possible in congressional politics. and some of the, some major legislation that was enacted during that time period was enacted during his speakership whether it was transportation legislation, some early civil rights legislation, legislation related to world war ii. so he was in many ways one of the most effective and best known speakers of the house of representatives. we've also had recent speakers who have demonstrated considerable effectiveness. newt gingrich in his early years, particularly the first 100 days, really turned the house into a real machine, just producing major, major legislation under his leadership relatively swiftly which was very impressive. nancy pelosi, in particular the enactment of health care legislation which was a huge feat and sort of a last minute outcome in large part because of her leadership. so we'ved had speakers -- we've had speakers, you know, most

speakers at least since the 1940s are known for at least producing one major work of legislation. but certainly at the top of that list i'd have to say would be sam rayburn. >> host: what's the speaker's normal interaction with the senate? >> guest: with the senate? i wouldn't say that the speaker has a normal interaction with the senate. it varies by who the speaker is, it varies by which party is in control of the house and which party's in control of the senate, and it varies on the personal or the personalities of the speaker and the senate leadership. there's an expectation that speakers need to have an open line of communication with the leadership in the senate because you can't get any legislation enacted without the senate's approval. and so to that respect, there is some kind of communication or relationship. but the degree of closeness that there is between, say, the speaker and the senate or senate leaders is going to vary

tremendously by who the individual speaker is and who the leaders in the senate are. >> host: matthew green, who have been some of the least effective speakers. [laughter] >> guest: least effective speakers. well, good question. i'd say there's certainly a host of speakers in the 19th century that didn't serve very long and aren't known for doing very much, and so you could put those on the list. but if we wanted to, again, keep our focus on speakers since the 1940s which is the focus of the book, looking at speakers since the 1940s, i would say the first name that comes to mind is probably either carl albert who served in the early 1970s or john mccormack who came right after rayburn and served from 1961 until 1970. they had for various or reasons a more -- various reasons a more difficult time getting legislation enacted, to some extent they had a more difficult party to work with. the majority party democrats had

rebels, it had folks who wanted to go their own way, and that makes it hard to enact legislation. they also had some personal issues. for example, mccormack, particularly towards the end, he had been waiting to be speaker for many, many years, and so when he finally got the chance, he was somewhat elderly, ask i had heard at -- and i had heard at one point he even provided over the house with an oxygen tank. so he didn't necessarily have the fortitude, the constitution necessary to really put in the effort necessary in order to get big legislation done. so i would say that mccormack and albert were probably on, lower on the list of those who were effective contemporary speakers. >> host: how would you grade john babier? >> guest: how would i grade john boehner? well, i hesitate to grade john bane or to the extent that he's still -- boehner to the extent that he's still speaker. and we see in history that sometimes speakers save their

biggest and most amazing accomplishments for the rebelled of their tenure. -- for the end of their tenure. so i think the jury is still out. i would say this about speaker boehner, back in the early 1930s we had a speaker named john nance garner who later became vice president under fdr, and he once said that the speaker hardship is the hardest job in washington. and i think that that pretty much sums up the experience of john boehner. imagine how much has changed since the 1930s when john nance garner was saying this. if anything, the job has gotten exponentially more difficult where now speakers have to deal with huge amounts of campaign funding, independent groups that are funding sometimes primary challenges against members of your party, you have a 24-hour news cycle, you have a plethora of interest groups, all these things are putting tremendous pressure on the job of speaker to try to get things done without making too many people angry. and i think that boehner

certainly has to go, those are challenges to his speakership. and then you couple that with some of the more, shall we say, independent-minded members of his party right now in the house of representatives that make it harder for him to count on the party loyalty that's necessary to enact legislation, especially when you can't get any votes from the minority party. so i would say that boehner has done in some ways the best he could do with a bad hand that he's been dealt. >> host: professor green, members -- speakers are also members of congress. how much attention do they pay to their particular district once they become speaker? >> guest: this is one of the things that i argue in the book, that traditionally people assume once speakers become speaker, what they're thinking about really is their party. they want to do what their party wants. after all, it's their party, the majority party, who decides who the speaker's going to be. and while i acknowledge that's true to a large degree in the

book, what i also point out is that speakers have done things on behalf of issues and concerns that matter to them personally. and so every once in a while we see speakers pressing for legislation that doesn't seem particularly important to the majority party in the house of representatives or even to the president, but matters to them personally whether it's in the case of speaker boehner issues like education which is very important to him personally, and if we look further back in the past, nancy pelosi and human rights, john mccormack and catholic education, sam rayburn and the energy, the oil and gas industry in texas. we do see speakers sometimes saying, you know, this matters enough to me that i want to pursue this. and they also do have to think about themselves getting reelected. so in addition to issues that matter to them, there's sometimes things they do because if they don't do it, it might put them in danger of losing

their seat. now, this hasn't happened very often. the last speaker to lose re-election was tom foley in 1994. but speakers like other members know that they need to at least be aware of the possibility that they could lose re-election, and so they will pay attention to their districts and do things that might be particularly important to their own constituents just like any other member of congress would. >> host: before tom foley, who was the last speaker who lost an election? >> guest: oh, it was in the 19th century. now, i can't remember his name, but it had been well over a hundred years before foley that the last speaker lost re-election. >> host: what makes a good speaker? in your view? >> guest: what makes a good speaker? i would say it's a combination of a number of things. first, i'd say be a good listener. speakers have to be good listeners. they have to hear what members are saying, they have to know when a member of congress says something if they're really saying, meaning what they say or if there's something else going on there.

so being able to understand what members want and need. related to that is knowing the districts of members of congress so that if you have someone in your party saying, you know, i just can't support you on this because my constituents would oppose it, speaker needs to be able to say, well, actually, you know, i also understand your district, and i don't think it's quite the situation that you portray. in other words, being able to persuade members involves knowing members and their districts. obviously, persuasion is a third thing that matters, being able to persuade. but i think in addition to these personal traits, what makes a good speaker is an understanding that they are, in the end, representing the entire chamber. their representing the whole house of representatives from voters to the president to the senate. and so that means sometimes saying to members of congress, you know, i know you want this, but if we do it, it's going to make our chamber look bad, hurt our ability to do our work. and if you don't like it, you

know, i understand that, but this is my job as speaker, is to do things that help the whole chamber. because when with we help the whole chamber, we help the house of representatives as an institution, fundamentally are, we're helping the american people and the country. >> host: what's the level of interaction historically that a speaker's had with the president? >> guest: historically, speakers have had a fair, i mean, a fairly significant degree of interaction with presidents. again, just because -- just as speakers need to have a relationship with the senate in order to get a bill enacted, they've got to have a relationship with the president in order to get that bill signed into be law. and the -- into law. and the president is seen by the american people as the person who sets the national agenda, who represents the country at large. and so it's important for speakers to have some relationship with presidentses and, hopefully, a positive working relationship. now, that has been a challenge for speakers when they're of the opposite party of the president. and we have seen from time to

time cases where issues have seriously divided speakers and presidents, and if you even look to the late '90s, the impeachment of, the impeachment proceedings of president bill clinton. obviously, that creates a huge strain on that relationship. so, but at the same time, there's an understanding that there has to be some avenues of communication. if they don't talk to each other, nothing gets done. president loses, the speaker also loses. so the ability to at least talk on the phone once a week, to meet if necessary, those are part of the job of speaker. >> host: why'd you choose to write this book? >> guest: i chose to write this book, actually, it was experiences i had when i was a congressional aide in the mid 1990s. i worked on capitol hill, and i was there during the 1994 election which was the election in which the republicans won control of the house and senate

and, most notably, the house because they hadn't had a majority in the house in 40 years. and i was struck by a number of things in that experience, one was that you could tell the next day walking through the halls of congress what party a staffer was because people either were, you know, just overjoyed with huge smiles on their faces, or they look as if death had just passed them over. and that was quite a remarkable experience. and then also watching speaker gingrich and how he operated as speaker and the forcefulness with which he exercised leadership, the speed with which he was getting legislation enacted really made an impression on me. and it started getting me to think about what it is that a speakers do and whether gingrich was an anomaly or part of a trend or one of many speakers who used the power of the office to get things done. and so that was kind of the experiences that got me thinking about writing about the speaker.

