.. >> guest: in which older people end up getting treated by the american health care system.

in her father's instance, he wasn't treated all that well and ended up dying without much in the way of dignity at all. in her mother's case, she had a more clear cut choice. and so i really feel it's both an indictment of the health care system, but it also offers a way forward that can be particularly enlightening and even, perhaps, a little bit maybe not inspiring, but certainly encouraging that people don't have to fall into despair. in addition, i'm also looking forward to a number of different biographies. it's really strong, interestingly enough, with respect to biographies of entertainers. so, for example, brian jay jones, he has a biography coming out on jim henson who is best known for being the founder and creator of the muppets. there's also henry bushkin, he's got a biography coming out on johnny carson, sam wassen,

stanley crouch's charlie parker biography which has been in the works for a very long time, that volume has -- is just about to come out. victoria allson who is an -- wilson who is an editor at knopf, she will be publishing her biography on barbara stand wick. and another biography that i had just finished that will be out in a few weeks' time is a biography on duke elington called "duke." it runs the gamut from musicians to entertainers, to choreographers to people who made their living being in the spotlight. >> host: you mentioned katy butler's "knocking on heaven's door," she is part of our coverage the weekend of october 12th and 13 in nashville. you can see her talk about her book live on booktv that

weekend. save rah weinman, dick cheney has a book coming out this fall, and it's not political. >> guest: no, it's not political, but it is certainly very personal to him. it's called "heart: an american medical odyssey," and he's written it with his cardiologist. so as i think the american people should be well aware of, dick cheney has had a a history of serious heart problems. he's had several heart attacks, he's had several brushes with death, and so what this book talks about are his own experiences as well as the changes in treatment of heart disease over the past four decades. >> host: and he wrote it with his doctor, jonathan reiner. >> guest: yes, that's right. >> host: and will he be -- do you know, will he be going on tour in. >> guest: that's a very good question. whether he does a national tour, i think, remains to be seen, but it would not surprise me in the slightest if he does appearances in the washington, d.c. area. >> host: well, on the other side of the spectrum is a book coming

out by bill ayers, public enemy: memoirs of an american dissident. >> guest: yes, that's right. it's a follow-up to his 2009 memoir, and it recounts his life after emerging from hiding after -- going about his life after he had been involved with the weather underground. and he became a college professor. and, of course, it became a note of controversy during president obama's 2008 campaign, because he was seen to be linked with him even though those links were not necessarily strong enough to warrant further scrutiny. and with respect to ayers, he's an interesting figure because, yes, he was involved with this underground fringe group, but he has certainly managed to make something entirely different of his life. and so it'll be interesting to read how this book is both different from "fugitive days" and also how it jumps off from

that earlier book. >> host: and the former mayor of new york city, david den kins. >> guest: yes, that's right. i think that just published today, in fact. so the former mayor is 85 years old, and in his book, "a mayor's life," he talks about what it was like to be mayor at a very pivot bal time -- pivotal time in new york's history. and, of course, it comes out just as new york city is at a very pivotal time, as this city is about to elect its first new mayor in 12 years. and it will be interesting to see who will end up governing the city and what lessons that perp may or may not learn from what the mayor had to go through then. >> host: does that book have legs outside new york city? >> guest: i think it remains to be seen. certainly, i think anyone who's interested in political life and political office could take away a lot of good knowledge from reading this book. >> host: well, david finkel won the pulitzer for his last book,

and he has a new one. he's a washington post reporter and editor as well, "thank you for your service," is his newest book. >> guest: yes, that's right. and it's the follow-up to his i 2010 book, "the good soldiers," where he had 'em -- embed with the the 216 infantry regime in iraq. he follows up with the members of the battalion what happened after they deployed and when they came home. so in light of the fact that "the good soldiers" did well critically and commercially, no doubt that his publisher and readers will have very high expectations for finkel's book, and certainly it will be interesting to see how the people that he covered, the soldiers that he covered, how they've gone on with their lives in the wake of the iraq war. >> host: i also wanted to ask you, how did eric schloesser go from "fast food nation" to nuclear weapons? >> guest: well, he did have a

book in between there, but certainly it seems like a great leap. it certainly seems to me that in this instance, command and control was a subject he was deeply interested and in, and frankly, wanted to know more about. what apparently turns out is that the united states is a lot closer to nuclear problems than we ever really know. so, for example, he reports on nuclear arsenals with a mishap that happened in damascus, arkansas, in 1980 and shows us how close we really got to disaster. >> host: sarah weinman, who is eric prince? >> guest: erik prince was the former ceo and chairman of blackwater. he found it in 997,, 1997, and they were a private contracting firm that became very, very instrumental post-9/11 in the war on terror, going into iraq and afghanistan. blackwater no longer exists.

