no and in rick's case they did. but what -- they said no. but the big thing was i would say part of it wasn't just his bank account or credit card accounts, and they were little things that would come up. i can't believe he was so sloppy. well, i guess i can. heeds charge an airline ticket -- he would charge an airline ticket, new york to vienna, austria, and we were under the rules and regulations as a cia employee can you travel anywhere out of the country whether it was for pleasure you know, vacation, he had to get approval from the office. of course, rick hadn't done that in of all places, the in the austria the hotbed of spying

east -- vienna austria, the hotbed of spying? and had sales we were going along is probably like a police investigation if you're looking for a murder suspect. you are trying to eliminate rick as your suspect. every piece of information. you don't want to get the wrong guy. >> what did you determine what his motivations for spying? >> simple greed. it was money. now, money the web, again, a little bit of a twist. jeanne and i are absolutely convinced that it had not been for rosario, rick never would've committed treason. the material things were not important to him. but in early 1985, he was facing

a divorce, although he hadn't told his current wife that he needed a divorce, because he had promised rosario, who was now in the states that they were getting married in august. and rick community had to divide up his and countries assets. there were a lot. basically it was $20,000. that's really all he needed. and he certainly could have common to the agency. we help our employees. and he chose not to. however, he never ever would have been able to keep rosario in the style she had -- she thought she was accustomed to. neiman marcus was neiman marcus and up the ladder, that's all she was concerned with.

>> you indicated in the book that getting the manuscript vetted by the agency was a struggle. you finally got about 90% of what you wanted approved but you think this with historic the agency would want out. why the difficulty? >> first, let me just tell you to we didn't start to write "circle of treason" until nine years after rick's arrest. the first time we put pen to paper. then it was four years later after several serious medical issues, that we had our first draft. we submitted it to cia's publications review board for approval. it was painful. that first draft came back -- jeanne and i were just kind of shocked. it was pages of black. so it took us three years of

back and forth, and i think a big part of the problem was the story of the assets. this is the secret world of spying. however, every one of those guys, they were gone. and the kgb certainly knew more about the operations than we did because they were able to interrogate them. there were some of the things that the agency asked that we removed. they didn't tell us why. although we sort of had an inkling. times change. things that might not have been classified, i know -- when you are dealing with human beings, things that might not have been classified in you know 19 -- i don't know -- 2004.

there can be a circumstance that would require that story not be released at that time. so for the most part, i would say we were able sorry sorry. for the most part yes 90%. and the 10% one where circumstances had changed and the others were just stupid. in the sense, when you read the book you'll see people, their first name and the first initial of your last name. i don't know. i think it was like working for an insurance company. it was just what was on the rules and regulations. it didn't make any difference if these people have not been under cover but it did make any difference if they passed away

20 years earlier. they didn't make any difference that their names were in books all over the place. so finally we just gave up on that and said the heck with it. but i would say it was one of these -- it was just hard for them to accept that this kind of material should appear in public. but you paid for it. >> you mentioned that you did a straw poll and discovered that amongst the investigators, for lack of a better term, you did a straw poll and mr. ames made people the most uneasy or whatever the right grammar is. in the wake of all that we've learned over the last 10 years and more about the concept of blink and brilliance and genius and it just manifests itself after years of experience, the

resources around with them or could you articulate now what major thing easy about them? >> it was his ego. it was so huge, to the point that even his posture changed. that was the difference when i saw rick when he left for rome. when he came back, rick was a tall guy and always as i said a slob, slouched like this. he was erect. he was in charge of everything. he was smarter than anyone in the room. and we all knew that that certainly was not coming from cia. his career was a dead-end. he was a gs-14 and that was it. and, of course all of his

classmates, they are rising through the ranks but it didn't make any difference. you have never seen anybody with such a fright into the go. it really was almost frightening. it was so huge. and that was, as i say in the book that wasn't the rick ames i had known. he was a gentle soul. it was really a personality change. but you have to remember we worked with all of these people. with a pretty small little group, and we had known them for years. and i'm certain if you ask the same question yourself to your own organization, you can look in your office and say that person would never be a traitor. that person -- you know. hopefully your and it was really one of those. and i know the guys in the

bureau said, i just can't believe we are doing this. we said, trust us. it's just like gene and i could never find a spot in the fbi. we don't know the people. even though we know something we don't know the people and we don't know how the game is played. that does make a big difference so yeah, a lot of it is -- we could never find a spy working for the chinese to the reason we couldn't do that is we don't know the chinese service. we knew the soviet services. we knew them probably better than almost any individual working for them. at times you have to think like the opposition. it's that old story can anybody here, there are a number of you here who saw george c. scott in

patton when he said u.s. of the, i read your book. and that's really what it is. that's part of it. anymore questions? >> one more. if all this evidence and he was convicted, i have to say this rhetorically, why was he given life instead of the definitely? >> a good question. that's all that was on the federal books at the time. and i think this went back, and i'm not positive, but i think this would back years to frank church, the church committee. i think that's what it was. and i think it was death only in times of war and it might not have even been that. however, what did happen because

of ames, the death penalty was put back on the books. and robert hanssen faced death. but instead i think he got something even worse. he went to super max in colorado. bad place. that's the reason. >> was rosario a spot? and if not, what was she convicted of. i had to look this up. all honesty. rosario was convicted of two things, espionage was one and income tax evasion was the other. she signed of those 1040s. she did not know rick was fine until about a year, and their stories much on this one until about a year and half before he was arrested. she found some note that it was

obvious this was this have to do with the soviets. however, has jeanne always said, she never once asked one question about the thousands of dollars, the bags of cash in the garage. and she spent every single cent she couldn't. it's just my personal opinion those guys having to listen to those caps something was going to happen to her. and that's the reason she got the five years. okay, thank you, guys, for coming. [applause] >> thank you very much. she is happy to sign copies of her book, which are for sale if you don't have one at the cash register at the front. thanks again. >> thank you.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> now, nicholas griffin looks at how chinese ping pong in its foreign policy in the 1970s including the invitation to the u.s. table tennis team that laid the groundwork for president richard nixon's trip to china. this book is "ping-pong diplomacy: the secret history behind the game that changed the

world." this is a less than one hour. >> well, thank you for all coming up tonight. i know it's a friday night and it's miami. there's plenty of time to get to the clubs down on the beach. so i will see you all there. so "ping-pong diplomacy," it's an extraordinary moment in 1971 when this deeply ingrained antagonism that existed for 20 years between mao and china and the united states suddenly fractured and it all seem to happen in the blink of an eye. the story goes that it was these ping pong players who start the process rather than politicians. and the press loved it because it was the spontaneity it is almost too good to be true. it was a story of a young american who befriends a young

