leaned on nancy reagan's chest and he wept. several days later back in new jersey, monica crowley found him and said there is no one here. there is silence. my god. at the funeral someone had told one of his attorneys that richard nixon is not going to last a year or he died eight months after pat bid. one of the great moments that you may remember is that president clinton came and he said maybe day of judging president nixon on less than his whole life be ended. and of course you may remember that president clinton was a war protester and his wife was on the watergate committee. so for him to say that was extraordinary. from one watergate protester to

another. i would like to join clinton and saying that we no longer use richard nixon's marriage against him. people can disagree with his policy, they can disagree with his politicking and they can disagree with the way that he used or abused power in the white house. but leave his marriage alone. it was one of the great accomplishments of his life. and i think today we should celebrate the quality is within that marriage. the loyalties. the persistence. the sense of adventure and curiosity and high purpose. as well as the willingness to forgive each other and to move through dark periods. the nixons always said that when they have difficult times, rather than slightly moved apart for a while and then they came back together. so let's celebrate these qualities. finally i just want to say in closing that the nixon marriage,

strength and weaknesses, reinventing itself in crisis after crisis in jordan public life for half a century. and their story is central to our story and is emblematic of the american story. thank you very much. [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's website at william smith.com. next on booktv's recent trip to tennessee, william hull talks about a few of the famous people from chattanooga. ♪ ♪ >> there was a lot of new blood in town and a lot of those ordaining interest in history by reading about the people. connecting names to their story

and who they were rather than a list of names. it was a different approach and gave me chance to tell about the story of who they were. benjamin franklin story is a great and very interesting story. in 1898 he went to cuba in the spanish-american war. while he was there he encountered a bottled drink and i think the name of that was pina frio. it was a pineapple drink. and he was impressed with that. and so he talked to friends about that. and at this time coca-cola was kind of on the ascendancy in atlanta. john pemberton was a doctor in 1886 and he patented it and then candler bought it from him and it just started to grow, year by

year, all over atlanta. foundlings was a popular thing for a lot of people. especially the young folks. thomas and a friend of his started thinking that they might go to atlanta and see if they could meet him. they took the train to atlanta in 1899 and met with them and according to some of the things that they said, it looks like they ran a couple of times. their idea of him is that we would like to bottle your drink and get it sold around the country. chandler was a tough nut to crack. he was skeptical about the possibilities for really two reasons. he was worried about the quality of the product and bottling was still -- there were still problems with bottling keeping things fresh and bottles. of course, this is a carbonated drink. he was also worried about these

two men. i believe that he was in his 30s by then. he wasn't totally convinced that he had the ability to pull it off. and he didn't want to be a failure on the part of this company. at any rate, he gave thomas and whitehead exclusive rights to bottle and sell coca-cola in the u.s. and actually there were a couple of states and basically they got the entire united states to do it. and they signed the contract allegedly for a dollar, which mr. candler never collected. that is the legend. and evidently they were so pressed for time to get on the train on the right time. so they head back to chattanooga. this is in july. and they had to enlist another

gentleman to help them so they could buy the equipment and cables and the gear and all of that sort of stuff. so in three months they had set up a facility and were bottling it and distributing it and within a year they were just cooking. they determine what they would do if they would become parent bottlers and they would divide the united states into territories and this would be a franchise system. so as a parent bottlers he would sell a franchise to someone in ohio or wherever. people were knocking on his door to get it. and he would get some of those profits from operations. but the killer was that he and the other two had exclusive rights to get this are up from atlanta. they got the syrup and they sold it to the bottlers. and so that was pretty much a

story and it is a golden story of american entrepreneurship. the sun he was of jewish immigrants that were local. he went to work at 11 years old for newspaper. he worked at a drugstore and he also loves going back to the printer's desk. he was the guy that cleaned up around the shop and does the dirty work often as a kid. the one person described him as a human interrogation point. he had to learn how to do things and there was a chance to buy the chattanooga times. it was also a struggling newspaper and in 1878, july of 1878, he bought that paper and i

believe it cost them $800 and it was $1500 in debt that he was. he had two or 3% capital. just a little bit of money. and the story goes according to his granddaughter that he went to the bank asked her alone for $3300 to secure his interest in the paper the chattanooga times. and the baker said who have you got cosigned for it? and you are a minor. and he looked at the baker and sent you. [laughter] and the baker evidently went along with it and sign it. his dad had come down from knoxville to help him sign a final papers. so in 1878 he took it over is very social and he loved people and he was very energetic and always we really focused.