and then later in graduate school when i'm looking for a topic to write about, i realized that the speakership was something that hadn't been explored very much, and i was still interested in it, and i was interested at this point in the end of the gingrich speakership and then the hastert speakership which had just begun. so based on that, i started doing some historical research and found all these interesting stories about speakers going back to the 1940s and sam rayburn. and then i started thinking, well, if speakers matter, we need to really try to understand that, how do we know that they matter, when can we say that, yes, they're actually changing the outcome of a vote, say? and then also trying to understand why they do it. is it always because it's something their party wants, or is it something else? and then based on my research i found something interesting which was that speakers not only have made a difference and do make a difference, but they do things sometimes because they think it matters, or the direct they're representing thinks it

matter, or the president thinks it matters. even if their own party in the house of representatives doesn't think it matters. and so that became the basis of the book. >> host: could newt gingrich's speakership have been longer? >> guest: well, historical counterfactuals are always difficult. it's hard to say if it could have been longer. there was a way in which gingrich had a somewhat similar problem to speaker boehner which is a fairly large group of new, young members who -- and this is not unusual, both parties have had this. they come in, they're a little zealous, they have a sense that they know how to fix things, and at first that creates tremendous enthusiasm and energy which is useful to the majority party. but invariably, that group or members of it start to get disillusioned, they feel the things they got elected on are not being done, and then they become a challenge for a speaker. and, again, this happened to carl albert in the 1970s, this happened to, and this in many

ways is what's happened to speaker boehner. gingrich had the same problem, so it would have been difficult no matter who the speaker was. but there was another more personal aspect to it, i would say, which is that gingrich was the kind of speaker who believed in being the general, the leader of the troops, and the folks would follow. and the things i mentioned earlier about the importance of listening and understanding where members are coming from, not necessarily gingrich's strong suit. and so because of that, i think it exacerbated these tensions that were going on in the party, and it led some republicans to question his ability to lead past the first couple of years of his speakership. and so those elements of his personality, i think, made it, contributed to the relatively short nature of his tenure. had he been a different kind of leader or acted differently after the first two years, then

possibly we might have seen gingrich last longer as speak or than we did. >> host: john boehner recently said after the government shutdown that he didn't really want to do it, but he saw where his members were going. >> guest: right. and this, this is an example of the difficulty that boehner himself, personally, is in with a lot of members who are, have, you know, strong opinions, strong views. and at that time, really believed this was their one source of leverage to try to get the policy outcomes they wanted from president obama, was to use the instruments at their disposal like the debt limit and the budget more generally. the danger, and so in that respect boehner was doing what a smart speaker does, which is you see where your members are, and you act accordingly. it's not as easy as people think for speakers to just tell members to do what they need to do. they don't have as many tools at their disposal as you might

think they would. and certainly in ore cups we see -- other countries we see parliamentary leaders who say if you don't support me, you're not going to be nominated again to office. speakers don't have that power. speaker boehner was speaking truthfully, he had to do what he had to do. but there is also a way in which it is part of the job of speaker to try to educate members and explain, look, if we follow path a, this is going to be very harmful to our party and also harmful to the country and so forth. if we take path b, it'll be less harmful. now, we won't get everything that we want, necessarily, if we take path b. if we take path a, we almost certainly aren't going to get what we want, and we're going to make ourselves, the party and congress, look bad. not saying that it would have been easy to accomplish that or that other speakers, other members of congress could have done a better job, but i think that was what was missing from the equation and what led to so much of the conflict, the

government shutdown last winter was the difficulty of boehner and the leadership team whether it was inability or just not a possible situation to get members to understand that the direction that many of them wanted to go was problematic. and i'll add one orr thing, too, which is an important power. of the equation which is the minority party in the house of representatives. if boehner had been able to get democrats to avoid a shutdown and do something else, the wouldn't have been an issue. and in decades past, something like that was possible. but in today's highly partisan congress, that's just not something that speakers have at their disposal. minority parties traditionally refuse to give votes to the majority on big issues. so that really constrains speakers. now they have to get only the votes of their majority party, and if you've got a critical mass of members of congress in your party who just don't want to go along, you're in real trouble. so this is something that has made it harder to be speaker

than ever before. >> host: what have some of the rewards and punishments that a speaker has at his or her disposal? >> guest: so the rewards that speakers have, today's speakers, and this has changed over time, but the rewards vary enormously. they range from saying, well, i'll schedule a vote for a bill that you want or an amendment you want to saying, you know, i'll put in a good word for you for a committee position, and speakers often have a decisive influence on who gets committee assignments. so that's a very important power that speakers have. speakers can say i'm going to visit your district and help raise money for you when you're running for re-election. that's an important asset. speakers also have little things, smaller things that people might dismiss that are important to members such as saying, well, we're going to have a congressional delegation going to syria, and i can only have three members of congress on it. would you like to be one? this is something that a member

of congress wants to do. this is a great incentive. so those are some of the rewards that speakers can provide. however, and then there are also some punishments which are sort of the reverse of that. they can say you're not going to get a committee position, or i'm not going to give you a congressional delegation spot, a trip on a congressional delegation trip. so that it's important for those to work that the members care about these things. and traditionally, they do. members of congress care about committee assignments, they care about raising money. but what has happened particularly with the boehner speakership is you have a group of members in this party who aren't interested in these things. maybe they're not running for re-election, or they can get plenty of campaign funding from some outside interest group. or they say i don't really -- i'm not interested in moving up here in the house of representatives. i want to stay on the committee i'm on and just do what i want to do. and that's another reason that it's been hard, i think, for the boehner speakership, is you have

members saying, you know, what you have to offer isn't enough for me. and there is one other benefit that speakers used to be able to provide which boehner no longer can, and that are these so-called earmarks when specific items can be put in a bill that provide funding for a dam or a bridge or a road in a district. and the republicans as the minority you should speaker pelosi -- under speaker pelosi campaigned on getting rid of these because they argued they were being abused. and so they stopped using then. when they stopped using them, they now no longer had a very important carrot. so a member of congress would say my constituents don't want me to vote for this bill. boehner would say, well, i wish i could get you that road you want, but i can't do that. well, if you k-7b9 -- if you can't get me anything for my constituent, i'm going to have to vote against you. so that's been a huge problem for the republican leadership in the house of representatives is the lack of this benefit that they can provide members in exchange for their votes.

