paul reid sits down to talk about his book "the last lion." mr. reid co-authored the book with historian william manchester who while in failing health asked mr. reid to finish the third and final volume on winston churchill. mr. manchester passed away in 2004. [applause] >> thank you very much and thank you all for turning out on a sunday morning for this event. i'm excited to be here with paul reid. we met before and we have talked before and we are both churchill buff so it's a pleasure to see them again and paul thank you for coming out to chicago. we are going to talk for maybe 40 minutes and there will be plenty time for questions so i hope you can keep that in mind and we will hear from as many people as possible. paul will be signing books so feel free to talk to him after. paul is really a wonderful guy. on top of that he is a journalist who got his start in journalism after a career manufacturing which he said in

his bio, which i didn't know and was a reporter at the palm beach post in florida where he came across a group of marines who knew bill manchester the famous author of the first two "the last lion" and as a as a feature writer got to know this group in got to know paul manchester and the rest is history literally because paul went on to take over this book project and write the third volume which has been out for months and is doing very well. i've had a i have had a chance to read it and it's amazing book if you haven't. so, paul welcome and tell us how this project started and how it came about. >> thank you. the project began 60 odd years ago as a little boy. i always get confused over that question, where did it begin because it's kind of nebulous but i would say it began with those six marines in 1996 who served on okinawa with bill

manchester. they were going to have a reunion in west palm beach florida for surviving members of the sections they called it. though couldn't come, miss -- mr. manchester. he was sick and the marines had the reunion anyway and i covered it and wrote a feature. one of the marines reverend matt douglas sent it up to bill manchester who liked it and send me a nice little note which was quite something for a rookie 46 euros feature writer to get. a couple of years later the same marines went up to middletown connecticut where mr. manchester lived. he had to destroy up to 1998 and his wife of 50 years judy had died that summer. five of the marines were up there to boost his morale. they invited me along to do a story and tom o'hare at the

post. lovely stories, south florida is where veterans go ultimately. i interviewed pearl harbor veterans and took an arizona survivor out to parole in 2001 and is just marvelous to write the stories and meet these men and women. so i went up to middletown with the marines and spent i think two nights in three days or three nights and four days with them and i will never forget the first night. i met william manchester and we all had dinner together and cocktails on his porch. he had a cane. he was not yet in a wheelchair, and he made it very clear that he could no longer write. he hadn't lost his memory or his wit or his charm and he loves to read but he just could not put words to paper and that was the great tragedy with bill.

and, i took notes and i remember one night it really moved me around 10:00 or 10:30 at night at wesleyan woman student not on the door and she was 20, 21 and she had two books. i forget what they were but she wanted mr. manchester to sign them for her father who was a veteran. he invited her in, sat her down and his five pals and build spent the next hour and a half talking about okinawa. this young woman i am sure never heard anything like that before and probably never will sense. these guys reminiscing. so i wrote my story and a year or so later wrote another one and another and my daughter was at umass near middletown at the time so every time i would visit her i would visit mr. manchester and we became friends. five years later in 2003 after the yankees beat the red sox as

usual, october 9, the playoff game he was having a jack daniels propped up in bed. i was in an easy chair and he turned to me and said paul i would like you to finish the book. it took me a split second to realize what he was asking because we knew "the new york times" had done a story that was going to be no one to finish the book. he had made that public bill manchester had and i had tried to encourage him a few years earlier to find someone and he pretty much told me to drop the subject and i did until that night. and to say i was flabbergasted would be an understatement. >> so he was on his deathbed at that point was he not and then he asked you to take over the book but he collected a lot of information. having read it i wonder how

much -- bill manchester was a famous author and wrote death of the president about jfk and about general macarthur. he too of course was a great author. >> in october of 2003 when bill asked me to write the book he was very very sick and had been for five years but not quite deathbed yet. he was -- in fact when he asked me he had a jack daniels. his his doctor kept him in to one or two a day and i said bill can you sneak another one in here? he said no paul, my mantis is fully compass and it was but then in the next six months he got very sick. he died on june 1, 2004. he sent a home that weekend with a bunch of what he called his long notes or clumps and every time i am at a place like this to remind myself i should have bought one. essentially they were eight and