however, private contractors certainly do, and blackwater itself changed its name to xe. and so even though blackwater may not be around anymore, certainly, those companies that have come up in the wake have learned a lot about what blackwater did, what they shouldn't have done and may or may not be applying those lessons properly and according to proper conventions. so certainly prince will have a lot to say about sounding this private -- founding this private military contracting firm. but will he be contrite about anything? will he only talk about what he was supposed to be talking about? it remains to be seen. but certainly from a knews worthiness stand point, this book will generate a lot of interest. >> host: and that book publishes november 19th, and it's entitled "civilian warriors."

sarah weinman, a book that's a getting a bit of buzz and just published today as well deborah spar's "wonder women." the president of barnard college has come out with a new book, and it's really kind of a biography, isn't it? >> guest: yes, i believe that's the case. >> host: are you familiar with that one? >> guest: i'm not as familiar as i would like to be, i'm afraid. but certainly, if it's the president of barnard college, no doubt she'll have plenty of interest things to say. >> host: a couple of science, well known scientists have books coming out this pall. richard dawkins and stephen hawking. >> guest: yes. so in hawking's case it's called "my brief history," and it was just published. and it reflects on his amazing rise to fame after his book "a brief history of time" was published a little more than 20 years ago. and, certainly, we look at

hawking now, and it's hard not to see celebrity more than we see scientist. in the case of richard dawkins, which his memoir -- "an appetite for wonder: the making of a scientist" -- it will publish on the 24th, and already it's generating a kind of controversy that perhaps his publisher may not want. he seems to be reflecting on his childhood in a manner that many people may find extremely politically incorrect. butting that this is dawkins, he's hardly backing down from his comments, and i think he is doing what happens to be the title of another hot book coming out this fall, "doubling down." >> host: and what do you mean he's being politically incorrect about his childhood? >> guest: well, he issued some comments in a recent interview and also backed this up with additional tweets, because he's very active and popular on twitter which i will try to be

as politic as possible, but he tried to make a distinction between certain types of abuse and what he termed, quote, mild pedophilia, unquote, which is a term that is not necessarily the right one to use in contemporary society. >> host: and that's richard dawkins and steven hawking. another book we wanted to ask you about was alan greenspan, former chair of the fed, another book coming out. >> guest: yes, that's right. >> host: what's he writing about this time? >> guest: his book is about risk human nature and the future of forecasting. so in this case greenspan -- who, as you said, is the former chair of the federal reserve -- he examines the history of the fed and the future of economic forecasting. and i think greenspan's book comes at a very interesting time, because at this point president obama is in the midst of picking a new chair of the federal reserve, replacing ben bernanke who had replaced

greenspan. and the news had just broken that one of the prime candidates and what many believe president obama's preferred candidate was, larry summers who had been the former president of harvard, and he had also served in the cabinet, he took his name out of the running. and so it remains to be seen who will replace him. there's one key front runner, that's janet yellen, but anyone who's in the running for the ped can probably -- for the fed can probably take some inspiration, learn some lessons by what alan greenspan will be writing about. >> host: and finally, i want to finish up with education books. and diane ravage has a new book out, "reign of error: the hopes of the privatization movement and the danger to america's public school." >> guest: yes, so diane ravage has published several books on the subject, but this one, i think, comes at a particularly interesting time because she had been a former assistant secretary of education, she had been, at first, an advocate of

president bush's no child left behind program x then over time she realized that, in her view, this was not a good program. and so in this book i believe she will be explaining why no child left behind didn't work and why it's very dangerous for prick schools to be underfunded and why there's this greater move towards privatization. and so she reiterates her support for the public school system in this book. >> host: and finally, sarah weinman, i know we're talking about the fall of 2013, but i want to ask you about two 2014 titles. robert gates, the former defense secretary, and hillary clinton. >> guest: so the robert gates book was just only recently announced, and it will be out in january, and it's called "duties: memoirs of the secretary of war." and this will, of course, generate interest because gates was a cabinet member in both president bush's terms as well as president obama's terms. so he'll be looking at things

from a bipartisan angle. and certainly, he's had a very long and involved political career. in the case of hillary rodham clinton, we don't know the title yet. we know that her publisher will once again be simon & schuster which published her book, "living history," so many years ago. and it will be published on the first of june. and i think it's fair to say whatever she'll be writing about will be of great interest and will probably sell extremely well and will garner a whole lot of attention. but as to whether it will solve a particular problem that is on many people's minds which is will she run in 2016, i think it remains to be seen. >> host: and we've been talking with sarah weinman here on booktv, news editor of publishers marketplace. this has been a preview of some of the fall 2013 books coming in. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here online. type the author or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click