chinese, and together the two guys start this process that literally changes the world. that's what we were taught to if you know anything about ping pong diplomacy, that's probably what you know. it's a pack of lies. it's a false renewed into ever wanted you to do. it falls neatly into the kissinger and nixon narrative but it fell neatly into the mao and his narrative but it's not the full story. this book is about the full story. so i want to start off in the beginning and tell you i want to present three different vignettes that i want you to hold in your hands. they are very different but they will be connected. so first of all if you would imagine a sort of doubt and add the setting. it's 1908 and there's a young boy standing there. he is four or five years old and is going to be a communist revolutionary but at the moment

he's dressed in black velvet suit with pretty self ruffle and patent leather shoes and is trying to get to the window by his nanny is holding him back in this huge house in london. and she's trying to comb his hair and he wants to get to the window because he knows that someone special is coming, the princess of wales is coming. and teaser rate excited because enough there will be golden carriages and dolby 12 white horses, just the right thing for a four or five year old boy to see. so he rushes downstairs and he sees his mom and dad and he sits down, and this woman comes in wearing a brown dress and they have tea and then she leaves and she gets into a motor car and then he turns to his mom and he says what is the princess? that was the princess pic he feels a deep and deep disappointment. that disappointment will actually be returned when the princess of wales becomes the

queen and she will write a note of condolence to his mother, not because he has died the because is done something even more forgivable, unforgivable in british society. and that, in mary's not one class beneath them but two classes beneath them. and the headline switch the nation. barons at sun waits secretary but it doesn't just dashed into the front page of "the new york times." it's considered that much of a shock. the second vignette i want you keep in your head, too, fortysomething chinese men in a cave in central china, a big cave. between them is a ping pong table tickets the 1930s. one of them has a slightly weathered arm and he brokered in a horseback accident. his doctors told him the best thing he did it by ping pong ping pong every day of his life. that's what he's doing but even more strangely, they are playing during a bombardment.

the cave is shaking as this game goes on. the third vignette i want you to imagine an american hippie. he's taking out of the hotel. is not just in any hotel. he's in a hotel just to the site of tiananmen square. is the first hippie who was ever stepped into china. he escapes with different. they go wandered through the streets. still in the middle of his very, very early morning, a crowd starts following them. they decide since everything is communist in china what they're going to to just borrow a bike but as they go to borrow a bike they can tell the crowd doesn't like it so they pull the by they look at the crowd they start to get on at the crowd starts moving towards them and they realize they're about to get into trouble. they dumped the bikes and expressed back to the hotel. those three vignettes are really the beginning, a middle and end of "ping-pong diplomacy" and what the initials is just a

political this game was from it's birth which is something nobody knew in 1971 your no one has spoken about since then. that first young boy who becomes a communist revolutionary goes by the name of ivan montague because of his father is called lord. the two chinese been playing ping pong our mao zedong and his future premier at that point. the american is this young free spirit called glenn, born in california not really doing much if anything, decide to get into ping pong, so it gets invited to join the american team for the world champions in japan, but two days later, boom use one of these spontaneous diplomats was roped into beijing out of the blue who becomes front-page news on every newspaper in the world in the early 70s.

now, what i'm going to talk about for a second is why this book is relevant. what i don't think we have to concentrate very hard to know that china has come a long way in the last 14 years and this sino-u.s. relationship is more important than ever. it is of course the only country with a template for empire. they have done it before. up until the 1800 china was the richest nation in the world and have been for a long time. it's very hard to imagine other empires recovering anytime soon. you can't really see athens getting their stuff together but you probably can't see wrong coming back anytime soon, even i don't think england has got much of a help -- much of a hope in hell either. but the chinese have been here before. they made a lot of big mistakes before and they made a lot of big mistakes getting back on their feet again. most of those were implemented by mao but they were on the right road agenda.

what other chinese intentions? so much osha the edge is nobody knows. there's this whole industry of commentators and authors who make a living on, taking on what might happen in china and the only reason that's possible is we just don't know. the best metaphor i heard was if you take two tiles and a bunch of potty. if you squeeze those together what we know about china are the little bits of putty that is squeezed out along the side. that's probably just about there. if this relationship is so important, don't forget them all these nations that china is sort of maneuvering around right now japan, south korea, taiwan, these are nations we have defense treaties with. we are in there. just account of it matters the chinese also of course old $1.2 trillion of our debt. it's an important relationship to some maybe it's worthwhile having a very close look at how this relationship really started

in 71. but the real question is why ping pong? ping pong diplomacy. this thought occurred to me in 2008 when my in-laws were kind enough not to invite me to go to the 11th. i went along and we were wandering around and one of the fun things to do is look at some of the more love sports but, of course, ping pong is not unloved in china but it's good to go into what should be played so seriously. what you realize even then was it was about gold it was nationalism, about acceptable place of nationalism. if you are a journalist in the trade of any kind, when you walk into these stadiums you're given a big bunch of papers with lots of information just in case you want to go and write about that fantastic match between uganda and ghana in the corner. the very first act on the page was it every week in china 300 million people will play ping pong at least once.

if you've ever been to china you know one thing. china is a top down country. it's not bottom up country. that means someone at sometime made this decision to tell everyone to play ping pong. it's a very strange idea but it's true. you think of all the things they could have told them to do a nation of weightlifters or sharpshooters. but no, it was ping pong. so why? why would he do that? i'm english. the english love sports but at the height of a push empire the english were codifying an expert in sports at an incredible rate everything from cricket to soccer and rugby to hockey. these are all english of sports. but the chinese decided to concentrate on ping pong. so i asked the first chinese person i met who knew a thing or two and i said how did that happen? don't you know? it all starts off with an englishman and his name is ivan montague. so i went back and i started

digging. i wonder this guy was, how on earth did he get to china? why did the chinese listen to him? the first thing i found out about ivan montague is he was the son of the lord. so and very noble family relatively new noble family, and he was the third son, the youngest son of three. the least popular you would have to say. he had a very, very rich childhood. they had not one but two enormous country houses, very much doubt and abby like. he reacted against his family for young. when he was 13 he befriended george bernard shaw and h.t. wilson started talk about socialism. by the time he was 18 he decided to really he should take a step further and become a communist. he also went to earn a living. the way he start to earn a

living was in the film world and the very first directory met was a young man called alfred hitchcock. so he started producing films for albert hitchcock. at the time when you turn 21 in england in those those days you were finally allowed to travel without parental permission to on the day of his 21st birthday he got on the train to moscow. sure if he gets picked up by russian intelligence services. he's the son of a parent. who wouldn't want to be friends with him? and the gets sent back to london and the gets called out again the following year and ask them to come and work secretly for a communist international and that had a very precise mandate, and that mandate was to bring communism and infiltrate foreign countries through culture. so time when it is wonderful opportunity and began to do so. is doing all of hitchcock's spy

moves a hitchcock has no idea that his producer is actually a spy. and this goes on in this relationship continued for five or six really good movies, 39 steps, some of the greats. i'll give you one quick short story of what a typical week in this young man's life was. he could move so quickly for through different social circles. it was just remarkable. but first his great hobby of course was ping pong. he was probably the only person worth the investment to start the international table tennis federation which he called -- he gets the ietf, international table tennis federation going when he's 20. he starts having these world championships. on his way to one of the first world champion gypsy sites write a letter on leon leon trotsky.