a half by 11 pads of paper taped at the middle so what you ended up with was 50 pages of 8.5 by 22. that is why he called them his long notes, onto which he would clue or tape xerox copies of pages from books. he did this back in the 80s, well the 80s and he had about 50 or 55 of these clumps which essentially are 100 pages each so that is about 5000 pages on which were extracts from speeches or telegrams from stalin to roosevelt ordered diary entries from more than 100 sources. primary newspapers, the london times, the "new york times," by

character, churchill, churchill's family, roosevelt's dog. everyone had a place in the notes but they weren't strictly chronological. nor were they strictly by topic so that charles degaulle would be scattered through 20 or 30 of these clumps that pretty much might address 1940 to 1944 that there was no charles degaulle section. and there was no way to you know, when i watch elections now and the anchors are on their touching the screen and counting in ohio that obama needs to win and collating of information that can be done this was longhand and i realized pretty quick weight that the notes couldn't serve me as they had though. i couldn't figure out the source codes and the topic codes, the key he had lost.

here codes. rx were his dock there's diary entries. that one i did used but other ones were a within a in it. i didn't know what that meant and i try to deduce from reading the page that the secret code was on and i made a lot of headway. so if i saw four or five entries about winston churchill's children with a with an aid in it i realized that means family. i would be doing this for the next 20 years. so i had to find a new way to, or way to reinvent the wheel and i had a brainstorm. i called the wesleyan library and i asked for all the books that will had ever used as an adjunct professor there, had ever taken out and he said we are sorry those are private.

how about this? can you send me a list of all the books that were overdue? /go because i knew bill and they said well i guess we can do that. the list was about 20 pages long. and on it were all the diaries and the collected speeches of churchill and roosevelt lacher fees and all of his sources essentially. which i then went on amazon five or six years ago and looked for everything and assembled essentially the same sources bill had in my house along with the latest editions of speeches in newly-released british archive papers and what have you. and started in that way as i say, to write 1000 feature stories and connect them such that at the end you get a book. >> so that was eight years of labour and it shows. the book is extremely detailed

and thorough and also it's a great read. i know that one of the difficult parts of channeling bill manchester was he didn't want you to just write a history. he wanted a story told. you can see from paul already that he was a great storyteller but this is a big story to tell. this runs from 1940 to churchill's death in 1965 so big events. one thing i love about this book in the two print that proceeded it that manchester wrote himself that were preambles, these are 50 or 60 page beginnings of the book that clue you in to hurt churchill is. it's like the movie trailer with history and it talks about clement team, churchill's wife and it gives you a sense of who he is and how he is full of contradictions. so tell us who is he and how did you write those preambles and decide what goes in there? bsu said the first two books

have these beautiful prefaces and preambles. build change the -- and early on for a couple of reasons we wanted this to be a stand-alone book and the reading public. we didn't want people to go into a bookstore and say oh my goodness i want to read that but i have to buy the first two. we wanted to stress to people that it's a stand-alone story so we did the 55 or 60 page prologue which as found trailer as you say a sketch of churchill, a portrait in pencil that the book hopefully flushes out. we wanted to introduce churchill to people who may not have ever met him, his eating habits and ranking habits in this so-called depression which i don't think was accurate but and give you a picture of the man so that when

you encourage him doing something really crazy on page 200 you don't think what is this guy because you have already met him and you are expecting them to be somewhat eccentric. he developed a suit that he could wear it during a blitz. essentially it was like a working man's overalls with a zipper so he could jump right into it instead of putting back on his evening clothes. his staff called at winston's rompers. he called it his sirens because he would jump into it whenever the siren sounded. he would wear monogrammed slippers that his wife gave him, velvet slippers with pom-poms with wfc on them and his siren suit. one of which was lavender for evening wear. and a tin hat, battle helmet and a cigar and out he would go to watch the german bombers, and he would watch from the roof of

the -- and his aides were mortified. he would specifically point to an area where of tom phil and say take me there. they would have to go down and get in the armored car and drive through bombed out streets. he would be smoking and so that behavior, i wanted the reader to be prepared for that sort of behavior because only churchill behaved that way. >> he was very much a classical 19th century man with a different idea about how to run your life than most. what were some of his central personality characteristics? >> especially in volume one when bill manchester writes about churchill's genesis he was born in the 19th century and he was a victorian man, dollar and