"search." you can also share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking "share" on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> welcome to fredericksburg on booktv. with the help of our cox communications cable partners, for the next half hour we'll explore the history and literary scene of this virginia state located about 45 miles south of the nation's capital. coming up, we'll explore how media coverage has affected elections and meet local authors who help us understand the roots of the area. >> james monroe was born in virginia in 1758, lived in fredericksburg for about three years during the 1780s. >> we begin our special look at fredericksburg as we learn about civil rights leader james farmer who spent a number of years in

the community as a professor at the university of mary washington. >> i wept during some of the speeches. i wept especially during the speech of a rabbi and walter luther of the united auto workers and particularly during the now-famous speech of martin luther king jr. in the finest hour certainly in my memory, a time when people became larger than themselves and maybe, to coin a phrase, larger than life because hundreds of thousands -- no doubt millions -- white and black found something to believe in that was outside of themselves, bigger than they. >> james farmer taught at mary washington college from 1985 until just before he passed away in the summer of 1999. he was an incredible teacher, an incredible lecturer, and i would argue that his time in the

classroom was one of the most significant moments in american public education where a great leader, a leader in the american civil rights movement, had the opportunity for more than a decade to interact with students on a regular basis and to regale them with the stories of the front lines of the civil rights movement. >> the march itself, many people wonder how it started, and hay assume that maybe dr. king one day said come on, y'all, let's march. that everybody got together and marched. no, not so. roy wilkens or whitney young or maybe farmer -- >> he brought the strategies of peaceful, nonviolent resistance to the movement in the early 1940s. he was the founder and organizer of the congress of racial equality and, of course, he was the inspiration for the 1961

freedom rides. he thought that any of the civil rights organizations that existed in the 1940s and 1950s were ill prepared percent task because they focused on one particular thing. so the fellowship of reconciliation was a pacifist organization. the naacp used legal tactics. the urban league sought to use economic tactics. and he thought that, instead, a grassroots organization that would bring together folks of different faiths, of different backgrounds and of different political beliefs, they could spring up spontaneously at various moments in various places to lend effort to the larger, broader movement was an absolutely critical organization and, of course, the history of the civil rights movement demonstrates that core and its grass roots nature and the birth that it gave to groups throughout the country was absolutely essential to the success of the movement. james farmer's life was always

being present at the creation but never being there for the big moment. and so he retells in his autobiography the story of the march on washington. of course, it was a big event. all of the civil rights groups were coming together. it was going to be a significant and historical moment in the nation's history, but he wasn't there. he was scheduled to be on the dais that day as one of the dozen or so speakers selected to give remarks, but instead he was in louisiana in jail. >> i watched the march on washington on television, however. local citizens of this town in louisiana brought me a television set, and the jailers allowed them to bring it up to my cell. i watched it, and i was impressed. i wept during some of the speeches. i wept especially during the speech of a rabbi and walter

luther of the united autoworkers and particularly during the now-famous speech of martin luther king jr. i have a dream. and i wished, of course, that i'd been will. >> as one of the nation's distinguished civil rights leaders, he was given the opportunity to leave and could have attended the march but declined because he would have left behind those that were marching with him x he chose not to do that. one of the stories that he always enjoyed telling students at mary washington was his days in the 1960s debating malcolm x. of course, malcolm x was the fiercest debater on the american political scene in the 1960s. and while most of the civil rights movement leaders tended to stay away from malcolm and urged james farmer not to debate him, he said absolutely not. instead, he chose on numerous occasions to engage malcolm x in

verbal disputation, in arguments. >> after we'd had five or six debates, malcolm suggested that we stopped debating each other. i agreed with him. i met him on 125th street. he invited me to have coffee with him in their restaurant. and he said, brother james, i think we ought to stop debating each other, because we're not doing anything but conducting a service. two black guys belting each other's brains out for the amusement of largely white audiences. i know what you're going to say, and you know what i'm going to say. i'm not going to convince you, and you're not going to convince me. i could make your speech for you and you could make my speech for me. in fact, you did once. >> farmer's freedom rides were an explosive, troubling and threatening episode for the kennedys in the early 1960s.