trust yet or had a split with stalin, and trotsky was living in exile in turkey and very worried about being a suspect, as ultimately he was. but he opened the door and let in this young aristocratic in lisbon who claimed he is interested in the labor movement. he has no idea he is a stalinist. they set up all night and they talk. they talk politics at the end of eating trotsky confessors eastward to my disgust at any moment by a stalinist enhance ivan montague a loaded pistol. ivan montague is many things but he could've in history books and we all know about in but he wasn't a killer. so he just slept through the night is to actually didn't sleep. he got up went fishing, almost drowned a continued in the ping pong tournament but that was a very normal week. i can't tell you that you are some of the people he gets to know over the years. mousy time fdr prime minister,

the king of england, charlie chaplin, alfred hitchcock it's remarkable reading through his letters but it's almost immediate that no one has ever talked to montagu before because there's no when he doesn't know. now, when world war ii started, there he is he's been sort of this sleeper died moving culture through but now the russian needs him for something more dangerous. they want him to start spying for the g.i. you. bgi you makes like the kgb look like chicken the. this is the sort of military intelligence gathering. and, of course he's in a great position because his brother happens to be very high ranking naval intelligence officer. so that let's him become this superstar for the soviets during the mid 1940s. after the war into circles back to more of a common term stuff.

and there's this amazing coincidence at the end of the 1940s, and that is that mao takes over china. and montague suddenly have someone who actually run the likes the game of ping pong. in charge of the most published nation on earth. to recognize this as an opportunity for culture sports communism. this is perfect for montague your three kids on a plane and he flies to china and tries to sell the chinese on the idea that ping pong would make a fantastic national sport. it seems preposterous. he has tried this in russia and it didn't really work but here he is and is trying again, and to his surprise the chinese think it's a pretty good idea. now, they run with it in the 1950s. they don't want to come out and play yet because the chinese come when they came out to play i wanted to come out to play and win. they did want to represent themselves as weak.

so they work hard and put all of state money in and they get better and better and better. the end of the 1950s is of course the great reform in china. the only thing they're actually great for, successfully in its ping pong. to actually win the first gold medal. the rest of the country is an absolute disaster. montague has another friend who is one of the great soviet peasant scientists and he had this wonderful idea that all seats were like a good congress. that seats, if you sprinkle them close together with aid one another to grow and only strengthened together. of course, if you think about agriculture, that's probably the worst idea in the history of agriculture. and sure enough, it is. all of this fails dramatically across china. montague supports the idea. mao supports the idea.

they're trying to industrial at a rapid rate. everyone is throwing every steel thing they have on these homemade furnaces, and the country fails. and if you believe the chinese statistics, 17 million people died between 1950-1961. if you believe the most recent statistics by historian in hong kong, the number is actually 44 million. to put it in perspective that would mean if you left tomorrow morning from miami and decide to walk to washington, d.c., you wouldn't see anyone on your entire walk. now, montague wanted to do this come at what he did was he offered the chinese the chance to offer, to host the first ever world championship in any sport and that was going to be table tennis, which they could show themselves in a really good luck to the rest of the world. seemed like a nice idea but what happens though is because it is such a disaster, this now is a

vital opportunity for the government to show that things are just fine thank you very much in china so they decide to do something remarkable just to invite in a lot of foreign journalists at the table tennis teams, some audience members and officials. they pull this thing off. the british charge -- he doesn't think it's much of anything. i actually think the whole point of propaganda sometimes it's not about shouting the lives from a rooftop as loud as you can but sometimes it's about hiding the truth. and in this case the fact that no one accused for for many people have died as rather a remarkable thing. what's happened now is the young men and women who perform her goals for the chinese come because you can imagine the pressure having chairman mao come to your table tennis practice session. he didn't want to disappoint him. some of them cracked and were

sent out of the game but many others continue. they won all the goal. and these guys become superstars in china. they get to go on holiday with all the revolutionary leaders. they get to have dinner with them but they get to go to the white house -- lighthouse. they're having a great time. the other thing that happens to them, and some began to be used as diplomats. mao has decided he doesn't like the way the cold war is going. he doesn't like the idea that the world is just being divided between the united states and russia. why shouldn't there be a third rail? why shouldn't china lead the developing nations with what he does is he sends these ping pong players out across the world to ever through africa, asia and that's supposed to be the spearhead for the diplomats to follow but, in fact, many of the officials who traveled with him are actually diplomats in

disguise. and this is all working really, really well intel the middle of the 1960s when mao is being challenged for leadership and he unleashes the culture revolution on china. such as when things are starting to come back to normal, the whole country is turned upside down again. and what he does is he takes the young and he turns them against the old. he tells them that it's their time to the revolutionaries as well. and then it's it still possible to practice revolution against your elders. now, anyone who is tied to those elders is suddenly in trouble. that basically means anyone who's had any kind of success since modern china resisted it and, of course, the ping pong team that is supposed successful sporting team and they are dragged on stage in front of thousands of people. they have their heads shaved to their tortured and tortured so badly that three commit suicide.

these are the people who brought the most sporting tour to china and who they are. in fact, one i found that wasn't actually, even commit suicide but was beaten to death. it's very sad story. so what happens at the end of the '60s then is mao has cut his country in a real pickle. not only is he upset domestically, but during the cultural revolution he withdrew every ambassador he had from around the world. in the windows what's going on inside china and china doesn't know what's going on around the world anymore. so he's decided he's going to try something drastic to breakout of this where he is. and this is an extraordinary thing that he does. he decides in order to triangulate the world as he wanted it to be so you can put on the same stage as russia and america, he's going to go and pick a fight with the russians. so on the border, the northern

border on the frozen rivers the chinese ambushed a russian patrol and killed 30 of them. this escalates very quickly and within a few weeks 1 million russian troops on the chinese border. it looks like a real miscalculation. mao decides to turn things up a notch. he launches to nuclear tests on the chinese side of the border designed so the fallout goes over the russian troop position. the russians as you can imagine a hotly met and they go straight to washington, d.c. and asked america to greenlight a nuclear attack on china which, of course, the americans don't because a lightbulb goes off and the lightbulb of course is kissinger and nixon thinking wow, this is something we could exploit. this is actually very good news. why don't we work with this? now, of course mao is thinking something not entirely different. he asks his doctor one that compels in a riddle.