honored the virtue of courage was churchill's main virtue that he sought to emulate. the dollar, courage were very important to him but i realized going into this that he was also a classical man in the sense of humor was not a religious man. he took his ethics from pre-christian socratic platonic ideals. he was extremely well read and self educated. i realized early on this is a man who would have been comfortable with plato at the academy hundreds of years before the christian ideals evolved. and i wanted to stress that. he was not an old fuddy-duddy too long in the sun englishman

with a helmet on and a nutty victorian. he was a very complex classical man. >> quite an experience to have dinner with him from what i gather from your book in terms of his eating, drinking and table conversation. it seems that takes up quite a bit trade. >> he loved his dinners but he was the one he gave me the line that his idea of a perfect evening was a wonderful meal in the company of friends with wonderful conversation with himself as the center of it. followed by drinks and more conversation with himself as the center of it and all of the folks who knew him, that diary entries that i would check to see a particular diary entry wasn't just cherry-picked or someone had a grudge but everyone agreed that churchill didn't care if 12 of us were sitting at this table. he didn't care what we thought

and certainly didn't care what we felt in the modern sense. it was all about churchill and he was absolutely honest when he said that would be a wonderful evening. his stock her said it was a cricket analogy but he said at dinner winston bats and everyone else catches. he was so insulated from people including at times as failing. he did not like to be touched and years later after the war he was standing on the steps of the casino in monte carlo having just lost again. he had bad luck in gambling and frank sinatra ran up the steps grabbed his hand and shook it and said i have always wanted to do that and he bounded down the stairs and churchill turned to his private section.

-- secretary who is who is was always with him and said who the hell is that? [laughter] his world, he was the center of his world. >> and of course the moment that i think everyone remembers is when the book opens, france is falling lord halifax a powerful member of churchill's cabinet wants a peace deal with hitler and of course we know how this all turns out. tell us where the book ends up and what churchill is thinking at that time? >> it picks up ready much at the battle of france which was long in passing, 38, 40 days between may 9 when hitler came through the ardennes to june 21 when the french agreed to surrender which just woggle churchill's mind. the french army was the greatest, the largest and best in some regards in europe and the english expeditionary force

was miniscule. the book picks up with the battle for france and the french loss of will, the back bone is churchill saw it almost did the trail when the french asked the english for all of their remaining fighter plane reserves and churchill would have sent it. he would do things like that and his air marshals told him sir, that's it? the french have lost and we are sending our remaining airplanes over there when the germans, and they are coming, we will be defenseless. dunkirk took place. he got the man off the beaches and left their luggage behind as he put it, their tanks, their guns. and from that moment on, bill manchester started from there into the blitz and the invasion scare and very early on i realized the invasion scare was a function of churchill's genius

propaganda. he never believe the germans were coming. but he wanted to build up his armies and the best way to build up his armies would need to keep people on their toes and scared to death that the germans were coming. and he did that and at dinner july 12 i think he was going to make a speech on the 14th. there are the diary entries that winston said we must keep this invasion scare going. it's the best thing to get an offense of army so growing up i always had this image of operation sea lion and the germans were about to comment any moment in the battle of written with this great heroic air battle that decided the war. all along, during those months, churchill knew that he believes strongly the germans were coming for one simple reason. they had to cross water and they didn't have the votes to do it

and he kept the numbers. the germans simply didn't have the merchant shipping, the tankers in the chip and the true carriers and they had no landing craft of the d-day trapdoor variety and he was supremely confident that the germans were never coming but boy he kept up that scare of the invasion. >> that is one of many things i learned from the book and another was the relationship between churchill and roosevelt which after the war was portrayed as one of great love and affection. it wasn't that way at least when the book opens. >> i loved history all my life so i didn't go into this line but i had some americanized version of franklin roosevelt and my father went to the naval academy and i remember him telling me 55 years ago, paul those destroyers that fdr sent to england saved churchill's

chestnuts. that's my old man talking. the 50 destroyers were virtually junk. england only got seven of them by the end of 1940 and roosevelt was very widely and played a very dangerous game of slowly progressing toward war, not fast enough for churchill and perhaps not fast enough for saving of western civilization in europe area and, the telegrams between churchill and roosevelt, the correspondence, the conversations, i didn't find them to be bosom buddies, barely friends and i think after the war in his memoirs churchill started referring to tears in his eyes when he saw a roosevelt in failing health and the sort of thing, in order to rewrite the history which churchill's memoirs were exactly that. a rewriting of the history of