a new president trying to establish his presidency, of course, dealing with the soviet threat, and he had a renegade civil rights leader that was getting on buses and going to the deep south and causing a ruckus and turmoil. to the extent tata -- extent that he was a leader of the freedom rides, he forced the kennedys to move aggressively to, ultimately, bring in the national guard and offer protection for the freedom riders. which was something that the kennedys didn't want to have to deal with. of course, when the freedom rides made national news, in fact, international news with the greyhound bus which the image is seared in history books across the nation, when that happened and it became evident that there was a serious race problem in america and one that the kennedys would have to deal with, it changed the national conversation.

now, we'll never know the degree to which john kennedy would have pushed for some of the momentous civil rights legislation that occurred immediately after his death, his assassination. but, certainly, we could say that james farmer was a thorn in the side of the kennedy brothers and one that forced the kennedy administration to deal with the race problem in america perhaps sooner than they would have liked. one of the stories that farmer tells about his impact on the american presidency was that he sat with lyndon johnson during the momentous civil rights legislation of the mid 1960s and made the case for and argued for what we know as affirmative action today. and some historians have referred to him as the father of affirmative action. in 1998, president william jefferson clinton presented james farmer with the presidential medal of freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. and in doing so, clinton said,

frankly, i don't think that he's gotten the credit or the recognition that he deserves. and i think that that's probably a fitting legacy. farmer was, in ways, the unsung hero of the civil rights movement; always there, present at the creation but always missing the big moment to be on the grand stage. but one of the things that president clipton did in awarding him that medal was to recognize a lifetime of achievement which was a significant contribution to the american story. those that become familiar with james farmer's story, i would hope that they learn and take away the idea that one person who dedicates themselves to a cause -- a cause greater than themselves -- is able to make a difference. that's certainly what james farmer did. that's what his life story was about. and that's the beautiful gift that he's bequeathed to us here at mary washington and to students across the country.

>> booktv recently visited fredericksburg, virginia, to bring you some of the area's rich literary and historical culture. next, a look at media coverage of presidential elections over the years. >> in the book "the nightly news nightmare," which i wrote with bach lichter who teaches -- bob lichter who teaches as george mason, we look at elections going back to 1998. so we see pretty much a downward trajectory in terms of the seriousness of coverage. not only do we see a decline in terms of the coverage of substance versus the horse race, which is our, probably our biggest concern and perhaps the most important for the viable political conversation after the election, that's a very, very important part of what's going on here. in 1988 television, network television especially, still rules the political conversation. i mean, there were newspapers

out will and, certainly, elite, political elites and other people who were paying a lot of attention to politics would be looking at the newspapers, but most people in america by the 980s were -- 1980s were getting their news in the same way they did in the '60s and '70s, primarily those half hour evening newscasts that still exist that abc, cbs and nbc had. there was no fox news. there was a cnn and a c-span, but the coverage that most people were paying attention to were these three networks. there was no internet to speak of,-a little government national security internet, but ordinary people were not online in this era. cable was still out there, but the audience for cnn was a fraction of what you were seeing with the big three networks. as we look at the media today, it's pretty are lowly regarded by the american public. the public when they're asked after the election to give grades to the media, the grades routinely are lower than most

college students would want to receive. these are cs usually in cases, sometimes each c-s for the television and the other media outlets that are in the campaign. so you have a situation where you're really looking at a very difficult environment for the media. the audience is also shrinking, particularly for television and newspapers. the traditional media of a generation ago. the audience is smaller, the attention is reduced, revenues are falling, and this creates a very difficult problem. it's like fast food journalism, i think, is a way to think about it. because what you have going on here is complicated matters, you know? when you think about, okay, well, let's say you want to fix america's health care situation or the deficit, what is the ten-second sound bite? how do you explain in 30 seconds even about how you want to fix these problems? these are complicated issues with a lot of moving part, and so it is very hard for television which is cop instantly dealing with --

constantly deal with a short attention span be public. those segments are 90 seconds, maybe two minutes for a really long one, and so that's not a lot of time to talk about much more than he said, she said or the candidate visited a flag factory, or there's this video about the 47%. these are the kinds of things that television especially can really hone in on because the story is simple, the narrative is clear, and people feel in ways, you know, they're not programmed, of course, because one of the things that happens is if you eat a lot of fast food, you tend to like fast food. so if you're used to a lot of the junk food journalism television provides, you're going to look for more of that. so television has created, in some way, a big problem for themselves because when people want to know what these candidates will do if they're elected, how are you going to get the economy moving again, what are you going to do about those tens of millions of people who are working but don't have health insurance, what are you going to do for them. and those conversations are