he says, what do you do with all your neighbors hate you? we have india as one of our neighbors. was launched a war against them less than 10 years ago. we've got the taiwanese. they hate us. the japanese we hate them they hate us. we got the russians to the north. we hate them, they hate us. the doctor did not answer it. mao said we should do what her ancestors recommended which is to reach across the oceans. we should contact the americans. that doctors were but. the american, these are the running dogs of capitalism. this is against everything they've been told for 20 years. mao is comfortable with this. he thinks it's a good idea and he starts this game to try to reach out to america. and meanwhile, nixon and kissinger are thinking exactly the same thing and they're looking for channels to reach out to china. so this game starts going and they finally find pakistan. pakistan starts passing handwritten notes that takes three weeks across more going

back and forth. and things are looking pretty good. this is 1970. things are coming along nicely but in for julie mao from his next move was so subtle, he didn't recognize over. he took a left wing american journalist and put them on his right hand side during a parade and the thought that was a brilliant sign and it would be picked up by the cia and the foreign services, and nixon would understand that that was an important message. nixon doesn't get it because that journalists -- everyone thinks is working for mao. mao thought he was working for the cia. that's a bit of a problem because nixon decides to continue the vietnam war and he tells, start bombing the ho chi minh true. the chinese are like what kind of signal does that? so instead of back channel working you've got total silence. so what mao need to come up with is a signal so glaringly

obvious, so smack you in the face obvious that no one can possibly get it wrong and this is why they just ping pong. so suddenly there's a job to do. they will have to coordinate this whole thing and position it so if mao gives him the green light he can go. so he now got to get a team to the world championship. there's only one problem. the world of chevy chase are in all countries are in japan. they don't have diplomatic relations with japan. he has to jump through several hoops and the funniest permission to go to japan and since they came to japan. the only problem is that team is so terrified having been terrorized from the culture revolution that nobody really wants to go. in the end they don't have a choice and mao writes this great note saying we may not -- domain a domain i come home we may lose a few but they should go

anyway. which was very mao. so they get to japan and now they've got to reach out to the americans. you have this incident that's become popular where this hippie a week started off to talk with it's on this bus. instead he gets on this bus. they have a nice chat. they get invited to china and these ping pong players open diplomatic relations with the chinese. not true. what happens is the chinese have their own bus but the chinese have their own practice dating to the have the own hotel. the chinese weight for glenn cowan. ♪ sacajawea's. glenn cowan's ego is so large that he thinks that scoping out because such a good in this table does but table tennis player. debit not to. he's ranked somewhere around

100. the chinese are number one, two six, 11, best known. the last thing you need is advice from glenn cowan. so he said he was waived on to the bus and that's true. when he gets on the bus this is same as moment where he gets given a silk screen portrait. that alone says a lot. the chinese are very precise about giftgiving. there's a story in china -- store in china where if you're going on a diplomatic mission you ago and you go i meeting with ambassador, i'm meeting with a couple of secretaries, and he would pick from the right to. he once confessed in if you i'd pick something that's because i was going to give it to an american. which says it all. it wasn't a coincidence. so this is a fantastically organized detail set up to get the americans into beijing. so this core group of americans

are about this diverse group as you can get. they are black white, latin high school girls, ibm engineers, a guy an immigrant who works in the u.s. and the chinese love. they all land in tiananmen square. they have 36 hours. this becomes, this takes the world by a storm. "new york times," one of the players had the gall to bring the new times the week before he left and offered to cover the world championships for "the new york times." now they call him begging him to write. they're all on the front page of every newspaper in the world and its a huge huge thing. but imagine being those table tennis players. someone on that team is carrying a large stash of drugs. someone on the team is about to declare in the next 48 hours is

deep love of chairman mao and communism it and yet the entire world is watching. and back in washington, nixon and kissinger are having conniptions. they've been practicing this secret diplomacy both on and so because they are with everything removed from the hands and they don't know what's happening. luckily, joe knows what he is doing. and this story runs for weeks and it creates this enormous feeling of warmth between these two countries. this myth of glenn cowan and his chinese counterpart and brotherly love and support works well for all form because anyone else has the same in the game here, which is really to upset the russians. they were each touch can do to upset russia, the more likely it is that rush will come back to the bargaining table in a much warmer frame of mind. the russians were loving vietnam. pages that vietnam could go on

forever. what that does is gives leeway to mao and makes -- mao and nixon to move on. nixon said -- mao says i love dealing. they are direct. extra knitting for it comes later to say. but i think of all the people in this adventure the meticulous manipulation of the tiniest details is most remarkable, and everyone was bamboozled. the soviets, the chinese the taiwanese. the path was open a. that really means the whole world has changed. the greatest irony which i'd like to end with here is that this is all started by ivan montagu. he had only two real buzz in his life. in phone and the soviet union. and now his own game has been

used to conspire against russia. the americans and the chinese have gone their own way. and guess where we are today? were a much more in that direction and anything ivan montagu could have possibly imagined. thank you. [applause] >> nick it will take some question. this mic doesn't project into holbrooke but it's important for the internet. so if you the question, please raise your hand and i'll make sure i come up to you. if the room can't hear it, you will repeat the question. any questions? >> what inspired your research to even start looking down this

path and for this story? >> what inspired my research. it was a niche of two. it was going to beijing and looking at ping pong and wondering what on earth this was happening. i also always wanted to write about politics and by different nations chose different sports as the national games. it's something i pitched as a book, and considering this book took me four years, thank god i didn't so the other one because it had us six sports in it and would've taken way too long. a remarkable thing was when i went and found the name ivan montagu. we knew of view montagu's in england. i said how about ivan montagu? he said of course. it was my father's best friend uncle, and he'd never been around to meet his own uncle his whole life. no one really knew why. now they know why.

i'm heading for london to launch the book next week and i think i've seven the of the montagu family. are not quite sure what i'm going to say. >> i was reading your review in "the new york times." you mentioned something about the 1972 with the chinese table tennis team was in the united states and play the americans and nixon decided to bomb the harbor at the time. how was the political time at that point? >> it look like the return trip, this return trip was very important when everything was supposed to be balanced. it was sort of a low in the vietnam war. i don't know quite why they decide to do this but the timing was smacked on the end of day

two of the chinese talk, so was terribly embarrassing situation for the chinese squad define themselves in. one of the great allies, the north vietnamese are being bombed by their host. and this creates real outrage not just didn't actually know windows there was outrage with the chinese grew. they were told to keep a poker face and no matter what happens they should not let anything through this ongoing diplomacy. what really -- who really gets upset is the american interpreters for the chinese. sunday, very, very established in human rights in china. and they are so outraged that when it comes time to visit the rose garden and go to shake hands with nixon, they decide that is last minute boycott of event. and i think four out of the six don't show up in which that was