>> host: how would you rate nancy pelosi as a speaker? >> guest: i would -- in terms of her effectiveness, the kinds of things she got done, i would rate nancy pelosi very, very highly. i think that she was a very active speaker, she, if for nothing else, will be known for providing critical support for the passage of obama's affordable care act or obamacare when it looked like it was going to fail at the last minute. and her, her ability to, and her sort of relentlessness in taking that job and lobbying members and helping members of congress and working to get things done is really quite remarkable. i think, i think jury is still out, but if there'll be any criticism to have pelosi speakership, it'll be whether or not there was too high a price to be paid for some of those legislative accomplishments. so in the first two years of the obama white house, the house of representatives under her leadership passed a slew of major pills.

and -- bill withs. some of them became laws, some did not, but some were tough votes for moderate members of her party; votes on climate change, votes on obamacare. and those members subsequently lost re-election. now, it's not clear if the votes necessarily cost them re-election, but for some of them it may have made the difference. and to the extent that it did, it may have cost the democrats control of the house of representatives. so this is a, you know, this is a dilemma that all speakers have which is do you get major bills passed if it hurts your members' re-election chances, or do you protect them at the expense of getting what you want done? but if the things that she accomplished cost the democrats control of the house of representatives and subsequently hindered president obama's agenda, then that could be something that would be part of her legacy that would be less positive. >> host: so people know where you're coming from, professor green, on that day this 1994 when the republicans took back the house of representatives, were you -- did you have a smile

on your face, or a scowl? [laughter] >> guest: wasn't a scowl, but it wasn't a smile east. i worked -- either. i worked for a democrat, and it was, he was one of the democrats who did not lose. so it was more a sigh of relief, quite frankly, because it was a year in which every, almost every democrat was in danger of losing. it was one of those wave elections. so it was a bit of shock and relief, i suppose. but then also a bit of intellectual curiosity. well, now that the republicans have a turn, let's see what happens next. >> host: what do you teach here at catholic? >> guest: i teach several courses in american politics. i teach an introduction to american politics course. i teach a course on the u.s. congress and part of, for part of that course i have the students play a member of congress. and they try to get a bill enacted through their house of representatives. and that's a great experience for the students and for myself if for no other reason than at

the end i get to play speaker, so i have a little gavel that i get to use. and i also teach a course called power in american politics where we learn about different aspects of power in the united states, power of interest groups, power of congress, power of the president, power of the people, power of voters. so those are are some of the classes that i teach here at catholic. >> host: why don't speakers traditionally vote on legislation? >> guest: speakers traditionally do not vote because it's a legacy of this hybrid position of speaker as i mentioned before. they are seen as both a partisan leader, but also as a nonpartisan leader. and if you're nonpartisan, it means that you're not supposed to be taking part in the issues of the day that put you on one side of the question or the other. and if, to the extent speaker is supposed to be presiding over the house and insure everything's done fairly, people might question their ability to do that if they're also participating in the vote. so traditionally speakers do not participate in the vote. they can.

they're not prohibited from doing so. but traditionally, they do not. this also has changed over time, and in the 1970s speakers started participating more and more often. i think cl many my nateing -- culminating in gingrich who vetted quite a bit. nancy pelosi did as well. but boehner, again i mentioned before, has moved back from that partisan role. he votes very, very, very rarely on the house floor, and i think that is in part a reflection of his belief that the speaker needs to move himself or herself out of these debates and conflicts in order to be seen as someone who really has the whole house and the interests of the whole house at heart. >> host: and we've been talking with catholic university professor matthew green about his book, "the speaker of the house: a study of leadership," published by yale university press. here's the cover, you're watching booktv on c-span2. >> visit booktv.org to watch with 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 formassachusetts booktv -- format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> here's a look at the top ten best selling nonfiction books according to "the new york times." robert gates tops the list with his memoir, "duty," followed by new yorker writer malcolm gladwell's david and goliath. three authors recently appeared on booktv, and their programs can be viewed anytime online at booktv.org. in fourth, atlantic editor scott stossel chronicles his struggles

with anxiety, and fifth, charles krauthammer presents a collection of his political columns, "things that matter: three decades of passions, pastimes and politics." watch the pulitzer prize-winning syndicated columnist's program from the george w. bush presidential library at our web site, booktv.org. sixth on the l.a. times bestseller list is "stitches," followed by "a short guide to a long life." ari shavit in "promised land," is eighth. in ninth place is "little failure. from the and wrapping up the list is gabriel herman's profile of fox news president roger race in "the loudest voice in the room." look for mr. sherman's appearance on "after words" airing in the near future on booktv on c-span2. and that's the top ten

best-selling nonfiction books list according to the lang wills times. los angeles times. [inaudible conversations] >> and we're back with more live cover coverage of the 2014 savannah book festival. scott berg is next. [inaudible conversations] ..

will conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] guilt

ge built inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. mining is linda hon tuned and i am delighted to welcome you to the seventh annual savannah book festival presented by georgia power. whose lights are shining

brightly in my eyes. this would made possible by fran and john kane. many of you have been to many wonderful sessions this morning. today was a difficult day for some of us as we chose which authors to visit during the day. we would like to extend special thanks to our presenting sponsor georgia power, members, the individual donors who make saturday's free festival events possible. if you would like to lend your support, you probably heard this before today, we welcome your donations and provided yellow box for book buckets which i worked on. at theucks for book buckets whi worked on. at the door as you exit. please turn your cellphones off and keys to not use flash

photography. following this presentation, a. scott berg will be signing festival purchase copies of his books at the book tent in telfair square. it is important that you let him out so he can get over there and be there to sign the books. i have lost the second page of my notes. which seems to be something i do on a regular basis. i apologize. i do know that i want to thank savannah toyota for sponsoring a. scott berg's appearance today. gillick surprise winner and best-selling author a. scott berg's recently published "wilson" is an authority of biography on america's 28president. the author should new insight with the benefit of being the first scholars to access two

sets of wilson related papers and hundreds of the president's personal letters. a. scott berg was born in norwalk, connecticut to a mother who listed f. scott fitzgerald among her favorite authors and gave her son his name. in high school a. scott berg researched the great gatsby's creator and read all of his books. in 1971 he entered princeton, fitzgerald's alma mater. his senior thesis was expanded into a full-length biography on editor maxwell perkins which won him the national book award in 1978. his charles lindbergh biography published in 1998 won a pulitzer prize for biography. this afternoon we look forward to a. scott berg discussing how woodrow wilson really read defines presidential power and was determined to make the world place safe for democracy. please welcome a. scott berg.

[applause] >> thank you. thank you very much. thank you for being here. thank you for that very kind introduction. what i will try to do is spend much of the next hour talking about woodrow wilson, but i was also told by the festival people that you would like to hear a little about my other most favored subject and that would be me. so you are going to get a little of me. in essence you look at how we all got here today, i think. it is highly appropriate we are in a church to talk about woodrow wilson, highly inappropriate to be in a church to talk about me. but here we go. nonetheless. i am going to begin my story actually prenatally as was suggested by the introduction. i promise i will take you through high school and college

very quickly, but i do have to begin in my mother's final weeks of pregnancy with me when she was reading f. scott fitzgerald and became determined to have a son and to name that son scott. to this day i am grateful she was not reading charlotte bronte a. that there we go. as promised we go to the tenth grade. we have to make one stop. my parents did move from connecticut to california, took all the children and there we were. in the tenth grade at palisades high school in pacific palisades california, beautiful school overlooking the ocean, we had to do the obligatory american authors report and i remember going home and telling my parents i had to write about an american author and i said i am sort of stumped. i don't know who to write about.

