccolo machiavelli historian,, author, tragic author. the particular circumstances of his writing the prince may be

relevant. the public could just fall when and they were about to be restored to power. machiavelli was suddenly out of a job and he wrote this book in the introduction to lorenzo in the recommendation to the this is the context of that has led many readers to study the silences of the press to read between the lines to ask if there is a deeper message to the book and some have concluded that it is an attack on tierney following the crimes of the despot so that careful readers would draw their own right conclusions. some see this as a defense of the will of equals and of the republic and even as catholics likened it to this subversive martin luther in denouncing it

protestants read it as an attack on the tierney of catholicism this embodies the ideals of the revolution by showing the tyranny of the was meant to overthrow. it has been all things to all people in the last 500 years it has been many more things to many more kinds of people it's simple tone might suggest. in the greatest number of university departments including philosophy, political science, international relations and many others. those of us that have taught machiavelli know that the book can still cause outrage. those of us that have led the scholarship on machiavelli nose that is still provides original and surprising readings. the predominant reading as

either outraged more original insight. perhaps the reading today is a kind of breezy acceptance, one that skates over any worry. perhaps it is an attitude in which we flatter ourselves with sophistication and perhaps we've seen this before we are not shocked we will take in stride and use a few trips along the way to reassure some recent books with the title. management, a prescription for success in your business. the machiavelli for women. this is from the dust jacket from the war of intimacy to public life what they are confronting bosses, competitors or lovers the greatest power

belongs to the woman that dares to use the subtle weapons that are hers alone. or machiavelli for mom's. maxims on the effective government of children. even in 2013 or even especially in 2013 we should not be complacent about this book after 500 years is still potent, still possibly dangerous and is still rich in its silence as it does still deceptively simple padilla it is still effective and forcing us to consider questions of right and wrong and exercise of power domestically. we are fortunate this evening to have to engage and thoughtful commentators.

she is among a handful of modern historians here and abroad who have redefined the field and he's a pioneer in the methods of cultural history and looks at what the details tell us about the structures of power and about the reach of institutions and their research with a larger vision that draws from across the social sciences to look at the group behavior, human psychology and the meaning of ritual. his subjects have included of violence, urban ceremonies, festivals, religious nonconformance, theatergoers and of learned societies. the professor is in the arts and sciences at northwestern university of chicago. he's been recognized for his teaching by the mccormick professorship and teaching excellence. he's the author of four books

and numerous articles. including the american historical association's price for the best book for the civic ritual and renaissance venegas that is now a classic in the field and the prize for the best book he has received that twice as well as mad blood stirring vendetta in renaissance italy and he received a distinguished service award for his lifetime achievement across his career by the andrew mellon foundation. professor muir. [applause] >> thank you. it's a great pleasure to be here and to think and talk about machiavelli who in fact

abbreviated version of his name has been my password for years i want to tell you what it is. when asked to present this occasion about the prince i turn to my note shelf and i was actually quite surprised. i had far more books on the machiavelli than any of the subject and certainly any other person, and i never really systematically attempted to collect on machiavelli. it's just when you are a college professor and people send you books and give them to you there is an enormous number. let me read a few titles you've heard some already. fortune is a river. leonardo da vinci and niccolo machiavelli's gerry to change the course of florentine history about a plan to deviate fortune is a woman gendered and politics in machiavelli the feminist

interpretation is similar to the one in the titles jim just mentioned. it's as important as five centuries ago his smile, machiavelli view, love and hell. i also found 13,000 hits to the word machiavelli and books and articles that of course leaves out many things in foreign languages which presents us with such a difficult problem of how we make sense of a man that wrote a deceptively simple book that has been interpreted in so many different ways his old make as the late 16th century equivalent of the devil when she

was angry with my brothers are used to say that the make out of your pants i had no idea what she was talking about until i became a scholar and i realized it was machiavelli all along. is he the most sexual or sexist clacks let me read you one of the most famous passages in the print. let's get in the right place. i am certainly convinced of this that it is better to be impetuous than cautious because fortune is a woman and it is necessary in order to keep her down to beat her and to struggle with her and this seemed she allows herself to be taken over bye men who are in impetuous than by those that make cold evidence is and then being a