ever knows in this awkward spot because no can talk to the chinese. so it was extremely awkward. >> tell us about the research process in china. how did you find your subjects? how did you gain access to them? how were you allowed to interview them? >> greater question. she may know a thing or two. had i really know what this book would entail i don't know if i would have written it. i was very naïve. i thought that asking people for interviews in china would be the same as asking people for interviews in any of the countries that i've worked in and it wasn't. i stupidly forgot that just because you retired as an athlete 30 or 40 years ago doesn't mean that you still don't, art managed and living

for instance, in government quarters. so basically every single person who played in those 59 squads in china or 61 are taking care of by the state. so in the end i had to go to the sports ministry. and it took a very long time and had to submit a lot of papers to get permission. and in the end they gave me permission. i didn't like about what i was up to. i was pretty darned august the more honest than it was with my publisher about what is going to write. what was fascinating was the sort of different but different reactions between the players. some of these guys, some of the older guys who have drifted away from the state but were still taking their pensions and everything were very open with me and really told me some extraordinary stories. but some of the ones who have stayed and gotten to a very high

level gauge, you know, i would get three word answers to questions. they were very glad to see the back of me. but generally i was amazed by how kind and open the players were with me. >> nick, it seems very interesting that they had a lot of -- were really diplomats. that was the way they're trying to reach out. did they have a backup plan? what if that had failed? >> there were many ways in which it could have all gone horribly wrong. one, the most obvious way is is the american team when they were asked to go to china the obvious thing for them to do would say are we allowed into china? the chinese had just changed out of the tactics, that change the

rules just before the invitation was issued. but they were really lucky that when they rang the embassy in tokyo, august they were in japan at the time the man who picked up the phone was just extremely bright wonderful guy named bill cunningham. he has a mind like a steel trap and he remembered that in a forum poster board that several hundred pages long there was one line saying that athletic exchanges could begin. the last thing he wanted to do was to give state department approval. so he could say yes to do what he has to say is you are individuals here you are america's. the state department want nothing to do with it but you can go. so they think there will be this huge process so they all trekked to tokyo with her passport thinking there will be some official step in all it is is some kind with a sharpie causing on the line this is you can go

to comments china. but it was that fragile. he was a master on his side but it did require a little bit of luck on the american side. i daresay there would have been another plan even more obvious to identify you could've got more obvious but we will never know. it's probably somewhere in an archive of the hasn't been introduced yet. >> for the research process were you unaware that the soviet try to boycott between the chinese and americans? were you aware that the even tried to convince the japanese not to have the tournament's? >> yeah, there was a lot i found out along the way. i didn't know that much history from the russian side at the time. i didn't know about the nuclear standoff.

i didn't know it would go all the way to washington and there was a russian defenseman who very much wanted to press that button. we always think you're of the two missile crisis is the closest we've come to launch a nuclear war but this was really close, to the point where there's a campaign in china in 1969-70 in every city in china and they were convinced by the end of these to get the entire population in cities underground. hundreds of millions of people. it was a hell of a campaign. but no, i really did know -- it's remarkable and a lot of fun is reading the russian telegrams the week when the ping pong players enter -- you've never seen someone has terrible ambassadors in your life. they're all taking beatings, whatever country uganda, any country in the world with their american counterparts and they learned you cannot trust the chinese but whatever you do don't trust the chinese.

kissingekissinge r is reading all these reports as they come in and he is loving it. he thinks this is brilliant. and he was right. the russians have been so intransigent in the two years before that. we've been trying to get them to the table with no arms talk. edward liddy things drift on and operate the no interest in vietnam ending whatsoever. so this was a total game changer. >> i mulcaire is about the highs and lows of when you write. when you're writing, with the moment that you are thinking i got some good come at the moment that you want to throw in the garbage and walk away. >> the high is definite always the first draft when you're on a roll and things are looking great. the low i can tell you is when your editor and you back that first draft. [laughter] in this case i had in a 500 page book at anyone has a copy in

hand sees it as come out i think at 295 pages. so that's a lot of chopping. it's not so much that, it's just that a major wasted a lot of weeks or months of your life. in the other since you can't write what you write unless you really know the whole story. that lot of it that naturally falls by the wayside but i would guess in the end less than two or 3% of the research actually count but you just don't know what's what and tell your editor jumps in and starts telling you. and editors, the good thing is, a company like simon and schuster, they are very good at what they do. you can sort of be a little petulant for a while and you are never happy to get the first draft back but i'm grateful it's a thinner, tremor, faster. >> i have a question. as a novelist, why did you choose -- and it was a have a choice, but why did you choose

not to fictionalize all this? >> that's i think for me had i fictionalized this, i would have been able to sell it. it's a to preposterous. [laughter] i mean, come on. i mean, i can remember my first meeting with my agent and others like him are undefined a new agent and you really want something solid to impress a good new agent and i said i've got this idea. it's about international relations, espionage and table tennis. and you say table tennis, and eyebrows rise way up. but the story come it's so bizarre, and ivan montagu is such a strain chapter that i would never, i don't have the imagination to make up a ivan montagu. i don't. >> along those lines, do you think nobody thought -- talk

about it because -- are they purposely concealed that story? and if so do you expect your book have an impact now that the story is out? >> that's a good question. the remarkable thing about what they did was the way he carved -- compartmentalize information. for instance, even on the bus where this incident happened between glenn cowan and the chinese ping pong player, the rest of the team didn't know what was going on. so when this american if he walks on the bus during the cultural revolution, people have been killed for a lot less and saying hi to an american during the last five years of china. but the one that enjoys doing was the team captain who is caring and. is made a career out of that mold. mao ended up loving him so much he said this guy guy is such as a good table tennis but, he's

actually very good diplomat and he follows through. through. he makes them a member of the people's congress in an open he makes a member of the central committee. he becomes the minister of sports and political culture. unfortunately, even be friends a nice wife and was rumored to be a lover and when mao falls when mao dies is arrested and never thinks he has been executed. he spent two years in prison and 10 years in exile as a street sweeper. this is a guy after tonight probably the most famous guy in china at the time but he only died last year. he was occasionally, he would occasionally little things slip. he was a total maoist and other in. forget about all the streets with into china but once he was diagnosed with cancer, and many think he could've done. what he did was try to walk back to the revolutionary base would become his head when they're

down to the last 1000. so i think compartmentalization of information was the answer. >> based on the research you did on the chinese and chinese thinking, how do you say the relationship with the u.s. and the world moving forward? >> there are many people who can answer that question better than me but i'll give you my impression. ..