the war. >> seemed as if another source was churchill's belief that roosevelt was in in over his head with stalin and other prominent figure in the book when he comes across a diplomat i would expect. >> roosevelt told his aides that if only he could sit down alone with uncle joe, as churchill called him everythineverythin g would be settled then he went behind churchill's back to the iran conference and did just that. to the mortification of both the american and the english aids to come. and roosevelt and his own people said this. he liked to laugh at other peoples people's expense and he did that to churchill a lot. i interviewed churchill's daughter lady soames who said my father was very hurt by that but he was never unmanned by it. but churchill thought this friend of his owed him more than

that. churchill's aides, his generals and admirals thought what is roosevelt doing? we the english fought for two years alone before a america dribbled onto the scene and the english did and roosevelt and the american press spun the whole story. the invasion of north africa in 1942, there was no mention of the british even being involved in the american press at first. so it was a very interesting relationship between the three of them, stalin churchill and roosevelt. see one of the unsung heroes in the book is one of churchill's many aides, the direst who was also a flamboyant man himself and it seems as if he really got fly on the wall events and his work quite a bit. >> he shouldn't have kept a diary and he knew it. he could have been imprisoned for quite a long time but that

diary opens the window on churchill in private life during the war and everyone uses it. it's just absolutely marvelous because colville was with the prime minister at chamberlain's funeral if you will at dinner many many nights. on his foreign journeys so colville, colville's diaries are more accurate in the sense that churchill's remembrances. if colville wasn't there we only had churchill's work to take for everything and his word at times was self-serving. >> and another unsung hero from what i could tell is molly patrick downes who i had not paid attention to until i read this book. she was a novelist who became the british sort of letter writer to america about what was

happening from the blitz all the way through the end of the war in her work was published in "the new yorker." it really stands up well in history. >> i found her -- bought it on amazon and sure enough bill had maybe hundreds of extracts from her war notes. i realized what he was doing and i did it too. she was his course if you will, ringing into the book the day-to-day life of londoners, the rationing and they have way they queued up she said her little sugar cubes as if it was momma from heaven because they couldn't get made, they couldn't get chickens, they couldn't get eggs at one point they couldn't get whiskey and ear and milk. her observations she is saying

things that churchill saw but didn't write about it and didn't talk about it in cabinet meetings. he was very sad about the lines of people looking for horse meat, which was not rationed in europe then. apparently it still isn't. so i used her a lot because i knew bill manchester was going to and that was really on his part. it's funny there have been a couple of picky reviews out there. what is with this molly patrick downes? she is everywhere. yes, she is our eyes and ears into the east end of london 70 years ago when you won't get it from the times of london then the order from a cabinet meeting memo. now there were other people over there doing that and william l.

scheier had come back from germany but molly served as again a voice to bring us away from the cabinet meetings and action on the eastern front and back to london and londoners which is really london and londoners are two of the big characters in the book for the first 500 pages. >> you know another relationship is between churchill and alec brooke who is field marshal and it's this same position as george marshall who was there for a very important orchestrated work. these two could not be more different. it's amazing their relationship lasted. >> churchill never fired any of his military chiefs and as minister of defense he could have on all of them threatened to quit all the time and none of them ever did. burke's diaries are just a tear. they were a riot.

the guy was literally pulling his hair out over churchill and the guy would write my god i don't know where we would go without him but i don't know where we are going with him. i checked admiral cunningham's memoirs and the mirror of rooks exactly so i used burke. i didn't want to seem as though i was piling on churchill. berkin cunningham and the top brass all pretty much felt the same way. winston is a loose canon and churchill wanted to invade normandy and sardinia potter java and north africa and france too all at the same time. roosevelt and marshall wanted only to go to the shores of france and that is another place where churchill got kind of a bum rap in the states. he didn't oppose the second

front out of belligerents or stubbornness. he opposed a premature second front on the shores of france and he was right and then everyone realized he was right. if marshall had had his way they would have gone to france in the summer of 1942 and that would have been the end of the american involvement in the european war. they would have been thrown off. so these diary entries of brooke and montgomery, cunningham, harry hopkins, they all give a window onto churchill and the main characters and it was my job and bill manchester again not to cherry-pick. people have said this is a very mixed review of churchill. well he was a very mick's demand. >> one thing that does come across so and you just alluded to it is how he kept up the fight and that seems like his biggest contribution. it didn't matter that he was a