woman nicias always a friend of young men for they are less cautious, more aggressive and they command her with more audacity. are we to understand this is a metaphor of understanding politics or is he in fact as i think most of my colleagues that specialize in the renaissance issue would say is in fact dedicated republican. a dedicated believer not what we would call democracy certainly but the citizenry to exercise its own individual and collective well. that is basically what i want to argue tonight and i will try to prove that in a few ways. first let me put it in a broader context, and i am going to borrow in this context from the late renaissance who understood

the republican is some and in fact the renaissance itself as a manifestation of one side of the radical the economy and i am quoting from him to put the matter briefly it is between the 13th and the 17th centuries western europeans and perhaps i italians most directly and vividly were torn between the two largely antithetical modes of proceeding reality. both employee republic and one is the universal community of the divinely created hierarchy order embodied in the roman catholic church and headed by the pope and the other was civic republicanism that particular manifestation of a political order and a particular time and

place embodied typically in the statute and customs of local regimes. the part of the dichotomy and the second renaissance she did not intend these labels to be historical periods but in fact ideal types as a way of helping us to understand the nature of this conflict that he sees it having existed in the tension with one another in the two positions is a different perception to the general order and a general nature. any other difference between them can be related to this. it's all about order. the medieval position placed every element of human

experience within a cosmic order. a definitive pattern unchanging an ideal which ranked things of persons hyperion of lower. any change violated in this universal order and was therefore immoral, indefensible. the renaissance position in contrast failed to perceive any coherence in the universe, rejected hierarchy as a principal and instead of perceived only of the incessant reflux of things. a principal bruited fundamentally in history of the notion of change. one system was closed and the ever opened. wrestles republicanism, civic republicanism in contrast to the medieval did not identify the substance of human nature has

the intellect, but as the will. and this is the most clear and machiavelli of all renaissance figures. the man that celebrated the exercise of the well under the conditions of political liberty not only in his famous book about republics discourses, but also in a very interesting way throughout the print. as it was put come turn the page to soon come of the renaissance republican as some salles no structure in the nature of things, no ground for costs of finding some element in the universe of higher and others as lower, no reason accessible for affirming that reality consisted of a system of on changing forms and that the validity of common experience could be dismissed as

meaningless. accepted an inconsistent, contradiction and paradox as insurmountable. and it is precisely those three conditions that i think are so evident in machiavelli and consistency, contradiction and paradox, something that did not borrow him, something that he celebrated, now one of the particularly interesting things that we have discovered in recent years of print is that it is a segment, an ongoing dialogue. in particular a dialogue that machiavelli was having with his friend whose correspondents would be examined in a brilliant book called between friends and it's quite clear from these

letters beginning about 500 years this month for the rest of 1513 that machiavelli was about on the discourse it was a book that he started to write about republics and then he interrupted that and started to write the print and finished the discourse later on so it is wedged in the riding of a book about republics and liberty. and he talks about how she involved in this letter so that in many ways he sees not only as a finished product but yet as one more letter. one more open-ended segment in an ongoing dialogue between friends coming off as a tight philosophical understood and

tauscher but as a dialogue. now who was machiavelli? he comes from a prominent but not most distinguished family in they were not aristocrats, but they had produced 54 prior meant that they were city councilmen and was a mayor of the neighborhood and the strong traditions within the family and the and then tortured and executed three generations before and for savitt freedom this is the world that they inherited. his own father was a rather bookish lawyer, ineffectual,

impoverished, really one of the lesser lights in the machiavelli of plan who had made a little money by writing indexes for other books. so clearly he had gained for some degree his interest in books from his father, his interest in politics from a family that had been long committed to the political behavior but at the same time she was no longer in the mainstream of the florentine life. his own family had seven children although we know that despite the fact that he seems to have been reasonably affectionate with his wife in numerous affairs he fell madly in love at one time in his letters as i think in the passage i just read indicates displayed deep ambivalence about women and about trusting them