>> i mean, it seems almost silly to say, but those things mark china deeply. what the british did in china was extremely cynical running opium up and down its rivers and then, you know the french weren't far behind that then the russians came in, the germans came in, there were even americans over there. it's a hard thing to forgive. and i think especially when you consider world war ii really starts in china, in manchuria when the japanese invade this the '30s and the japanese are there a very long time and it's a very brutal occupation and that doesn't really end until hiroshima.

so all these things scar, and i think i would guess that somewhere with in the chinese foreign ministry there's probably a map of china at a very healthy stage in the ching empire and they'd probably like to get back to something like that slowly, steadily and without any bloodshed. but i think as you can see in the last year or two some of their actions are pretty bellicose, you know? and if you look at some of the maniacal gambles that mao took, i think we're a long way are that thank god. -- from that, thank god. they're very aware of their own problems x they have some huge problems. you know one-party states are, obviously, pretty brittle things. you know, they've got a lot of problems to solve before they can really start exercising their power, and it is also everything's regional. so, you know we're a long way away. if i was japanese, taiwanese or

south korean i might be a little more wobbly. >> let's take one more question. >> yes. hi. you had mentioned earlier about -- [inaudible] it was to make up a character such as montague. just curious if today's headlines on cnn saying that -- what's that guy with the pierced nose ring plays for the chicago bulls? you couldn't make this up as well. [laughter] was basketball another sport you would have written about? [laughter] >> it's a great question. yeah really crazy stories as well basketball, i almost wanted to do a book about that. but let's talk about rodman for a second. there's a great basketball story about frankenstein and hitler but i'm saving that one. [laughter] rodman, i mean, i don't know.

i kind of feel bad for dennis rodman in the end. i think he's talked -- he says i'm practicing basketball diplomacy just like ping-pong diplomacy, it's the same stuff. it's just that, you know as i found out pipping pong diplomacy had this huge framework behind it with political goodwill, and very active, a very active framework with. that doesn't exist. and the chinese were very busy sending positive signals that whole year leading up to -- we didn't get them all. now, one interesting comparison they actually released a dying priest, the chinese, in early 1971 as a signal. now, you compare that to the north korean treatment of kenneth bae who is also in ill health. that would be a very easy low-hanging fruit to show political goodwill. it hasn't happened. i'm afraid what tennessee misrodman is up to is probably more to do with reviving his own career than anything else. >> well, nicholas, thank you so

much. [applause] >> now, from the seventh annual savannah book festival lily koppel discusses her book the astronauts' wives' club a true story. this is 45 minutes. [applause] >> well, good morning. it's so nice to be here. i heard there was a vicious rumor going around that i didn't make it out of new york city because of the weather, so i'm so glad the volunteers actually believe this is me and that i'm here sharing this story with you this morning. i love great american stories and i love beehives. and a combination of those two things, as you will learn, led me to tell this amazing but looked-over american story of our original astronaut wives. so i want to bring you back to

1959 april 9th. there's a press conference in washington, d.c. and the whole country is rivetted and waiting for the announcement of the mercury 7 astronauts. the height of the cold war and we're looking to these seven men -- gus grissom john grandchildren, alan shepard among them as our cold war warriors these silver-suited men who are going to take us to the stars and beyond. so you have all of these macho test pilots sitting up on a stage, and something peculiar starts happening. the reporters are raising their hands, and instead of asking, you know tell us about your with bravery, about why you wanted to volunteer the reporters want to hear what does your wife think about this.

she's going to let you be catapulted into space in and so there's this immediate attention to the wives of these men. and i want to tell you about some of the women. there's reem carpenter who is this dishy blond. she's sort of the marilyn monroe of the space age. she wakes up in garden grove california, early in the morning and sees these headlights hovering in her yard. is it a ufo? what is that? no they're reporters who have come to interview her about what it's going to be like to be one of the wives of these spacemen. i mean it's almost science fiction. reporters can't believe it. and reem, who wanted to be an actress in high school she opens the door, offers the reporters coffee. some of them have brought doughnuts, and they start taking

pictures of her and her family as they're sort of crawling all over her and she's a real dish. jfk would later say he found her the most attractive of all of the astronaut wives. [laughter] because, of course, as they're going to learn they're going to quickly go through this cinderella-like transformation. now, out in ohio at wright patterson air force base betty grissom, gus grissom's wife just received a tone call the night before -- a phone call from her husband saying you might want to straighten up the house a bit, beth. you know some reporters might be coming tomorrow. and she looks around. the house is a mess. she's just getting over the flu. she feels terrible but somehow pulls it together, goes to the doctor the next morning, and as she's stopping at a grocery store on her way home, two reporters from "life" magazine encounter her in the vegetable aisle and want to know what she thinks about old gus going into

space, you know? she just wants them to leave her alone. of course, they follow her home. she's sort of the shrinking violate of the group -- violet of the group, very down to earth, folksy. she always repeated a quote of gus' which was we don't give a damn about keeping up with the joneses, which was more along the lines of keeping up with the glenses. annie and john glenn, the american superstar couple of the space age. you can't get more apple pie than annie and john. they literally met if a playpen -- in a playpen as toddlers in ohio and they are just, you know both sprinkled with freckles john glenn sort of having that "mad" magazine kid's face, annie to go with it. and annie was really sort of the ultimate astro-wife with. as the women soon learn, it's

not only a mission about getting their husbands, you know these grade a military test pilots who not only are picked for their piloting skills but, you know as some of the scientists say when they're picking the astronauts, there were some wild theories about what were going to happen to these men. were their hearts going to stop this space? were they never going to stop urinating? was their blood pressure going to fall to zero? so they're sort of picked for being literally human cannonballs. can they withstand it. and the wives, too, were actually investigated, you know by the fbi before the couples are announced. betty remembers some investigators coming over to her neighbors' home and asking questions about her. well, does mrs. grissom cook home cooked meals every night you know? she doesn't drink too much, does she? she doesn't have any communist

leanings. because all of a sudden not only the astronauts, but the astro-wives as thai called -- they're called in headlines across the country, are going to be disturbed up to the entire world as examples of, you know the height of american family values. and these wives, you know, probably the most stressful time to be an more than housewife, the late '50s and early '60s, have to hold up this model of perfection. so overnight they are transformed. and i almost think of them as america's first reality stars. and really it's like that because "life" magazine bought the rights to their exclusive personal stories for half a million dollars in 1959 which was a huge amount of money. and in exchange for that, they were to allow reporters and photographers into their homes

to just chronicle their day-to-day lives. what was it like to have your husband sitting on top of that rocket about to be blasted into space? so the women are sort of caught in this catch 22 which is they're supposed to reveal who they are, but yet there's this acute pressure to keep up with the glenns, to be that model american housewife, so they don't want to let out too much. in fact, the book is being turned into a television show which is going to air this summer on abc, and just looking at some of the storylines, i mean, it's very funny because one of the other wives of this group, trudy cooper, she was the only licensed pilot among the group, a very adventurous girl. of course, you had to be an adventurous woman to be married to one of these guys who were testing in their early careers