really complicated. i mean, it's a lot more fun maybe to talk about bill clinton and his personal life than it is to talk about bill clinton's plan for fixing health care. it's a lot more interesting to talk about barack obama and the questions of where he's going to go for his summer vacation or these issues of, you know, what's going on with the nurse lady and how much it -- with the first lady and how much it costs to travel when the white house goes around the country, these kinds of things are very simple and easy to grasp rather than, okay, here's where we are with austerity and infrastructure spending, where we are with respect to the fed, these other issues. i think at its best the media can really inform the public and create an environment in which there can be an effective conversation. ideally, the candidates themselves would also provide a lot of substance this what they have to say -- in what they have to say. but candidates have to get on the media. they want the free media. even though they may have very detailed plans like romney and

obama did or mccain and obama four years earlier, the conversation isn't really about those plans. the conversation is about the trip to europe and whether obama as a candidate for president should have gone to berlin and to paris. john mccain spent his day when obama was in germany, spent his day having lunch at a german-american restaurant in ohio, and he stood outside the restaurant talking about why, you know, campaigns should be conducted in the united states. which, you know, is lovely from the point of view of news. you package it, you send it off, there's your 60 seconds, you're done for the day, but from the point of view about a conversation about where the country is going particularly when you think about 2008 and all the problems we had at that environment, it's really not satisfactory. and it creates, i think, a real problem. remember we, the public, own these airwaves. the networks have a public duty to inform us. that's part of the deal that allows them, basically, a license to print money.

because, obviously, the limited broadcast spectrum when you talk about cbs or nbc or abc, you know, there's -- in washington, for example, it's channel 4, it's channel 7, it's channel 9, and there are a lot of people who would love to be washington's channel 4, channel 7 or channel 9, but somebody else already has that, and they can make money with that frequency. and be in exchange for the public airwaves being licensed to an individual broadcaster is this public trust, this public duty to inform. and some places do a better job than others. but what we've seen over the last several election cycles going back more than 20 years is this downward spiral. and we think it's a really important thing to draw public's attention to and to draw the media attention to. i mean, i've talked to reporters about these findings, and one of the things they off say is they're under so much pressure from their editors, there's only so much time, they have to limit it, they have to keep it simple. they have to assume maybe the

worst about the american public, about how sophisticated they are and interested they are. and as a result, the coverage moves in this triy'all direction. now -- trivial direction. now, for really motivated citizens, you can use the internet, of course, and get all the information that's out there and it's infinite, practically, in terms of what you can find about a given subject. but one of problems people are going to have when they try to go down that road is they're not editors. they don't know necessarily without spending a lot of time thinking about the quality of the source of web page that they're looking at, they don't necessarily know who actually generated this content that they're looking at. and so if you just simply rely on what pops up on a google search for deficit, you may not get a really comprehensive and effective understanding of the financial problems that this country faces. and, you know, this is why the media in campaigns are so important, because if you don't have this kind of facility orerring, if you don't have this kind of -- filtering, this kind

of judgment by professionals that gives you what you need to know, it's a lot more work to figure out on your own, and most people are not going to stick with it. so this is one of reasons why we're not having a national conversation. we're having all these little conversations in these different groups, the people who listen to the talk radio, the people who listen to the drudge report online, i mean, they have very different ideas about what's going on in this country, and they don't even have an agreement on what the problem is and how they would define it. so you have a situation where it's very difficult in this media environment for politicians to govern. and part of the reason for that, i think, is that the media do not do a better job of laying out the challenges and the problems that this country faces. print does a much better job than television, but print still has to compete with television sp. so there's even a race to the bottom when you lack at the -- look at the way that "the new york times" or the washington post would have covered a campaign back in the days of michael dukakis and

george h.w. bush and the way they're covered in the internet age. the challenge for today's politics is more than just winning the news cycle. i mean, in ways it was much easier to be a politician 30 years ago or 25 year ago. all you really had to do was focus on keeping the new york times and the washington and cnn and the networks happy. if you could do that, they were golden. you gave them information, they ran the stories, hopefully, in the way that you wanted to frame be them, and all's right with the world. nowadays you can't win the news cycle and call it a day. you have to win the twitter cycle which is instantaneous, you have to win facebook cycle which is also instantaneous. and so you have a situation where you have to work so much harder as a campaign to try to control the conversation not just on network television -- which is still important for the older voters -- but also try the bring those younger voters to your side n. many ways one of

the bigger problems that we're now seeing in elections is and the coverage, because it has to be so instantaneous, the reporters are making a lot of mistakes. i used to be a journalist before i became an academic, and i know how hard it is to collect the information and be fair and put everything into the proper context and balance. i used to do it for a living. but i did it before the twitter age. i didn't have to put something out that moment. i had time to think about it. i had time to make that extra call. i had time to confirm something. and what you're seeing now is this rush to be first. the rush not just in twitter and not just on facebook, but even on the web pages of news organizations or leak breaking live with all those hours to fill on the breaking news channel of cnn or fox news or whatever you -- wherever you might go for that. it creates a great temptation to be fast rather than accurate because these are things that are in conflict. to get it right takes time.