test with the mediterranean but he wanted to fight and was always looking for a way to punch the enemy right then, right now. >> he wasn't i think in not losing the war during those long months of 1940 and 1941, almost two years and not losing the war, he and england won the war and gave us the time needed to come in. during that time he wanted to hit anyplace he could anyway he could buy air, mussolini, by submarine. and those two years i made a point in the book from an american standpoint from mine anyway 1940 in my memory in my collective memory began on december 7, 1941. what happened to the rest of the year? well in england it was a horrible year. it was worse in 1940 and i wanted that to come through.

churchill january, march, april, june and september of 1941 was still fighting alone london franklin roosevelt in his september 11 address said challenge the germans. shoot at american ships in the atlantic and at one point he said if you see a rattlesnake don't stop and think. you crush it. and he had thrown down a challenge to hitler. early in september the germans tried to torpedo the u.s. destroyer. a month later they did hit another u.s. destroyer and at the end of october they sunk the rubin james with 115 men going down with the ship so they are our three attacks on u.s. shipping and at that point churchill realizes this country and america is america's never going to war unless they do so on their terms and their good time and something far greater than the loss of a destroyer.

it takes place. he thought on the morning after the rubin james went down churchill thought he would have a deck gration for the war by the u.s. that afternoon. he didn't. >> he we know how this ends in how the war ends but i think one thing that amazes americans that is vividly told in the book is how the war ended. churchill got kicked out and he was no longer in office within months of signing declaring victory. churchill won by the way his office with 90% victory margin but because of the english system his system has party lost and therefore labor took over as prime minister. it's amazing to me he was out of office as soon as he won. >> that's another story that i grew up with anyway. the ungrateful english throughout winston the savior. he wanted to finish the job but the european war was over and

they scheduled elections and they have them and inexplicably my father, he is out of office. if you look at the campaign churchill was an old liberal. in 1912 p., with the old welshman who's name i'm forgetting, he began social insurance and unemployment compensation. this is 20 years before the new deal. churchill was an old edwardian liberal but during the war he kept all of that under wraps. he didn't want as he told his aides to offer shangri-la or utopia to the english people. it was going to be tough after the war to win the war. during the campaign he let loose and they think this was a dealbreaker for the english people, he compared the labour

party socialist policies and they were socialist doctrinaire. he said in order to implement them labors going to be something like the gestapo was his word. the wrong thing to say to these millions of men who are coming home after four and a half, five years of war. they were fighting the gestapo philosophy all those years and to say these good and decent people would turn into not cease. i think that is what caused churchill the election that year. >> once he lost power one of his first stops was full missouri where he gave a very famous speech and coined the phrase iron curtain. a surprise for me in the book was how badly that speech went over with his american counterparts. churchill out of power stirring the pot belligerently against russia and that was very an welcome from what i recall. >> the russians throughout the war in england the u.s. were heroes -- heroes.

"time" magazine, "life" magazine, forget the pogroms and the mass murders and the ukrainian famine. all of that was not mentioned. these brave russians were running the war and they did actually. the russian army was 10 million casualties defeated hitler. so, in 1946 most americans including harry truman thought, most thought the russians were still heroes in many thought we just can't do this to our former ally. it's not gentlemanly. well before the ink was dry in may of 1945 when the germans surrendered churchill was planning his next war code-named operation unthinkable to fight the russians. brooke again is pulling his hair out. this is may 13 or 14th and winston wants to go to war again against russia. that was a bit premature and he bided his time and by the time he made the missouri speech of

people were beginning to see just what stalin was doing and all the capitals of eastern europe were behind that iron curtain. and i think a year and half later truman came out with the truman doctrine, took over british involvement in the eastern mediterranean and the rest is history as you say. >> one part of the book is how churchill recognize the difference between anatomic bomb which he thought of as a tactical weapon and a hydrogen bomb which he thought it best -- >> that moved me a lot and i remember thinking this is where the book ends, with churchill leaving office in 1955. there is a 20 page addendum if you will for the final years of his life. very sad and very sick but his last speech in the house of parliament and the house of commons is in march of 1955. it was another warning that the

h-bomb was a factor, infinitely more dangerous than anatomic bomb which 10 years earlier he and roosevelt saw it as a strategic weapon, the atomic realm and they used it and it worked. eisenhower in the mid-50's saw the h-bomb the same way as a tactical, battlefield variety strategic weapon. churchill again was ahead of his time and he came up with the concept of mutually assured destruction and said the only value in these things is to build enough of them to ensure that nobody could ever use them. and he gave a beautiful speech in march of 1955. he said i sometimes wonder if god is wary of mankind and the little children who are playing might not be there in a generation. and that was the last time he spoke in the house.