i can't really think of an author to write about and my mother said that is because you never read any offers. i s . i sayauthors . i say. i say this for all your parents with children who watch tv, i was a television idiot and july was 15 years old and had to do this assignment and went to my mother and she said why don't you write about f. scott fitzgerald's and at that moment she produced a magazine article that had been written in life magazine about f. scott fitzgerald just at the moment i was born. this was a 15-year-old article. she said read this and see if this doesn't intrigues you. i was swept away. she said if you think that was good you should read some of his

books. this was a revelation to me. she said why don't you come down, we will go into our library together and i said we have a library? she took me into her room which i have always considered the tv room and there, sure enough, surrounding the tv where shelves filled with books. the most amazing thing. there, sitting altogether were at scott fitzgerald's novels and we walked over to those if you are familiar with f. scott fitzgerald's work, this side of the paradise, "the great gatsby," the last tycoon, short stories spread out along the way, you will know that i picked "the great gatsby" because it is the skinny as of them all. i thought i am not sure how long i will keep up this reading things, but i could devote myself to that and i sat down and in one sitting read "the

great gatsby". by the time i stood up, i was a different boy. you know how in comic strips the light bulb goes on when somebody has an idea? my light bulb went on. i didn't even know i had a light bulb. but suddenly i did. and i sense spent the next 2-1/2 years reading everything by f. scott fitzgerald and everything about f. scott fitzgerald, first in the home library, then in the school library, then in the public library, then the ucla library such that by the time i had graduated from high school i had literally read every word i believe that had been written about fitzgerald in the english-language. when it came time to apply to college, it was only one school i considered seriously and that was his alma mater which was

princeton university. i was going to say by chance but actually woodrow wilson would say by providence, i had begun reading a lot of other things beyond f. scott fitzgerald. it is the funny thing about reading. one good book really leads to another. by the time i was a senior in high school, i had up on my wall f. scott fitzgerald's picture, needless to say. i am pretty sure i was the only kid in my high school food did. i don't want you to think i was a little strange. i had adlai stevenson, woodrow wilson who i had read a book about and don quixote who i had read and been swept away. there is a through fine as you can see, almost two, one through

line is they are all rather romantic, even tragic figures. at 15, 16, 17, i was deeply into romantic tragedy. there was nothing. not sure which i like more, the romance for the tragedy but they were great, really great. the other through line is three of four went to princeton, don quixote did not go to princeton. bad s.a.t. scores i was told. very bad. anyway, now has promised, i applied to princeton, last question any application today is the same as it was then, why do you want to go to princeton? i wrote a very floury answer, your faculty and blah blah, but i said i have a fitzgerald problem. i details this obsession i had with f scott fitzgerald and said frankly i could draw maps of your school. i have never been there. if you don't accept me i am coming any way to make a

pilgrimage. the prince and admission office made it very easy on themselves. they took me. i arrived on princeton campus in the fall of 1967. i was on that campus all of a day and half when i made my way to the princeton library. within the library the rare books and manuscripts room and i walked in and i sat down and a librarian came over to me and said what can we help you with? do you have any fitzgerald things? why don't you just sit here for a second, she said. she came back ten minutes later with a little frawley with five big blue boxes on them. i said what are these? why don't you just look around and see if any of this appeals to you. i have given you just a touch of what a fanatic i was about f.

scott fitzgerald. so imagine what it was like for this 171/2-year-old to open up the first blue box and see the first draft of "the great gatsby" written in pencil. to open up the second box and find f. scott fitzgerald's liquor bills. to open up the third box and find zelda fitzgerald's scrapbook. to open up the fourth box and find f. scott fitzgerald's liquor bills. to open up the fifth box and find some letters between f. scott fitzgerald and ernest hemingway. i turned to the librarian and said what do i have to do to see all of these and more? she said you have to show up between 9:00 and 4:45 monday

through friday. for the next four years whenever i had a free moment between 9:00 and 4:45 monday through friday that is where i was, going through this stuff. i found even though it was delayed 60s and newseums, f. scott fitzgerald was really being discovered in this country and rather iconic figure, as i went through these papers i found a correspondence that nobody had ever excavated. and they were a bunch of letters between f. scott fitzgerald and a man named maxwell perkins. max perkins was a book editor at charles scribner sons. he worked in their his entire career really. i began to see in this

correspondence between fitzgerald and perkins the creation of f scott fitzgerald the artist because it was to perkins that f. scott fitzgerald, a princeton dropped out my father reminded me, that this man who wrote his first novel, what became this side of paradise, send it first to max perkins at scribner is to send him back the series of letters telling him how to improve the novel and maybe then perkins could get his company, then the stuffy is publishing house in america, to published the book and this over a series of year-and-a-half, fitzgerald did until "this side of paradise" was published, became an overnight sensation, became one of the landmark books in american publishing in the 20th century. as a result of that two things happened that i could read in

this correspondence between an author and his editor. the first thing i saw was how perkins stuck with fitzgerald for the rest of his writing life and became not only his book editor but became his closest friend, his marriage counselor, his psychiatrist, his money lender, whenever fitzgerald needed anything, max perkins was the go to guy. i also saw, this is even more important, maxwell perkins in working with at scott fitzgerald change what a book editor does. until max perkins's book editors were primarily mechanical figures in publishing who corrected spelling and punctuation and prepared manuscripts for publication. with max perkins i began to see him coming up with plot points,

titles, structural designs for books, and i began to see because i am not just into a scott fitzgerald's papers, and the scrub nurse had delivered all their archives to the library. now i am 19, 20, 21, and i am going through these deeply personal professional letters between not just as scott fitzgerald and max perkins, but ernest hemingway, ring lardner, taylor caldwell. erskine caldwell, james jones, allen payne, marjorie rawlings, i could name another 40 of the most important writers in this country between the two world wars and one man discovered and

developed all of them. this is a man, max perkins, who changed the course of the american river basically. i had very good luck because in that moment there was teaching in princeton, carlos baker had just finished his epic biography of ernest hemingway. i went to this office and asked if i might work with him. i said i have a great idea for a book. i want to write a book about max perkins, it is a fantastic idea, max perkins is the great enigma of american literature, no one has ever written about him. the big question is whether you can write about him. looking at your transcript here, a very solid d- work, it is a great idea. why, he suggested, don't you write your senior thesis, why don't you do that on perkins'?

if you are still interested, carry on, write a book and you have written an interesting thesis. i spent basically my last three years in college working on my senior thesis. when i turned it in, they turned it back, they gave me an a plus, gave me up fries and most important they gave me three single spaced pages saying this is not relieve a senior thesis, it is the first draft of a book. if i was waiting for a sign, there it was. and i then decided i would turn this into a book. what the princeton english department failed to tell me is it would take another seven years to do that. but, you know, it is a powerful impulse not to want to go to law school. [laughter]

>> and so i worked on that book. we are going to get to woodrow wilson in a second, i promise. i was at work on my book for about two years when i decided, you have to remember i had never been anything but a few postcards and a senior thesis in my life. i began to think wouldn't it be interesting to right not just a biography but a shelf full of biographies of 20th century american cultural figures. and each book will be about somebody from a different part of the country and each subject will be from a different wedge of the apple pie. so after i published max perkins in 1978, he, being all harvard educated, ninth generation white anglo-saxon protestant who went into east coast publishing, i

began to think about the opposite coast. i began to think about those first generation semiliterate jewish immigrants who went out west and started something we now call hollywood. coincidentally the son of a man named smool gepphish. select extensive paper is unchanged his name to samuel goldwyn. samuel goldwyn jr. said there are tons of his archives. before my father died i promised i would find a biographer. are you interested in writing his story? i did a little preliminary research and realized this indeed was a magnificent story and by telling gold when's life and this is what biographer's

must always ask themselves, can i tell larger story. the purpose of writing a biography was not just to tell the single life but it is to depict the life and times in which your subject lived and worked. and gold when it seemed the ideal person to do that. i spent the next ten years writing the life of baldwin. a lot of it was going through those hundreds of thousands of documents that literally chronicled the entire life of hollywood and also, i love to interview people. i was fortunate in my perkins' book to interview a lot of people. i started my gold when book at the exact moment that all those people from the golden age of hollywood, 20s, 30s and 40s were just beginning to die with all too regular frequency in fact.