but you don't have time in today's media. things are said, and then they're unsaid. and the difficulties are really hard because the old mark twain adage, you know, that a lie goes all the way around the world before truth gets its boots on is really, i think, a warning for us all in the twitter/facebook age. i think that the information out there so overwhelming that we have a lot to work with, but on the other hand, we also have a much greater responsibility in terms of figuring out what really is true and what's not. >> now, more from our recent trip to fredericksburg, virginia. booktv visited the area with the help of our local cable partner, cox communications. >> today at the james monroe museum in fredericksburg, virginia, talking about james monroe, the fifth president of the united states. upon row, like -- monroe, like

all men of his class, his era, were great readers. and they all had a great love of books. monroe did not have an extensive library like thomas jefferson or john adams had. he was never able to collect on that scale. but he did own and collect books. he bought books, people he knew gave them books that they wrote. jefferson gave him a copy of notes on virginia. will yam wilber forest gave him the books he was writing on anti-slavery, these sorts of things. and then he would buy books. he was interested -- most of his books were on, as one would expect, law, government, history, these sorts of things. in various language, not just english, but in french which was the diplomatic language. and those books in spanish be,

german. so it's really this sort of international library that he collected. but like his contemporary, he was also interested in writing books. was not very good at it, wuss not successful -- was not successful. he wrote -- in his retirement he started working on an autobiography that he never finished, and he started writing on this other political, analytical/political thing in which he wanted to explain why the united states was succeeding as a republic when republics in history had always failed. going back to classical greece and rome and sort of comparing those republics to the u.s. republic. and it just, he never finished it, it was not -- it's been, it has since been published, but it really wasn't a successful book. but what we have here is when

monroe returned from his diplomatic mission to france in the 1790s, right when he left, france broke relations with the united states. and monroe, being a jeffersonian , and being a diplomat under a federalist administration, the federalist administration blamed him for the break in relations. they said that he bungled the mission. which you hear quite a bit. this interpretation still gets some currency, although it's wrong. and monroe responded to this by publishing a book that argued that it was, that the policies of the washington and adams administration caused a break with france, it wasn't anything

he did. and he had obviously put off the break for the four years that he was in paris. so he wrote this like a 65-page essay explaining what went on, and then he published another 200 pages of documents defending what he had done and trying to document and to show that it really wasn't his fault that this had happened, that it was administration policy. and the book received a fair amount of currency when it first came out, of course, because it was something that was still being debated, and it was current. and after a couple of years, it lost its currency because it was no longer really a public issue anymore. we began working on papers of james monroe in 1989. and the first step in doing a project like this is, of course, to know how many documents are

what they are. and there were some we knew about. there was a collection of monroe's papers at library of congress. there's another major collection at new york public library. this is a collection here at the monroe museum. there's various others around. we knew there would be a lot in the national archives, of course, because of his long employment with the national government. we knew because he had been governor, had been an office holder in virginia trillion dollar be papers in the state arkansas kentuckys as well. we printed up these little cards that we sent around to libraries around country, any place that would possibly have manuscript collections and ask do you have any monroe documents? do you have a lot, do you have a few, ?owm and we had a fairly good response to that. once we had that core, we then

began to research the documents and prepare them for publication. and there are a number of prompts like this. there's jefferson pape ors, madison papers, the abraham lyndon papers -- lincoln papers have been in the news a lot recently. so there's these sorts of projects going on. the big projects that started in the 1950s -- washington papers, jefferson papers, madison papers -- are publishing everything they can find; letters to/from. they're doing this comprehensive project to do these comprehensive editions of the papers. so the jefferson papers is trying to publish everything they can find relating to jefferson. these are multigenerational projects. jefferson papers started in 1950, and they'll go for another 25, 30 be years probably.

when we came along and started monroe papers, there was no one who was willing to undertake, who was going to pay for this sort of undertaking. so we're doing a more selected edition. we're going through monroe's papers, and we're pulling out the documents that we consider critical to telling monroe's story. and those are ones we're publishing. so we'll do approximately ten volumes which will be about 6,500-7,000 documents out of this 40,000. what we're really aiming at in the work we're doing on publishing monroe's papers is how does this one individual, the choices he makes, the decisions he makes, how does that influence the formation of the country?