they took the paper over in 1878 and within two years he had gotten a subscription up and the debt was way down and he was able to pay it off by the 80s and owner. and he already had most of the interest and he made a huge success out of it. in the late '90s he got word from a friend in new york who said that this was newspaper that was having major financial difficulty, "the new york times." and this might be an opportunity for him to jump into new york and have control or interest in a major daily newspaper. and so he went to new york and met with a group of people that were trying to buy the newspaper to say that the newspaper evidently was printing 19,000 or 20,000 copies a day and only selling 9000 copies a day.

they were running against a lot of yellow journalism that would sell for a penny or two and from what i read they were really wanting to do this but they were really uncertain whether he was the man. he felt like he was a small-town fellow. going into the big time. and he met with the principles and they were interested in him. but he had had very little money. very little money to put up front. and essentially called upon his contacts. it's not what you know, it's who you know. including president grover cleveland to sign letters of recommendation of backing to see if he could borrow enough money to purchase an interest in the paper, a controlling interest. that is what he wanted.

he wanted ownership and he wanted control. and he did it. and in a few years you begin to bring down the debt and show his organizational superiority. it was something that he was very gifted with. it didn't take too many are certain to turn "the new york times" around and make it a very respected newspaper. as well as a very profitable one. and i mean, he did things like he started a pension fund for his employees and he was very geared towards his employees well and trying to do good and he of it are validated the quantity what was being presented to the public. he had a public mission. ♪ ♪ single go.

♪ ♪ >> she was born in chattanooga and her older brother had joined the minstrel show. she volunteered and she tried out for the show and she was tempted as a dancer and not as a singer. and begin traveling with the show. a blues singer who is a bit older than her and perceives her as a woman singer of the blues was on the show and she gradually became really well known and they eventually superseded her in terms of popularity and then she traveled with the show and she did a lot of shows in atlanta at the

theater. it was kind of an early version where she played with a lot of courthouses and this is part of the records and just garnered a great, great following. she had a big following and she has that bigger husky style of singing. as was typical of the teens and 20s. she never cut a record until she was 30 years old. so her young and wild golden voice is never really captured on the record. but as soon as she released her first record, they were wildly popular. the tens of thousands is what they were selling them, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands. and by this time she had moved from atlanta to philadelphia. she died on a road trip when she

was in mississippi. she died essentially because she could not get medical help. her funeral was held in philadelphia and was attended by 10 to 20,000 people. and that is how wildly popular she was in that indicated her great popularity. one thing that interests me is that everybody knows the name betsy smith. i would venture that maybe 95% of the people in chattanooga probably couldn't name one or two of her songs. i don't think many people have probably ever heard it. they have probably heard a little clip on. so for what that is worth, i thought that was kind of interesting. ♪ ♪ single

♪ ♪ single >> i like people to be able to look at the book and find interest in these stories and integrations. and they had given back and enrich the community a great deal. and it's a good feeling to all. >> from booktv's trip to chattanooga, tennessee, we bring you an interview with john wheeler, author of "the chronicles of cadillac dave: true confessions of a drug kingpin." >> hello, my name is john wheeler. i wrote a four book series called "the chronicles of cadillac dave: true confessions of a drug kingpin." i use just an alias as a pen name. but frankly, it is my story, and i am happy to take

responsibility for it. i put that as a tongue and cheek facetious thing because the dea and the fbi and all of the enforcement agencies in every local agency, i mean, they wanted to portray me as this big huge kingpin character. when i look at myself with all of the people that i knew then what i knew was really going on, i was a pretty small individual. but it was more tongue-in-cheek to say kingpin. although i am sure that there are people who would still argue that that is what i was. it was an interesting thing. i was always an athlete in high school. i never smoked a cigarette or drink a beer and i graduated from high school. that summer i started drinking

some with some friends of mine and actually sniffing glue is a big thing. and that was kind of what we were doing. we were mixing up a bunch of mixed drinks in a blender and sniffing glue. and that is before marijuana came along. this was the late 60s. and in chattanooga, no one knew what marijuana was. it was a couple of years later when i was in college before i ever got introduced to marijuana. and that is when i started smoking pot. i was in with the little antiwar hippie folksinger group. and it was kind of cool to go to the coffee houses and set sit out in the parking lot and smoke a joint. it was like the greatest thing in the world. that's how i got started. somebody said the key to success is to sell what you love to do. so in the beginning that was marijuana and that was kind of a -- i mean, it was in my mind, at