but i was able for several years to interview the likes of katharine hepburn and bette davis and myrna loy and barbara stanwyck and the great directors william wyler and rubin mullion read and billy wilder, and other writers and other actors, i interviewed i believe 150 people for that book. 85 of them died before the book was published. a lot of people were saying this was no coincidence. it was reaching the point i would call somebody for an interview and they would say no, not yet! not yet! i am not ready for my final interview! no, no, it is time! it is time! let's sit down and have a little chat! it has been a good life.

so then, after doing samuel goldwyn, this great west coast figure my eyes turned to the midwest and i began to think first of all what are the great metaphors for 20th century america? rather the way the motion picture camera is and i thought of the airplane and i thought who is a great romantic embodiment of the airplane? and a midwestern figure, and all roads pointed to st. louis and its spirit, charles lindbergh, who i knew had left extensive archives, but i also knew that his bill had stipulated that nobody could see those papers for 50 years after the death of his wife who in fact was still very much alive.

now. i began calling around at the library alive and discovered actually there was an asterisk that says unless my wife and three of my five children settle on a biographer and then that person can go through the papers. where there is a will there is often away. in this case i began writing to mrs. lindbergh and after a year of letters with no reply i got a phone call asking if i could meet her in florida, in fact in fort myers beach and so i went out, spend a week meeting her and at the end of the week as i was literally getting in my car to get on a plane to go home to los angeles or to go to new york to a publisher to say i met mrs. lindbergh, she came out to my car, handed me a letter that was

handwritten, she had called her attorneys that morning who dictated three sentences that basically gave me the legal right to go through all of her husband's papers. i then took this letter up to the yale library with mrs. lindbergh afterwards ringing in my ear, be very careful with this letter when you go to yale because they have never seen one of them. and i went to the library and showed her the letter. where did you get this? do you have total id? indeed, i was that person and i had that letter and i said i want to see what i got here. this was a real case of be careful what you wish for. because i realized there were millions of documents that he left. this was a man who saved every piece of paper from the time he

was a child and there it was and i realized perhaps worst of all, especially for a princetonian i was going to have to spend the next two years of my life at yale going through the archives locked up in the library but that is what i did and i spent another decade working on that book. now it was time to discuss what i was going to write about next and i began to look southward and i thought as i told my publisher i have never written about a subject from south, and politics and government, i have not written about something from higher education. certainly an extremely important aspect of american culture and i said i have been carrying around in my hip pocket the name of woodrow wilson since i was 15 years old and i would really like to write that book and she said i don't even want to

discuss it. she said i love woodrow wilson. that is a great idea. but she said before you do that, she said there is one thing i wanted to ask you. you never really talked about her but i know you often go off on trips, weekends, have dinner with katharine hepburn. you seem to be friends with her but you never seem to talk about her. have you ever thought of writing the book about her? i said i have thought about writing a book and in fact so has she thought about my writing a book. we have discussed at great length. in fact we started discussing, i can tell you as i told her, we started discussing it the second day i met her. we were having dinner and she said after dinner, you know, you should really write a book about me. and i said yes, i think i probably should and she said because i am fascinating, you

know. you really should write all that. and i said you are. and she said but one thing. i don't want you to publish anything about me while i am alive. i mentioned this to my publisher who said she said you can't publish while she is alive but you can write about her and you can have a book about her all written and we can publish it right after she dies. i said that is a funny thing too because she always said i would like you to publish something as close to my desk as possible. and so for 20 years that we were friends i kept notes, usually because after each trip or after each dinner, every dinner invariably as sitting by the fire drinking the couple's scotches, in my case more than a couple in her case, and after

each conversation as the fire would go down low, she would say go upstairs and write down everything i just said. because i am fascinating and i am never going to tell about the story of my life again. the and write it so for 20 years i compiled these massive notes on the life of katharine hepburn and i took my editor's advice, wrote up the book, proofread it, set in type, gathered the pictures very quietly, loft it up in a safe, katharine hepburn said to say died in 2003, just days before she died, realized this was going -- i rode the last scene we had together in the book which i hope you will read if you like katharine hepburn is part memoir on my part of our friendship but in the course of the friendship, she married her entire life to

me. so i wrote up the last visit together and then the day i heard she died i wrote the final paragraph of her death and within two weeks the book was published. and i realized then why she wanted it published so soon. i always thought it was because she wanted her version of her life as told to me to be the first one out there. what she really knew was she died there would be such a desire to read about her, to have a piece of her to have a souvenir, and so within two weeks the book was published and became a huge sensation. far and away the biggest seller i have had and certainly the most emotional book for me that i have ever done as you will see, a deeply emotional book. which brings us to woodrow

wilson. was he georgian? let's get into that. i wanted to write about that for all sorts of reasons. i have given you the personal reasons that led me up to wilson and how i selected it. i had two thoughts in my head, that for years i had been thinking two things about wilson based on all of my readings, and there with two things i had not seen come out in any of the hundreds, thousands of books that had been written about wilson. and now, 13 years later, having done 13 years of research and writing, i am more convinced of this than ever and here are two things. the first is i believe woodrow wilson is the most influential figure of the 20th century. not just american. i see all of you going to i can

come up with -- i hope by the end of my few minutes on wilson or by the end of your reading the book which i hope you will do you will be convinced too that no man has changed 20th century life, bleeding into 21st century life anymore than woodrow wilson did. the second thing and this was equally important to me for all sorts of reasons, i believe woodrow wilson's life, his personal life is the most dramatic story that has ever unfolded in the white house. woodrow wilson has a son, as a husband, as a father, as a friend. these elements of his life i had never seen a book that captured the man i think is the most emotional, and i am not forgetting lincoln, the most poignant that we have never had

as president of the united states, a deeply passionate man. most think of wilson as presbyterian minister's son and grandson and he was both those things, but he was something far deeper than that. that is something i wanted to capture not just in a book about wilson but presidential biography in general. most presidential biographies feels they were just to get the upper layer of the story, just the professional story but i wanted readers to remember these are men so far who wake up every day, they go to an office, they go to work, it just so happens they change the way the world spins. so this is something i wanted to

capture a almost like two threads running along at the same time. so you could see how the personal life affected the professional and how the professional affected the personal and all times. in the next few minutes i am going to leave you -- i have written a really big book on this subject but a couple of blips points so when you go to a cocktail partyullet points so w a cocktail party and some really informed. woodrow wilson was the most religious president we ever had. i am not forgetting another georgian who became president. this was a man who was the son and grandson of ministers. if you shake a family trees of them, another dozen present minister's fall to the ground. everywhere, everywhere. wilson is an man who got in his knees even in the white house twice a day to pray.

this was a man who said greece before every meal, read the bible every night. i know we have had a lot of ridges presidents. usually they are religious once every four years. this is on man who was religious every moment of his life and that religion is going to interviews every decision he ever made and that is going to affect the way we live today. that is important. woodrow wilson was the first southerner elected to the white house since the civil war. he was elected in 1912, 50 years after the civil war. this was considered an epic moment in american history. this was really, people thought, the first reuniting of the united states after the great

divide. divide geographically and certainly emotionally, what happened in this country. he was born in 1856 in stanton, virginia. they of course claim him but i think georgia has a bigger claim on woodrow wilson. his father, after a year, after wilson was born, was transferred to augusta, ga. and there wilson spent his formative years. woodrow wilson's first memory in the world before he was four years old was of living in augusta and he remembered hearing that abraham lincoln had just been elected president. i hope you will visit the wilson house in augusta. it is quite splendidly you get a great sense of his childhood and right outside austin, the picket fence, a man walked by and said lincoln has been elected and there is going to be a war.