i think that is his, for me that is his greatest legacy. he saved western civilization twice if you will once against hitler and once that this concept of we need h-bombs for the sake of never having to use them. contradictory but it's why we are here today. >> that is the last words in the book to remember churchill. are there other reasons? the big one is what you just said. >> if you value of schopenhauer and plato and shakespeare and freud and the whole legacy of the classical western tradition i think he saved it and if you go down that list, where would freud be if hitler could get his hands on him or fixed and stained. it's just so obvious that these not cease were just a mind

bogglingly insane/thugs/evil and for two years one man and one country this little island was fighting them alone and stalin was in bed with him. he had taken his -- so that was the first war. and then the legacy with the atomic bomb and churchill's goal after the war in his second premiership was to sit down at the table. he coined the word summit meeting, to sit down at the summit with the russian leaders and as men and human beings and agree that the atomic bomb, the h-bomb is simply could never be considered a weapon. something had to be done and only a person with that i think background in the classics of ethics and only someone with

that frame of mind would think that way. stalin certainly didn't. so yes, there is a plaque i saw 30 years ago in westminster abbey near the west doors. it's it's about four by 60 green italian marble and on that it simply says remember winston churchill and i remember thinking way back then, that's all you need to say. a thousand years from now. you don't have to put anything on the plaque about what he did, who he was. the myth will transcend the legend and a thousand years from now people will walk in there and none of them are going to ask who was winston churchill? >> thank you paul and i would certainly welcome questions if anyone would like to approach the microphones. that way we will get them recorded. i do have one, this is not what we were just talking about but i

think if churchill is being quite the drinker and you address it thoroughly i think. >> he had a miraculous metabolism. that is all i can say. [laughter] i did, i created a word document and i took all the diaries and sources i could find in any reference from eleanor roosevelt and the usual suspects and i called the word document booze. i realized his drinking was just off the charts. from morning to night. wine and champagne. he brags he had a bottle of champagne with every meal for seven years. a dozen cigars per day and brandy at night and occasionally he got a little sloppy and brooks certainly mentions that in his diaries. he attended the horrible meeting with the pm today who apparently had a good lunch. [laughter] >> and a good wreck -fest. >> isenhour walked in on him one

day and it was breakfast time and churchill was in bed with a bottle of white wine. churchill said i don't like powdered milk. [laughter] so he drank a lot but he wasn't a force yeltsin both in. it was something miraculous and i wonder if some reporter tried to do a story on that and thought while i will drink like churchill for a week or two and we'll see how it goes. not going to happen. >> yes, sir. [inaudible] to replicate mr. manchester style? >> no. in fact my editor and i chatted a lot. bill manchester came of age as you know in the mid-20th century is a writer and i'm thinking of stephen ambrose and cornelius ryan, william manchester and they saw black hats and white

hats. even samuel morse sent the navalist taurine of world war ii. he is rooting for them and then they swooped down on the. that generation saw heroes black hats, white hats and mr. manchester was one of them. and so we agreed that my goal was to write a conversational 21st century voice and is my editor said if you tell the story well paul no one is going to say this sounded a lot like manchester. that was the goal. i will say this is bill manchester is writing style. it was nifty. in his macarthur book for instance, there is a very terse manly voice. he's writing about general

macarthur in the churchill volumes. manchester's prose was first churchill. in a sense that is bill manchester putting himself in the book but it was a pretty nifty way to approach things. so that there is a reminder of churchillian frederick in the first two parts. i hope there is here but not as a device. just as a way of getting the story told. ..

>> he was so grateful. every night, he was so grateful that there were three or four australian divisions and new zealand divisions and canadian shipping and the canadian division came out of france. he knew what the dominions did for the empire actually until november of 1942 when he went to africa.