these high performance experimental aircraft. trudy cooper had had a little too much of the sort of "top gun" mentality in her husband gordo playing around on her. so before he was picked as an astronaut, he had to come with his tail between his legs back to his wife saying, you know, trudy, i have this amazing opportunity. i'm going to be picked as an astronaut. the only problem is they're not going to pick me if i don't have a wife, and we were just separated. basically, they get back together for the space race and they will later get divorced after gordo's career is over. but those were the kind of details that the wives were very skittish about letting out as they're having this incredible public eye and spotlight shined into their lives. so the program starts out in

langley, virginia. all of the families pack up and move to virginia and the men start training. and they're down in cape cape canaveral, of course, florida. and one of the most interesting things i learned just starting out on the book was how the cape, this sort of incredible men's playground down there where they were working hard but also playing hard, was a no wives' zone at first. going to the cape for a wife was totally off results. they actually weren't -- off limits. they actually weren't allowed to go off where the rockets took off from and the early flights all the wives would watch from the beach. at one point deke sladen's wife marge, said this is ridiculous. you're going to be going into space, i can't go to the cape? what's going on out there anyway? so she tells deke that he better drive her out there. and he hides her under some

blankets in the back of his car and they go out past the, you know military guards, and she gets out there and pops up her head and, of course, it's just, you know, sort of a lonely beach jetty and some scrub brush and what not. and she said the whole time she was just dying for a cigarette. but this is the kind of spunk ander reverence these women --er reverence these women brought to this brave new world of being an astronaut wife. so you suddenly have these seven women, all different walks of life. alan shepard's wife, louise was very sort of high bred. i think of her as almost like a intreep that, an audrey hepburn character. she grew up as the gardener's daughter at this longwood gardens, an e's candidate on the east coast. so when she met jackie kennedy she almost treated jackie like she was an old friend, you know? that they were two private school gulls almost getting to -- girls almost getting to know each other.

but you have this band forming. these women are in the public eye, and they don't though how to deal with it at first. and so they start giving each other little words of advice like if a reporter asks you to something you don't know anything about don't worry. just say it's classified. [laughter] you know? one of my favorite stories because a lot of the inspiration for writing the book just came out of these incredible technicolor looking photographs from "life" magazine. because the wives were on the cover of "life" dozens of times from 1959 to 1972 at the end of the apollo program. so the wives have their first cover shoot, and they're all going to be clustered around this mercury capsule which when you see it today in the smith sewn -- smithsonian i mean, this thing looks really flimsy, and you can understand why its nickname was the can and you

can understand how terrifying it would be to have your spouse ride in that thing. especially because many of the early it's launches had -- test launched had gone absolutely haywire with explosions and things just not going right until the last minute. but the women are told by "life" and nasa that they're to wear these proper pastel shutterwaist dresses -- shirtwaist dresses, you know? the epitome of the perfect american housewife. so they all start this tradition of the round robin phone call, and they're calling each other, are you really going to wear that a? what color lipstick are you going to wear? and they all decide they're going to wear pink lipstick, and everyone's going to wear a shirtwaist dress except for reem carpenter, scott carpenter's wife. and reem is really a bold character, intellectual, a really independent woman who will end up hosting her own feminist talk show in the mid

'70s and looking sort of gloria stein m like in mini doctorses and skirts. but -- dresses and skirts. but she says according to the other wives i'm not going to let the government tell me what to wear. we're astronaut wives now. our husbands are civilians they're no longer military. and so she shows up to the photo shoot, and she's wearing this cocktail dress with big red roses and red high heels. and, of course, the other wives are sort of aghast. but she really, i think, makes the shot. so you have that kind of melding of personalities coming together. of course the men, meanwhile they are becoming rock stars and everything that goes along with it. they're getting one dollar corvettes which they can trade in every year and get a new one. alan shepard gets this really snazzy white corvette. they're getting $1-a-night hotel

rooms at the holiday inn. this is all down in cocoa beach which is, you know, space city and just, you know, lit up with all sorts of neon signs of moons and stars and intergalactic fanfare. the women actually come town to coe -- come down to cocoa beach for a sort of ladies' weekend, and jo shira remembered walking into the lobby of the holiday inn and two women, these astronaut groupies who come with the adorable name of cape cookies fall to their knees in front of her astronaut her husband, you know? what is going on? and so you have, you know throughout the space race having to maintain, you know, this semblance of everything's fine at home. oh, of course. my husband, you know, i'm sure just goes home to the holiday

inn as soon as he finishes work. meanwhile, you know, of course there are all sorts of tabloid headlines coming out and everything. the space program moves to houston in 1962, and i had a lot of fun learning about this whole area known as togethersville. this is what makes nonfiction writing so tantalizing. this was the space burbs where all of the astronauts can and their wives moved. and it's almost like a beverly hills of spacemen. there were literally tour buses that would wind their way through the streets of these little subdivisions where john and annie glenn lived next to scott carpenter and his wife, reem, where betty grissom and jo shira lived a few streets down where the media attention on these families was so acute that

reem and jo actually had a doorway built in between their two yards which they called the rabbit hole that they could scurry back and forth between during a flight so the press wouldn't see them. astronaut kids were chased down the halls of the holiday inn when they went to visit and they were always told not to open the door to any reporters because they had this exclusive agreement with "life" magazine. one anecdote that one of the astronaut kids shared with me that i always, you know, have fun remembering is during apollo 11 that flight, the wives -- first of all, janet armstrong pat collins, buzz aldrin's wife joan, they actually had to hide in backseats of neighbors' cars even to go to the beauty parlor the grocery store because there was a whole media circus on their suburban lawns. at one point michael collins' kids open the door and they

were given a present of a panda bear. it was two journalists from, you know, i think china handing them this teddy bear. oh wow, this is great. well, it turned out there was a microphone hidden inside its stomach, you know? so it's this kind of marx brothers relationship with cat and mouse game with the press and the wives. now, these -- as one of the wives put it she said our lives were composed of highs and lows. and in a way what's so remarkable about this group of women is how down to earth they've maintained sort of their personalities. and, you know, or they were strongly patriotic they felt that they were given sort of an equal task in supporting their husbands' mission into the stars. i mean, they were going to do everything they could to support

the country's effort to support their husbands even when it meant, you know tucking things in backs of drawers, you know? emotional things to deal with for late err, sweep -- later sweeping things under the rug. as i mentioned they're living in this very almost truman show existence where no divorce was actually allowed within nasa until 1967 when it erupted in the first space divorce. so the women had to rely on each other. the men were away at cape canaveral. they would fly their hot t-38s down to florida on monday morning, they wouldn't return until friday night when they'd fly their planes down low over togethersville and rattle the houses, you know? and that was sort of, you know some of the astronauts' way of saying hi, honey, i'm home. put the roast in the oven, you know? your astronaut's home. and i recently went back to togethersville with some of the