most biographies of wilson leave out this business of the civil war, which is extremely important. mostly because it was extremely important to wilson. he never forgot his sudden this, never forgot how the war affected even agusta which was really scared, could i say sherman's name? was scared the torch but nonetheless wilson saw his father's church turned into a hospital, saw a lot of neighbors come home maimed if they came home at all. wilson carried all the stuff with him for the rest of his life and it is going to affect him deeply when as president of the united states he is going to remember back what war can do, the deprivations of war, the degradation of war, the devastation of war, and wilson is going to use this to keep america out of world war i for

three years until he can hold back no more. so this southernness plays an important part in wilson's life. i should add that he later opened a law office in atlanta for a brief while, rather unsuccessfully but it was while he was down in georgia having gone north, by no. i mean beyond atlanta, while he was down here he met a woman named ellen act some --axom who was living in rome, ga. but her grandfather was a presbyterian minister right here in savannah. in fact, he was the minister at the first independent presbyterian church in savannah, and and they were married in

savannah in the presbyterian church blocks from here. another bullet point. woodrow wilson was the most educated president we ever had. i didn't say he was the most intellectual but this is the man who was the most scholarly president we ever had. this is our only president with a ph.d. to this day. he went north to princeton, at davidson college in north carolina for a brief moment but to princeton, which really changed his life, he went on to do, went to law school at the university of virginia when he realized a law career was not happening for him here in georgia he decided to go into academia, went to johns hopkins, got his ph.d. a brand new field of study called political science. he became one of the first political scientists in the country, he became a famous orator.

on the subject he wrote many books and articles on the subject, he had a career in academia as up professor first at bryn mawr college, at wellesley college in connecticut and he got the call to return to princeton as a professor where he was so outstanding, a scholar and teacher, that after 12 years he was asked to become the president of the university and he became the 13st president of princeton. and, here, he became a complete reformer. he tried to democratize this rather snobby schools that really catered to the sons of the very rich in this country. in so doing, wilson got great national attention for his school and for himself. he also reformed higher

education in this country. if you went to a school or you know someone who went to a college in which you majored in something, in which you follow courses in a certain sequence in your major and in which you took a few courses out of your major and left some elective sound top of that in which you had two lectures a week or a small class in which maybe there was an honor code, then you studied under the wilsonian method of college education in this country. he took little bits and came up with a few of his own hand came up with that as a model for how colleges should be run in the united states. needless to say it is now century later the way most colleges are run in this country. wilson drew the attention after about ten years as president of princeton of the democratic machine in the state of new

jersey who was looking for -- which was looking for a really good putt that who they could basically put in office and manipulate. it was a very corrupt machine and they thought who is the cleanest guy in this state who will get elected and we can push around. what about the college professor from princeton? easy to push around and clearly knows what he is talking about. he went to wilson and asked if he would like to run for governor as democratic nominee in 1910. by the way we can pretty much guarantee you will win the election. and he did. he won as i don't have to tell you in a landslide. for the next two years he introduced the most progressive agenda of any state in this country. he not only introduced it, he

got it passed. got so much past that now he is drawing the attention of the democratic national committee looking for a candidate for the 1912 election. they went, needless to say, to woodrow wilson and he got elected in one of the most exciting elections in american history. 1912 was a great three way horserace with woodrow wilson the democrat, william howard taft the sitting republican president and theodore roosevelt who bolted from the republican party to start the progressive bull moose party and just for cover from a ford candidate, eugene debs, the great socialist. was a four what way race and wilson won kin in the greatest electoral landslide the country had ever seen and now the way he took over princeton, the way he took over anything he took over,

wilson introduced the most progressive agenda of the country had ever seen and within a matter of months, within the first two years of his presidency, woodrow wilson brought about reforms the likes of which the country had never seen before. he introduced lowering of tariffs, the modern income tax, the federal reserve system which 100 years later is the very foundation of the american economy. child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, he put the first jew, louis brandeis on the supreme court, shattering the first important glass ceiling at the federal level, did all these things, was on a great role and in fact would have continued rolling this way except for two cataclysmss, the first was his

beloved wife from georgia, ellen wilson of rome, ga. suddenly died in the white house after one year. the second thing is she died the very week world war i broke out. and now the president has to face a severe depression, a personal depression, can barely get out of bed because his beloved wife has died, if that was not enough the world has gone to war, the united states has to do something even if that something is nothing. that requires some residential decisions. wilson kept us out of war, largely i think because he went back to his southern roots. he remembered what happened in georgia, columbia, south carolina where he lived as a teenager and he saw a city still

charred so he did keep us out of war until 1917 when he got reelected, on the slogan that he kept us out of work and on april 2nd, 1917, woodrow wilson gave a speech that i considered the most important foreign policy speech in american history. contained in that speech is a single sentence that has been the bedrock of american foreign policy to this day. the sentence is very simple, the world must be made safe for democracy. you can like that sentence or not, you can agree with it or not or understand it or not. but nonetheless every american incursion since 1917 whether it was 80 or vietnam or iraq or

afghanistan, whether it is c rea, wherever, all goes back to that one sentence. and indeed, we did make the world safe for democracy, got into the first world war, helped win that war, we won it largely because i think wilson kept us out for so long and sent over a prepared army before we started fighting. wilson had 14 points he wanted to introduce to the world that would settle not just this war but might see to it that we just 5 full war to end all wars. the heart of this, the fourteenth point was the establishment of something he

called a league of nations and indeed wilson introduced this into the treaty, he got it in and he came home to america where he found much of america wanted it but the republican senate did not want to ratify this treaty party out of partisanship, and didn't believe america should be on the international game board. we should go back to isolationism. wilson took his case to the people, he embarked on a 29 city tour, the most quixotic venture a president has ever embarked upon trying to convince the people to adopt his league of nations. in the middle of that tour he collapsed, he was rushed home and suffered a stroke three days later. here is where the story gets good. because woodrow wilson and his second wife, a young widow he

met in washington, because mrs. wilson and a handful of doctors conspired for the next year and a half to tell nobody that the president of the united states had suffered a stroke and indeed for the next year and a half anybody who wanted to see the president, any document with the president's signature, anything before the president of the united states, first had to go through mrs. wilson. it is easy to argue. you will see it detailed in the book that edith bolling goals wilson, remember her name, became the first female president of the united states. wilson left the office a hobbled man emotionally and physically and even until the. he retired to washington and died in 1924. i will leave you with this, i will leave you with two

thoughts. the first is one from woodrow wilson. we are not put into this world to sit still and know. we are put in it to act. i hope you will all read about wilson and know more about wilson and tell people about him. people should know about wilson but i will be view this moment before i have time for a question or two with something max perkins said. let's go back to the beginning, the origins of my first -- something max perkins wrote, to the most important in his life, thomas wolfe of asheville and it was this, there could be nothing so important as a book can be and the fact that you all are here this afternoon proved that to me as well. thank you.