>> jeff mcclerken to talk about his book, "take care of the living." the lock virginian office sat down with us in our recent visit to fredericksburg, virginia. he talks about the reintegration of confederate veterans to their families and to the united states following the civil war. >> really about two things. it's about the impact of the war on the 3400 men and their families from pennsylvania county in danville, virginia, and it's also about the ways that those confederate veteran families in the county and in virginia more broadly attempted to deal with the consequences of war. so what happens to those who lives, and what happens to those families of those 20%, one out of every five southern white men who are dead in 1865? one of the things that i talk

about quite a bit in the book is the concept of southern social welfare. welfare is typically aid that is given to those who are needy in society. for much of the 19th sent tally -- century, that kind of aid to the poor or aid to widows or aid to orphans didn't happen at state level. for most of the 19th century, that kind of assistance happened in local areas, right? family members would help each other out, churches would help each other out, local elites would help the needy out. i talk about each of those as options and opportunities for assistance in the context to have the post-civil war poord. the -- period. the problem is that there are so many people who need that assistance in the aftermath of the civil war that the old system simply breaks down. in this case, the state of virginia has to step in and help out and has to do more than it ever has to before, but it wants to do so in pretty limited ways.

it does so initially in the context of artificial limbs for soldiers who have lost an arm or a leg. there's a brief movement towards that during the civil war, but a sustained movement in the post-war period. it happens in virginia, it happens in of confederate states, and it happens in the north. be. ..

so they arrive in some cases heart wrenching letters to their state legislatures, to the governor, asking for assistance, asking for help, pointing out they made the sacrifices for the state and the sacrifices for the confederacy. even though the confederacy doesn't exist anymore there's still this sense that these men who have sacrificed, whose family members have sacrificed, deserve some kind of support. so there's a southern social welfare system. i talk about emerging, really emerges in response to the failure of the old traditional system of family and of the elites and other churches being able to provide enough support for everyone. and through the expansion of the mental institutions. and one of the things that i found and going into the admissions records and the

estate records of those who said there is about over the decade of the 1860s, about 12% of the admissions to western state hospital were there because of the war. what also became clear in studying a silence, these were the people who were the most violent, the people who have no one to care for them. these are the people who would wander off. and were a danger to themselves or to others. but they represented in many ways the tip of the iceberg of the psychological impact of war. it represents a very important piece of southern social welfare, that before there was such a thing as ptsd, there clearly are people suffering from things that look like ptsd. you've got to be careful about imposing modern definitions onto the past but i do think there's something substantially important going on there. there's a parallel between experiences of returning veterans from vietnam and iraq

and afghanistan, and the experiences of returning veterans in virginia. so here we are talking about the sesquicentennial, that civil war in iraq wasn't that long ago that we were paid to support the legacy of that. i think that to me, that amazed me. >> for more information on booktv's recent visit to fredericksburg, virginia, and the many other cities visited by our local content vehicles, go to c-span.org/localcontent. >> the chapter on capitalism i wrote because i was worried that people in business, first in business, personal, there are very few people in government ever been in business because it's hard. it easy for an academic to go into business. they can leave and come back to their world. it's easier for water to going to government and think about. it's it's very hard for a business person if they're a small businessperson it's their

business and they have to be there. if there in a larger corporation, then they get knocked off the ladder and they are out. and it's very hard to read and agree. has resulted people in this is who -- i'll admit it, confession is good for the soul my wife tells me, but if you are in government looking at business, you understand it intellectually, but it's one dimensional. you don't have any idea what delay does. if you're in government what government delay does to business be doing any idea what uncertainty does the business. you don't really feel the impact of the regulation. i send my taxes and every and i always had a letter, to whom it may concern, here are my taxes. i want you to know, i haven't the vaguest idea if they are accurate. [laughter]

i said, i'm -- i went to college. i've got average intelligence, and my wife went to college and she won't even read them because she she doesn't understand them. and i just want you to know that that's the case, and i'm paying money to an accountant and he helps me. i hope they're right. if you have a question, just give us a call. [laughter] but, but can you imagine this country with a lousy tax system like that? it's an excusable. how many people here understand that taxes? let's see. i don't see many hands going up. but i wrote the chapter because i felt that -- i was in business and i know that a businessman has come in a large company, they have shareholders, their customers and we have employees. the shareholders, customers and employees are all across the spectrum, political views and

ideas and party. and, therefore, business people are very reluctant to challenge the government, to criticize government. they don't want to divide their stockholders or their employees or their shareholders. they also worry about the irs. [laughter] well, if you don't understand your taxes you ought to worry. i agree. i mean, i know i don't know. and they also, if you're in the pharmaceutical business like i was, you've got the food and drug administration and how the securities and exchange commission and all these alphabet regulatory protestations. and to the extent someone criticizes the government or challenges and approach they're taking, they worry that the government could turn on the. that is in my view like this current irs thing is so critical.