>> could you comment or do you have any comments about churchill's relationship with truman and eisenhower remap. >> he didn't spend much time with truman because churchill was voted out of office at that conference. he grew deeply to respect truman. not is because just because he spoke at westminster college, but because of the truman doctrine and the marshall plan after that and truman was seeing things the way that churchill had hoped that the new american president had seen things. then the empire was down on the totem pole.

eisenhower, i think the church hill had a modest lower opinion of everything, especially when eisenhower was in office and he was starting to talk about using nuclear weapons against the chinese from the north koreans and at one point he said that he reserved the right that if this happens, we would use the weapons and churchill begged him and eisenhower changed it to the right to consider the use of. so i think that, again, churchill didn't have that much -- truman was out of office before churchill went back into office. so he never really knew him in a professional sense. churchill did not go back into office until 1952. late 1951, perhaps. he left office in the mid-1955 year. so he was president for eight years and what churchill was on

the scene for about three. >> we are out of time. but paul will be in the book dining room. which is just adjacent from here. thank you, paul. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> we would like to hear from you. send us your feedback at twitter.com/booktv. >> talk about the importance of confidence being a united states senator, but being a woman and how important it is to foster that. >> we are encouraging them to be involved and step outside, thankfully. you know, i always say that i could never imagine that i would

have been running for the united states senate when i was in your position either. but we have open the possibilities of doing that now. because it is critical to have those examples. and our government institutions. it has been a part of her society and it is important to have this in our population. they bring a different experience and that is having it as part of this discussion. i encourage them to think about it in the future. and it seems to me, as much as i was talking about politics, including running for public office, we made changes in

policy. even today, there is a women's health initiative that to this day, it was one of the greatest titles ever. there were a lot of life-saving discoveries for women. and that is so important for cause-and-effect. having to bend in the process of participating in the political process and what came about from it. i think that with this example, in fact i was talking about it the other day. i just love the fact that we get young women who are just so active and there's no second thought about it. there's an active force because

the law of nature repeatedly goes forth so that women were treated equally. >> is so fascinating. you were really there in the formative period. but you had to witness as to the changes that occurred. women should really be read about this. they gave a speech about the declaration of conscience. he was a financier and political consultant.

you mentioned in the book and we were talking about hilary rodham clinton who was an old friend. the great hope of many women is the democratic party. whether or not you want her to run or supporter she is borrowing whatever is wrapping her up and then got the

excitement. >> down the road, we have a lot of speculation about that. if she chooses to do that, i think that this could be a way to embrace her candidacy. i think the woman president is something that this country is really waiting for. i really hope that this dispels

any notion that women cannot be prepared. by virtue of how she conducted this, it was basically eradicated as far as how a woman would handle it. >> there are many delightful answers that we are mentioning in the book. little nuggets for congress watchers like myself who enjoy. one of my favorites is how regularly senators get together. >> i thought it was so wonderful.

women look out for each other and positions to it here. it is truly bipartisan and the way the talk about it. obviously it is just a unique connection even if it is not near-term, there is a path to unity and production of future for the congress. especially in the future if some steps are taken in the meantime. there are recommendations for the annual budget process of

getting into a budget, bipartisan leadership is so interesting. we have to get out of our own partisan leadership. and they will not collect their own paychecks. and especially the regular order of activities resuming is so important. everything would have to go back from the leadership talk. which actually made me chuckle. we are a big believer of such things and we commissioned this end we have decided on redistricting. i think it is important for

americans to read this without these political systems. they don't know about how huge they are standing with every election cycle and how many of us shouldn't even get in the car in this case because it was already decided. we are open to all the right ideas. >> where did you get the establishment where do you get them to follow the leadership have to change.

>> any campaign finance reform, it has to be a level playing field on both sides it is part of the evenhandedness. so both sides have to do it. i mean, that is one less level of financing. in the house of representatives, i think they have one run for leadership. but it is so interesting. they are not only raising money for their own campaign, but they also have the way of this money with a leadership tax because it is expected.

they have to raise the money. >> it takes so much time. it reminded me when members of congress would be paid for speeches so the whole schedule would revolve around this. but ultimately they came to the conclusion that it had an impact of the people back here in town. >> that's right. this includes one less level of raising money. because that is a huge time-consuming efforts. >> you can watch this and other programs at