[applause] [applause] >> mr. bird has agreed to take a couple questions, we ask you speak to the microphone. >> i recall reading that in a delegation sent over to the side peace treaty -- verisign peace treaty, he did not include republican members. >> wilson took over, wilson took a delegation at the end of 1918 for the first six months, was gone for six months, delegation of five, he does have one

republican in there but he was a much older man, wasn't really in the political mix so you raise a really good question, why didn't he think it through and realize why didn't he bring more republicans? wilson felt what he was doing was bigger than partisanship and he knew he was going over now for the first time an american president was going to sit down at a table with representatives, leaders of 24 countries, each with a very detailed agenda. this was going to be a constant headache and i think he figured if he was going to be fighting with the republicans internally, when he is over there fighting with the rest of the world externally he could get nothing done. he had one specific mission, he wanted to be donations.

every country there has this agenda. they wanted money, wanted reparations, wanted territory, wilson, the united states, was the only country that did not have that. he had a super national agenda. that agenda was we want something to stop war. we don't want you people to have to fight each other again or us so that was it. may have been one of the great oversights. a lot of people thought he should have taken henry cabot who was his great foe in the senate, the republican dean of the senate and head of the foreign relations committee, wilson figured nothing would get done if he had henry cabot lodge to their. this we got close but no cigar, no legal. >> i wanted to ask a question about kate. kate's relationship with laura harding. where they just friends?

locals and a different take on that. >> of course the locals did. >> i am a local. >> what to say? i never met laura harding. she was alive when i knew kate. they had a special relationship. i think there relationship was something more than just friends, but i guess i was never in a bedroom or any room so i can't answer that question. it was a deeply emotional friendship. that much i do know. and i know that whenever katharine hepburn wanted to talk about friendship or up problem, she had as a young woman, laura harding was always a nice part of that solution. great figure in her life. and a very generous human being

rather like katharine hepburn herself. >> thank you for a wonderful talk about one unquestioned for you. do you think if wilson or the united states hadn't gone into the war what do you think of the argument that the great powers that were fighting would eventually have stalemated, settled and we might not have had -- we wouldn't have had the lead of nations but would have had a more moderate settlement that might not have produced hitler in the 30s? >> i should say i don't do speculative history. i know a lot of historians to have a crystal balls but i am not one of the. that being said, i don't quite buy it for a couple reasons. the war had been stalemated for a couple years. months would go by and hundreds of thousands of people would

die. millions of people throughout europe and a gain six inches of ground and neither side was showing any sign of stopping so there is that for openers. i do believe to get to the treaty itself and i should at america when i entered the war ended very swiftly. americans were fighting for six months and was all over once the troops got in. we lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers mostly early on and that was bloody and terrible. once we got over that little hump full war was quickly over. so i think tens of millions of lives were saved by our entry. the settlement itself, wilson again was the only one in paris who kept saying especially to the french and the british, ease up, don't make this a vengeful peace. if you do, he said, this is very

much in the book, you will all be fighting the same work again in 25 years and did you pull on your calendar you can check off a monday. he almost got it to the day that they would all be back at work again. so it was hitler, you raise the question, did that treaty lead to hitler? deep down, i don't believe so. the punishment imposed upon germany was not that terrible. it was not so great they couldn't pay it and they didn't pay it. so that wasn't an issue. as for hitler, i think a hitler was going to rise anyway. it was hitler, and it there first of all was demanded but second of all, there were a lot of germans who felt germany never had its day in the sun. this is our time to rise from whatever the ashes are. i do think had there been a league of nations in place, and

the germans wanted to belong to the league of nations, i think the likes of hitler, i think he would have been a fringe figure very likely. maybe i am just being quixotic, going back to my role back here, and wilsonian and maybe the boy wouldn't have happened. maybe the hitleribm ideas could have been stepped on very early on but the league never really had a chance because we didn't join him. ..

he took no money, he had no official title but they send him on a visit to the way you would send a secretary of state he had much more power mostly because he always ha had the president's ear and he was a personal friend of the president. in the middle of the six months wilson was away in pairs he had to come home for a three-week period to do business with congress and when he came back he felt house would have been left in charge basically sold the ranch and had sold out all of the work. as a result of that, wilson felt that he lost a lot of flooding

and stature an and have to starl over again and as soon as those talks were over, woodrow wilson never saw or spoke to the kernel again, ever. and wilson had that ability to cross him he just slammed the door but there was no question of his loyalty to wilson. there was nothing but enmity from this man who disliked wilson from the day that he arrived in washington, d.c.. >> we thank you so much. [applause] he will be signing books and book signing tent that's just over in the square. also, please try to remember the yellow buckets i'm not going to say what the book buckets are that they are at the end of the ideal. please help us keep the festival

free. thank you. and audible conversations going [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] we are going to take a short break but we will be back with more from savannah, georgia, in

about 15 minutes.

you mentioned of the affordable care act in the opening. do you think if the affordable care act had been in place with

health care have been any different? you were covered by insurance the whole time the six >> there was a time in my life i was about 23 shortly before we got married and i was sick and hospitalized i had no health insurance and spent our honeymoon money on hospital bills. i needed insurance and when i worked for the government i got the regular blue cross blue shield program and had got through my life and that basically financed and then i believe when i left the white house they were on medicare. in terms of my concerns there are a lot of them. "and the doctors. when i had my second heart attack in 1984 the care was perfect.

there had been a couple episodes but one of the thing that concerns me is i never knew who my doctor was until he walked through the door that morning and that is when i made the decision that i needed to find a first rate cardiologist in the washington area because i planned to stay and embarked on a political career. and to follow that over time was put onto the gw and i think the continuity i wouldn't be here today without it. i think that is a very bad sign. i worry very much about the tax. they have a good idea but no money. i had no idea.

he was in the macaroni grill and so forth and invested $250,000 gave enough to build a patent and sold it to johnson and johnson. the initiative and the incentive for them to do that and make it happen didn't come from the government they make devices from the very first and pay taxes now on whatever profit they make and so forth. but the new tax is going to be composed on the medical devices it's one of the dumbest ideas i have heard.

>> book coverage of the savannah book festival in georgia will be back shortly. on the war on women we are rolling back access to reproductive. there is no end to the record oe credible statistics on violence against women. we haven't stopped shaming girls about their bodies. you have to have a certain sha shape. the problem in terms of defining feminism is it true that what unifies a lot of women globally

and what is done to win then i don't want to identify someone about the victimhood. that's a very important critiq critique. women should be equal in their rights and opportunities, period. aware we don't see that, we want to push forward to make that possible in a statement. in terms of women's lack of access again to everything from education to health and information about their options. the book tv book club selection for the month february. on booktv.org you will see a tab

that says book club and you can participate in the discussion at booktv.org. we will be posting reviews and articles up there tomorrow. so the discussion will begin tomorrow and we will be posting on a regular basis. i hope you will be able to participate. the women's history for beginners is the february 2014 book club selection. >> what i saw was in the same way if it sounds trite and sorry but when i started seeing white people whose racial politics i just trusted i don't read like bob marley anymore. and it took me outside and it's

good in that you can't blame him for that and that does speak to that speech and of the ways in the speech of there is a moment in which king talks about a bad check and we have come to cash the check in the insufficient funds and if you understand it as a speech than it does bring the issues up to date in a way that the dream which is a vision, utopian vision and i like it. when are you going to come good on this check and say no one has ordered a bad check into the metaphor is that the declaration

of independence or the constitution said that all men,, black men and white men were created equal. it does do different things to how that speech can be remembered. not just can't we all get along but they have to be talking about reparations. there has to be a redistribution of wealth. you have to make good on what it means to be. and that is a different way of understanding the speech. 200 years ago in the shadow of which we stand he talks about the legacy of slavery and segregation in a way that makes

it clear there is more to a quality band simply the end of segregation and so when people take the judge by the content that is the only line now on the speech and they use that to ignore the fact that he says they have a legacy and consequences into the concern is quite often america has a set of conservative country rights to do is to pretend that it has no legacy so even you talk about the bombing in syria why are you bringing up old stuff?