because the american people don't want to feel that their government come into their government, could turn on them in a way that targets people. if you target one person you can target summon us. it doesn't matter if you're liberal, conservative, republican or democrat. i think that's so central. now, what i'd like to do is have sandy, or somebody, where are these people? the you have microphones? i think you do. there you are. and i would be happy to respond to questions, as i say, and even answer some. i'll do my best. and what you need to do i suppose is raise your hand and sandy were bringing mic. i always hate the first question. [laughter] and he pops up like a jack-in-the-box for the first

question scares me to death. death. >> hello? >> boy, those lights are bright. make it a good one. i'm going to embarrass you if you don't. >> here's what we'll do, mr. secretary, if i may speak someone will have to turn its mic on. you had the floor appear before, sandy, you know that. >> who has the first question? you've got, okay, anthony. is your mic on? here. spin well, mr. secretary, i get two quick questions -- >> no, no. i'm 81 in july. i do not, i do not need multi-park questions. [laughter] its 17 time that. it's 10:15 in washington were i flew in from yesterday. single part questions. [laughter] >> okay. spare but feel free to go ahead. [laughter] >> first question is, will use be no, no.

you only get one. [laughter] turn off his mic. [laughter] [applause] >> will you write a book for republicans that says that will not tax without doing a tax decrease? thou will not raise expenses without some sort of cut in the middle? on me, i remember when i watched you interview on the letterman show, you've suggested that there was a time in which are dead reach, i forget what was, like $100 billion or so like that, the world went crazy spent i was there. it was in the presidency of lbj. i was a congressman and it was the first federal budget in our history that hit $100 billion. and everyone just gassed at the thought. speak but now it doesn't -- >> now we have a trillion dollar deficit.

deficit. >> and it doesn't look like the republicans are helping us any, so will you write a book for that? >> well, let me say something about that. i think the republicans, you know, there are people all across the spectrum in both parties, but i would ask, i was speaking about my other book, known and unknown, at fort leavenworth, the military base, not a prison. [laughter] and they were 1490 majors from most our country but from around the world. it's a big school there. someone asked me what's the biggest problem that i worry about when i go to bed at night. and the answer was, american weakness. and why do i say that? i thin think the signal that's n sent out from this country is that basically we're modeling american economy on europe, and

it's a failed model. doesn't work. and there's no way you can have the deficits we have and have the debt we are incurring without sending out a signal to the world that this country is not going to be what it was in the past. there's no way you can do that. if you not going to act responsibly, people take that message and they see it. and then you turn around and when i went to washington, eisenhower was president to i came out of the navy and i served there during kennedy-johnson in the congress. we're spending 10% of gdp on defense. they were spending less than 4%. our allies in europe were spending less than 2%. and the stigma that goes out to the world now with sequestration is that we have got $493 billion out of the pentagon budget, and we're about to get another half a trillion.

which brings it close to $950 billion, out of a ten-year budget. the signal that sends to the world is that the united states is not going to be in a position to contribute to a more peaceful and stable world in the decade ahead. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> we are in princeton, new jersey. this is a garden that alan wilson originally designed. she brings the white house gardens back into this garden at prospect house. she says to the white house gardener, let's re-create the rose section of this garden at the white house. and, of course, this becomes the famous rose garden at the white house. she tragically doesn't live to see the rose garden completed, however. she's dying in the summer of

1914. she is wheeled out into the space outside in her wheelchair and she watches as the garden works, but she doesn't live to see the completion of this vision she had the roses blooming at the white house. >> me the first and second wife of president woodrow wilson tonight live at nine eastern on c-span and c-span3. also on c-span radio and c-span.org. >> up next on booktv, "after words" with guest host jenna greene, senior reporter for the "national law journal." this week, legal scholar mark tushnet and his latest book "in the balance: politics in the roberts court" pic in it, the harvard law professor explore the opening years of the roberts court. examining the more controversial decisions including upholding the affordable care act. this program is about one hour. >> host: thanks so much for being here. i really enjoyed your book "in the