air forces, 15 others, each had a commander. the commander of the 20th air force was hap arnold. he maintained personal command of that. this field commander was curtis lemay. when it came time -- when hap and don douglas started rand, with what they brought in as part of their little group was curtis lemay. so, he did have respect for lemay's ability to cut through and get things done. >> okay. thank you again. [applause] we do have books available. i'm sure he would be happy to sign them. if you want to read those. you may have been wondering.

you will all be very famous because c-span is filming us today. i don't know when that will air, the state had. thank you again for coming out. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> when you look at congress in 1901, less than 2% of members came from working-class backgrounds, got into politics and eventually wound up in congress. flash forward to the present day, the average member of congress that less than 2% of their career doing manual labor jobs, service industry jobs. so this is one thing that really hasn't changed, you know, lots of different aspects of the political process of change.

broadcast television, cable mayors, big money in politics and promote this is happening, one of the constant stirring back, during the last hundred years or so is working-class people are not getting elected to political office. >> you talk about the founding fathers. he mentioned hamilton a couple times in the boat and his view that the merchant is probably going to be able to represent the worker, probably has his best interest at heart. it sounds like from your data, from a study that you have looked at, you don't think that is the case. i guess if you talk about that. was there another founding father you didn't mention that had the opposite view click >> i'm glad you brought up the founding fathers. the question i talk about in

this book really doesn't honor the working class people are getting political institutions. almost no one in a policymaking institutions has real experience in the working class. that is a debate we have been having in this country since the founding covers since even earlier. alexander hamilton, james madison way in the federalist papers. their argument is one that stuck around ever since it basically boils down to this. it doesn't matter that there are no working-class people getting into politics because we all want the same things. we all want prosperity. we all want growth. today was sort of the modern version of that is what is good for general motors is good for the country and vice versa. what is the harm in letting the business owners, white-collar professionals call the shots? we all want the same thing at the end of the day. so this is sort of one old-school political thought political thought in this country. there's another school of political thought, the

anti-federalist at the founding sort of threat against this perspective. they said we don't really want the same things. if the government we set up only involves a political decision makers only come from white-collar professions, that is going to seriously tilt the policies they create. it is going to make it harder for the voices of working people to make a difference in the halls of power. so this is sort of a long-standing debate. the reason why i wanted to read this book and why i got interested in this question is these debates have been going on since the founding and people have brought anecdote and speculation coming in now, to these debates. but really interested me about the question is when i started there was any hard evidence on this point. one side would point to an example of white-collar professional who really cared about working people. that proves it doesn't honor. the other side will point to

working-class candidate who understood the needs of working people and say we need more like that. what i wanted to know in this book is, you know, if we stop looking at individual cases amok across large samples of politicians can't ever look at our political institutions as a whole, does it really matter all that much that white-collar professionals are calling the shots and working-class people are almost totally absent from our political institutions. so i really wanted to check this debate and try to bring the best empirical evidence, the best i could possibly bring to bear on the question. that is what i'm trying to do in this book. >> so i think you look at various bits of historical data, but you look at 780 degrees lawmaker? from 99 to 08. i think that you found dirt team of the 783, spent a quarter

monitor time and political jobs. you talk more about what the findings were an unalaska talk about lindow versus laura sanchez, which is a nice example of does it matter occupation versus income versus the economic status. >> absolutely. one of the real challenges in doing this research was when i started, you know, there was that sort of good database. but% of the average member of congress, before they got into office, did they spend white-collar versus blue-collar jobs. i couldn't really find any sort of database, just a spreadsheet that had this information. so the first task for me in doing this research was to actually create that. so with the help of research assistants, i went through a 783 of the unique men and women who served in the 106th through 110th congress.

1999 through 2008. the question i asked is what did you do for a living before you got into political office? for each of them are pulled together from a half dozen different almanacs, every piece of information we could find about the job they did before they got into political office. that was an interesting project in itself to find out all these different facts. so for instance, orrin hatch, who i oocyte known -- orrin hatch was a lawyer before he got elected to congress. in the research i found out he spent a big percentage of the time before he was a lawyer doing manual labor jobs in service industry jobs. he was janitor. he was a receptionist, julian working-class jobs in order to pay his way through law school. so what we did this boat together every piece of information we could find about this group of 783 modern members of congress.

and of course researching a book, i also came across lots of other data sets compiled by other people, scholars, interest groups. what i try to do in the book is look at all of them, use every available piece of information. the thing that was really striking to me was i got the same answer every time, whether we like a really detailed data on modern members of congress were sort of a classic serve and political science called the american representation study conducted in 1958 of these two political scientists surveyed the u.s. house members and make a really detailed information about what they did for a living and what they thought about the issues and how they voted and what committees they were on. you know, once i got access to that data set, i brought that in, too. i got the same answer every

time. this was the striking thing to me with every day is saturday examined, every government cannot every historical time. i was at the answer. politicians from the working-class really do bring a different gift to political office and politicians who get white-collar jobs and especially politicians who only get white-collar jobs in the private sector. that seems to be a major dividing line in our political institutions. >> next on booktv, robert miraldi talks about life and career seymour hersh. mr. hersh broke stories on the chemical and biological weapons. the beeline massacre and it, watergate, cia domestic spying on the abuse of prisoners at abu ghraib prison in iraq. this is about an hour and 20