least, and in the people around me, this was like an adventure. nobody had this stuff. everybody wanted it. it was the fuel of the counterculture. and i discovered i could get it and bring it back, i was like a hero. and so i always resented that stereotype of those shifty drug dealer over in the shadows sneaking things to kids coming out of school. it wasn't like that at all. you are my age or older who knew and one of marijuana and it was being suppressed and nobody could get it. and i brought it. later on after i discovered cocaine, loves cocaine and i got into that. i was actually sentenced to a term three times. the first time was not related

to drugs. it has to do with burglary. what i was running with these older guys and we were breaking into places and they were saying you have more nerve than jesse james. you go in here and i was the one that got caught. but anyway, i was in the workouts when i was 18. the first time i got out was when i was 19. the next time i had sold some marijuana to an undercover agent and chattanooga and it was a pure set up kind of deal that but they got me and i was out there. and i had been there about three months and i had a job down at the hog lot and i found out that there were some things happening that were pretty upsetting. my partner had stolen my money in my old lady was running off

with somebody and i just got mad and one day i left. and that is when a lot of these adventures happen while i was an escaped fugitive kind of flying under the radar. i went straight to tucson where i bought products and took it back to atlanta and then i found some connections down in mexico and started smuggling. and it was very different back then. but it's much more violent and murderous now than it was then. back then i would walk across the bridge carrying a rich cracker box full of money and just a hippie going across the bridge. i would go down the alley and he

had his wife and little kids and, you know, it was just a destitute type of place. and i really felt great because you could see how much good it was doing time to be able to sell this marijuana to me and then back home everyone loved them. that is how it worked. personally in terms of smuggling, probably only about a thousand pounds. it was really a hippie and amateur hour thing. you had an old beat up pickup truck and a bunch of mexican teenagers with duffel bags. and every duffel bags had bricks and. and on the mexican side they would go through and pay off all the farmers to open the fences and let them through to the border. and then they would carry the bags through the desert across the dry riverbed over to the arizona side. and when it was dawn we would

swoop down and a truck to pick it all up on the main patagonia highway outside of nogales. and we had little radio shack walkie talkies and we were cooking with. and this was our smuggling deal. and so 500, 600, 1000 pounds, that's what we did. i was arrested at the park hotel on january 31, 1975. almost three years today from the time i escaped from silverdale here. and they were promising me 30 years and the d.a. people came in and they took on my jury, they said that you won't be needing us. but i had some really good lawyers and as it turned out through a variety of brilliant

legal maneuvers which i detail in the book, i did go to the prison but only for a brief time and it was about 22.5 months later that i was out again. and that was the last time that i was in prison. i cannot detail everything that happened during those years, but suffice it to say that there was a lot of occult and voodoo part of the smuggling that i never knew about. the play can come, the chicken lady didn't give a clearance. and i thought, you have to be kidding me. i didn't believe in any of that stuff. that was going on all around me. and eventually it had an effect. and i had some surrealistic experiences.

and i really can't detail for you on this camera. it was hard enough to write it in the book. i ended up in a mental hospital for about six weeks. they wanted me to stay longer. but i did not. all of that lead to a process of searching what happened. what happens to my mind. and that led me again to search for god. that led to a dramatic conversion that i experienced in march of 1981. it totally transformed my life. and from that point on there were no more drugs and there were no more anything. to me, everything about the drug dealing in the smuggling and the parties in atlanta and all of that. that is interesting and it's

fine, but it's really the back story. it's what brought this particular individual to this point in time where i have this satanic supernatural encounter that almost destroyed me which i had rejected to that point in time and how my life changed after that. >> for more information on booktv is visit to chattanooga, tennessee, go to c-span.org/local content. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. information and technology professor at the massachusetts institute of technology and andrew mcafee with co-author

erik brynjolfsson, present their book, "the second machine age." felipe fernández-armesto, a history professor at the university of notre dame examines hispanic past in "our america." a hispanic history of the united states. douglas egerton, history professor at lemoyne college looks at the reconstruction era in the wars of reconstruction. and in "careless people", sarah churchwell, professor of american literature and public understanding at the university of east anglia in england looks at the intersection between a double murder in new jersey in 1922 and the writing of a scott fitzgerald watch for the authors on booktv in our