it may say this one can't. that was over. you are still fighting that war. you haven't finished the course on the reserve and think about what you're doing but there are ways in which the speech even on its own terms it was not a radical speech.

john rizzo is next from the savannah book festival. his book is company man 30 years of controversy and crisis in the cia. an audible conversations [inaudible conversations] my name is linda and i'm delighted to welcome you to the seventh annual savanna book festival presented by georgia power into the new lutheran church of the ascension venue

which is made possible by the generosity of fran and sean. it's been a busy and a long day. you will not be disappointed by this one. we would like to extend a special thanks to our sponsor georgia power, the members and individual donors who will make saturday's festival events possible. if you would like to lend your support we welcome your donations and have provided you low bucks for books buckets. i hope i did that as well as the others have. we practice that a lot. i would ask you to turn off your cell phone and not use flash photography. immediately following the presentation, minister john rizzo will be signing festival purchased books at the book tend

in the square which you have probably all seen. please join me in thanking courtney and mark for sponsoring john rizzo's appearance here today. [applause] john rizzo spent more than three decades serving under 11 cia directors and seven presidents. his timely and candid book 30 years of controversy and crisis in the cia is an authoritative insider account of american intelligence and highly and hotly controversial operations including enhanced interrogations and drone strikes. he left the cia in 2009 and waited five years before publishing his book. he graduated from brand university in george washington

law school not long after in january of 1976 he arrived at the cia as an untested voyeur and rose to become arguably the most influential career lawyer in cia history. he received the thomas clarke award from the federal bar association and the distinguished career intelligence medal. the highest recognition awarded to an officer. please welcome john rizzo as we step inside the cia. [applause] >> thank you linda and all of you for coming. this is gratifying. i should start with a couple of comment. first full disclosure.

this is my first book festival talk. i have done speaking before the lawyers association, conferences and schools but this is my first festival appearance, so this is a new and exciting experience for me. but it's also a new experience for me albeit somewhat intimidating this is my first talk in a church. [laughter] the idea of an older cia guy talking about spy stuff i will try to stay focused but thank you all. i'm not going to speak any

longer than 30 minutes. and i may not speak that long because one of the things i have enjoyed about the public appearances is honestly not listening to myself talk because god knows after five weeks of either two or you have heard me say everything for about 25 times already. but what i enjoy is the feedback from the audience. i was telling linda right before i came on here that it never fails. i always get asked the question in all of my appearances i've not thought of before. so that is what makes it fun for me. i did, to get the way of the land here, i did attend the

previous address of the previous speaker which may have been a mistake on my part because i think it will become clear to you soon there is a vivid contrast between the two of us. he is obviously just a prestigious highly successful professional writer. i will let you in on another secret company man is my first book. it may not be much of a secret in terms of the book business, i do not know at this point. i'm still processing the experience i have been through. so i am not by any stretch -- i consider myself a professional writer. i thought it might be interesting i read the materials that were given to me to prepare

me for this appearance, and i noticed one of the suggestions for every speaker besides keeping it for 30 minutes is to discuss my life in letters. my life in letters is one book so that would be a short discussion. the idea of how on earth somebody who spends so much time inside of the cia how does one go about writing and getting an agent or publisher and getting the cia to agree to allow such a book to be published? as i said i haven't really talked about this before to an audience, but it's i think it is

a fascinating and albeit complicated process with your indulgence i promise you probably know other writer you listen to at the festival has quite the journey that i'm going to describe to you, but i think it does say something about how the cia operates and how people in the cia, once you leave the cia how they conduct themselves and how they must conduct themselves. when i entered the cia as a young fellow, 28-years-old in january, 1976, first i will preface by saying i'm not one of those people who grew up wanting to be in the cia. you know, i grew up in the 50s and six and it never once crossed my mind.

i wasn't even a fan of the talks as a kid as most of my generation was. it just never occurred to me. i graduated from law school and went to work i had seen enough of the private practice during the summer clerkships to decide i didn't want to do that and wasn't going to be very good at it. so when i did enter the federal government service, which i did i joined the department as a lawyer which is fine for the first job, but after a couple of years you know how it is in your 20s at least the way it was for me i was in washington, young and ambitious wanting to make some sort of mark and i knew i would never make the treasury, the first public revelations about the cia really hitting the media, the first

series of exposés followed by looking at the audience i think most of you were old enough to remember the committee hearings, remember those in the mid-70s. they first came to light and i remember watching those on tv not knowing anything about the cia but simply thinking i have no idea whether that place has lawyers but if they don't they may need some so that was it. that was the total of my planning getting at the cia, so i shot out a resume and it took me a while to address, that long story short, i got in, and when i say long story short from the time i sent a letter it was a full year before i walked in the

door because of the security processing and all that. anyway, when you come to the cia you are asked to sign then and now the whole stretch of forms that in some cases you are basically signing away or restricting your constitutional rights in many important ways. one of the rights that are restricted is freedom of expression. every cia employee has two sign a lifetime commitment that he or she saw never publish anything publicly without having been vetted by the cia in advance of classified information. so that was the hurdle i was facing when i first started to think about the idea of writing a book.

as it turned out didn't worry me all that much. i knew a couple things. first of all, by the time i had retired to 34 years later i had done a lot of work at the cia, one of which at the midpoint in my career, i wrote the internal regulations about how you get your books reviewed for publication. [laughter] i can say that now. so i knew where the lines were in terms of what kind of information you could talk about. and i also knew since i was on the other side of the table for a number of the memoirs over the ear i knew what the agency position was going to be because

i had espoused it for many years. that part honestly didn't bother me. i knew enough that i could write, i thought i could write an interesting, informed and hopefully entertaining story about my career. the problem of course is that i couldn't let anyone on the outside see what i was writing while i was writing it. the cia says you have to complete the entire manuscript before the cia will look at it. obviously that is a problem when you are trying to solve a book proposal first to an agent and then to a publisher. ..

>> you know, i became, i became afr 25 years of being happily under the radar at cia, by the time 9/11 rolled around, by fate i'd become the chief legal officer. so i am the guy who first heard about the proposal for the enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding. i was the guy who submitted those proposals to the department of justice, and i was

the guy who received, was the dress -- addressee of what came to be known as the torture memos that the obama administration declassified. so that was me. so i became, suddenly, involuntarily, not only a public figure in the post-9/11 years as the activities became more and more controversial and more and more of them were leaked to the media, you know, i became in some quarters notorious. which, you know, went with the territory. the, i mean, personally, you know, to be honest one advantage it gave me, of course, is that no one, no publisher, no agent would have been interested in me writing a book about my career were it not for that notoriety. you know, i have no illusions about that. but what the attention did give

me, and there's a lot, you know, there's a lot of negatives, negative attention, criticism. but, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't all negative, and point of fact be, near the end of my time in june of 2009 the l.a. times wrote, actually, a, you know, in the scheme of things a relatively favorable profile of me. talking about not just about my nerve years, but the 25 years i had been at the agency before then, and as luck would have it, an agent from william morris read that article. so am i going to write this book, will anybody be interested, can i get an agent, and william morris basically called me up and said we'd like to at least explore the idea of you writing a book. so that's how i checked the agent box. easy as that. but they said you've got t