and about seeing their influence in the political world. throughout the print for example he is always morning the prince not to appear to be evident. let me talk just a bit about his political career and what that might help us to understand what happens in "the prince." as a young man and was a period of the family beginning in 1334 and 1494, the family first then his son and great-grandson controlled the city of florence even though they virtually never held a significant public office. florence was a republic, to hold the office you have to be a member of the guild and former

aristocrats' had been exiled in the 90's. there is a list of 150 names of families and if you had that last name you couldn't even walk through the gates of the city because of their antiaristocratic tendencies but by the middle of the 15th century, rich bankers were able to subvert the republican control everything from behind-the-scenes so when the foreign diplomats came in the 1430 and the 50's they would go to the town hall, present their credentials and get out as fast as they can, looked on the street, go to the palace where the real work to place. now, what this is -- and i think what the situation, the historical situation contributed was a radical distinction between the authority and power. machiavelli when he contemplates that period can see and it's

typical it doesn't matter what your title is and what authority you have. what matters is how you exercise power. he had no authority at all of the power. 1494 they failed to protect them from the innovation of the french and replaced by a charismatic profit who becomes a dictator also from behind the scenes he's controlling things from the pulpit there are still elections and the republic official but he saw him as shifting and as a lawyer and for his generation it was the informative experience for him

for his generation of as much perhaps as the vietnam war for this country as perhaps 9/11 is for my own students. after he was arrested and burned in 1598, and you can still see the spot on the marquee was burned, within three weeks machiavelli gets a job. he had applied several times and had always been turned down. as soon as he was out of the way, he is elected to the position of second chancellor in the job that he held for 15 years and a job in which he was clearly known as the man, the servant of the most powerful member of the florentine republic and became an outsider

on the inside of a second-rate power he went on numerous diplomatic missions to france and the roman empire, venice and most famous florence representative rear he directly observes the attempt to conquer. he writes back letters virtually every day from these various diplomatic missions. he's never the ambassador. he is behind the scenes who does the nitty gritty negotiations while the ambassador goes to the banquets and she is down in the kitchen with the other servant representatives and figures out what is going on. and he writes extraordinarily frank letters from france back home to florence he writes the french respect only those who

are willing to fight for to pay and since you have shown ourselves in capable of either, they consider you as misters zero. he had to manipulate and control and track his way to find information of value and i must say i spent much of my career reading reports and when you read machiavelli's letters their stunning. not only is he the probably the best prose stylist from this period, but in a letter after letter there is this analytical quality in which he is looking at what is at stake and what the sources of the power our performance. it's not just gossip or who is going to fight whom as you fight in so many of the diplomatic reports. it is analysis all the time then in 1512 day return to power. the republic is overthrown and they don't even bother with the

charade of elections. they just become dictators in the city of florence and he loses his job. he is accused of conspiracy against him and his knee and is found on a list of potential conspirators. he is arrested and tortured but eventually released and retired to his former where you can go today to see the house and see the tavern across the street where she amount and it is there that his literary career takes off and he writes the two greatest renaissance comedies. of course the print and the discourse and numerous other works. but, he found this prospect especially in the first year that he's writing "the prince" deeply depressing i feel useless to myself and my relatives and my friends and it is that depressed state that he

describes his writing of the "the prince stock would probably the most famous written in the renaissance it is a letter in which he talks about his day of collecting blood to sell back to his own friends and how they cheat him about catching birds feed his family and he spends the afternoon of an innkeeper, butcher and to baker's gambling over their wages. dennett the end of the evening this famous passage about him returning home. when evening comes on a return to my home and i go into my study and on the threshold for which are covered my close with mud. these are his robes of office

the ancient courts of men and welcome to buy them kindly and the food and alone as mine in which i was born and there i am not ashamed to speak to him to ask him the reasons for their actions answering and for four hours i feel no boredom, i do not tremble at the thought of death nor do i longer fear poverty and become completely part of them this is the renaissance family. the letters to cicero who had been down for 1,003 injured 42

years. in the same fantasy game of a conversation with the ancients. it's reading is what he's doing what he describes it as a conversation of him entering back and he's describing this to the poor, his good friend with whom she is also continuing a conversation by a lot and he goes on without the retention by memory i've noted what i've learned from their conversation and i compose a little work where i dealt as deeply as i can into the thoughts on the subject. what kind they are and how they are acquired and how they are maintained, why they are lost. so, in some ways it is an open-ended kind of book that doesn't have the final answers.

let me just briefly turn to one of the core tractors. the most famous part of the book, the most disturbing are chapters 16, 17 and 18 where he asks these by mary questions is it better to be generous or miserly? is it better to be loved or to be feared? the answer, feared. is it better to be a fox or ally in? answer, both. then we come to this famous part, perhaps the part that has generated the most controversy in the literature. let me read it to you so everyone is clear about what we

are talking about. the necessity that is a guide to how she is thinking. therefore it isn't necessary for "the prince stock quote to have all of the mentioned quality though these are the virtues. it's necessary for him to appear to have them. furthermore to be so bold as to assert this that having them and practicing them at all times is harmful, and appearing to have then is useful and here are the virtues come to seem unmerciful, faithful, humane, forthright, religious but his mind should be disposed in such a way that should it become necessary he would be able to and know how to

change to the contrary. in other words, kind of instinct of pragmatism and it is essential to understand this, that a prince and especially a new prints cannot observe all of those things by which men are considered good. for in order to maintain the state he's often obliged to your to act against his promise against charity and humanity and religion but to turn itself according to the whims of fortune and the change ability of affairs requiring him to a good as long as it is possible he shouldn't strain from the good, but he should know how to enter into evil where necessity, again the word necessity commands. the prince therefore must be

careful never to let anything slipping from his lips for the qualities mentioned above. he shettle up here to be all mercy, all kind mess called religion. there is nothing more necessary than to seem to possess the last quality which is religion. you have a pure one way but you do not necessarily have to behave that way. now, here is why. in general, judged more by their allies and their hands, for everyone can see but few can feel and we make the people make judgments based upon appearances. everyone sees what you seem to be few perceive what you are.

and of the few that do do not dare to contradict the opinion of the many that have the majesty of the state to defend them and in the actions of all men and we have coming up on one of the famous phrases and the prince where there is no partial arbiter one must consider the final results one must consider the final results and this is the passage that is translated into italian one looks to the end this is the passage that is often mistranslated as the ends justifies the means. there is nothing about justification. what the whole paragraphs are about are about the necessity, let the prince therefore act to seize and maintain the state. his methods will also be judged honorable and this is what the necessity is to maintain the state and they will always be judged honorable and praised by

all. for ordinary people are always deceived by appearances and the outcome of things that ordinary people and there is no room for the few while the many have a place to live. amal, let me just finally say that this passage, which seems to be so condescending to the many to the impoverished masses is in fact a rather strange comparison to what happens throughout the rest of the prince and in the discourse because in the end you have to ask where does power come from? it doesn't come from this manipulation of appearances. that is what they do to maintain power. power ultimately comes from those very people that are being

deceived. vara this was in power. throughout "the prince" when he talks about fortresses and territory and when he talks about almost any other element of power ultimately derived from the the people. there is a notion of popular sovereignty which permeates the tax and it's very clear also in his other writings and i would argue that it's not often we do is mistake the sources of power with the techniques of maintaining the power and that the prince must respect people and if they hit him as machiavelli says many times and "the prince," they will get rid of him. thank you. [applause]

>> questions of power and justice are at the center of michael's book. michael ignatieff is the author of 12 books translated into 18 languages on subjects ranging from political economy in the system to human rights, nationalism in the balkans and the political age of war on terrorism. as a scholar she has provided an eloquent defense of human rights framed in a way that acknowledges their origin in a particular time and a particular place. his work is not naive about modern tyrannies that deny their rights by violence or ideology. his work is not blind to the destabilizing elements of western campaigns of liberation. in human rights as politics and idolatry a book from 2001 he

writes of what he calls humble humanism that these is the universal rights on shared human capacities and capacities of empathy, conscience and free will and things that define the individual with autonomy and choice. as a novelist, michael ignatieff writes with the economy and penetrating human insight into gripping immediacy. his most recent novel is called chiarelli johnson and it's about a journalist without illusion swept up in the violence of the war motivated by a sense of justice that only she can bring yet he is destroying. ..