women and went into -- i was with sue bean alan bean's first wife, and we went into their old house overlooking the pool. and alan bean who, of course was the fourth man to walk on the moon with pete conrad on apollo 12 had done this whole mosaic bar with the astronaut insignia. and sue is just sort of very beautiful still today, blond and texan, and she's looking out over the pool and says, oh, you know buzz and joan used to live over there and the bassetts were over there. and, you know, this was a really swinging place. and it was. the wives in the '60s formed the astronaut wives' club which would meet once a month just to sort of support each other and get to know each other. these were monthly tea and coffee events. they would always gather at each other's houses for all of the launches, and these are just

these fabulous scenes that aren't reproduced in women's gatherings, i think today because times have changed. but deviled eggs and overflowing ashtrays and martini hours and just sort of being there to support each other and going through something that, obviously, very few will ever experience. and the way the wifes dealt with the -- wives dealt with the pressure was very different. of course, you have the pressure of your husband, and you have the pressure of the media. and their most dreaded moment, even more than the possibility sometimes i think of something going wrong out there on the launch pad, was the postflight press conference. and this was the moment where all of the wives would have to walk out on their suburban lawn face the cameras and give a statement. and with receiving very little formal coaching from that is saw besides what they'd heard back this their air force and is navy

days which was feed your husband a good breakfast of steak and eggs so, you know, he doesn't get lightheaded up in the air, these women were basically just, you know, told to act picture perfect. and so they sort of did this send-up together. and reem carpenter whom i mentioned, sort of glamorous and outspoken blond, she came up with this one-woman show, and she called it primly stable. and that was her send-up name of the astronaut wife. and primly was married to squarely stable, of course her perfect astronaut husband. and, of course, they had their perfect astronaut children, and they had their dog smiley, and she calm up with she just said to the women basically whatever a reporter asks you, just tell them you're happy, proud and thrilled. so throughout the decade basically, whenever the wives are asked how they were feeling

while their husbands were up there this space or being blasted into space they often say happy, proud and thrilled. and, of course reporters are just tearing their hair out. no, we want to hear how you feel. but with back then it really -- but back then it really wasn't they really weren't able to put the feeling into words. and, of course, they were scared of revealing too much and in this highly competitive environment. if i show my fears like my husband, maybe he'll be bumped from the flight. marilyn lovell married to jim lovell, who are just a wonderful couple to this day, of course, he's played by tom hanks in apollo 13, when jim was going into space on one of his gemini flights, she -- marilyn found out she was pregnant, and she actually hid her pregnancy from jim first for a few months, which is pretty remarkable, until he finally found out ask is she said well, i'm sorry, i

didn't want you to get bumped from the flight. and be he said good idea, we should keep it secret for a little longer. but this is just a taste of the astro-wife life. and i actually would like to open up the discussion to questions now because it's such a rich topic, and i can talk a little bit more about what it was like going into these historic figures' living rooms and what it was like getting to know them as well. so if anyone has questions, please do line up. [inaudible conversations] [laughter] >> in your book you talk about one of the episodes on one of the lunar landings where the camera didn't work. and there was virtually sort of

a cover up because they didn't want to show that. i was wondering if you could kind of go into that. >> sure. well one of the most exciting things, of course, about walking on the moon, being on the moon for the guy withs and for -- guys and for everybody watching back at home because i think that's what's so incredible about the apollo program. it's, you know even for someone like me who who as one of the wives once asked me when i went to interview her, where were you when we landed on the moon? how old were you? i said, jo, i think i was moon dust. i wasn't born yet. [laughter] but whenever you become fascinate with the a subject, i mean, you can go there with the guys. all you have to do is look at the youtube footage, the television footage that they filmed. but the incident that you were just talking about was apollo 12. so it's the second mission to the moon, and alan bean add this television -- had this television camera that they were going to use to chronicle their

journey, and he by accident turned it into the sun. and so it was burned out. and so the only transmission that they were able to share with the public in, you know realtime was with the voices of the astronauts which, of course are going into the wives' homes on these squawk boxes which are these baby intercom-like space age devices that all the wives had at home. but, of course, the ns are just up inning out. -- the networks are just flipping out. they have big swaths of time allowed for it. is what they did was nasa had some mock-ups of the moon where the guys would, you know, practice going through their routines for when they were up there. and so they outfitted some actors in space suits and had them sort of mimic -- [laughter] what pete conrad and alan bean or beano as his friends called

him were doing up there on the moon. and i can only imagine it's sort of fueled the conspiracy theories that anyone who has anything to do with nasa, including the wives, of course, think they're absolutely ludicrous. well i'd like to tell you all how i came to write in this book -- write this book and a little bit about getting to know these women today. of course i'm a writer. i live in new york with my husband who's also a write who's in the front row and, you know our lives are really composed on a daily level of thinking about stories and thinking about ideas for great stories. but, you know, this isn't something, of course, you can manufacture. i mean, inspiration has to hit. so i have to admit at that time i was quite into the show "mad men." we were having this, you know, sort of tv marathon watching it. i've always loved the '60s

time period. my grandmother used to wear great lily pulitzer dresses. so we'd just bought this big art book, photo book of the moon landings with the norman mailer text of a fire on the moon. and i was looking through all of these pictures of neil armstrong on the lunar surface buzz aldrin in his sort of marshmallow space suit and just having sort of a tomboy moment, i guess. because these are pretty, you know male heroic images. and suddenly i turn a page, and i'm just hit with this burst of color, sherbet-colored, a group of astro-wives in their pastel mini dresses with these skyrocketing beehives. and i turned to tom my husband, and i just said, wow, look at these wives. this is incredible. i never really thought about this whole other side of the space program, sort of the emotional side of the spas race. space race. and wouldn't this be a fantastic

book? and it just sort of took off from there. and literally minutes later i was on google looking up where these women were today, you know were they alive? yes, most still were. and i found out incredibly that they have this club this sort of sorority that continues to meet to this day. they go on cruises and sort of continue to support each other through triumph and tragedy. one of the sweet things about the connection of the wives is many of them when i met them wore a little gold, gold bracelet with a tiny golden whistle on it, and that's one of their symbols. it's whistle and we'll be there for you. of course, it was really a matter of winning over these women's trust. they were always very protective of nasa of their husbands even if they were later divorced after their husbands came back

to the moon because startling amounts of the astronauts and their wives did divorce after the apollo program. and i see it as really a casualty of the incredible amount of pressure that was on these families to conform and to just work around these rigorous hours. out of 30 couples only seven marriages survived. so in many ways the wives, as they pointed out, their relationships have endured longer than many of the marriages. and they always joke, you know that the guys are just so competitive that their friendships have outlasted them as well. there were people that were more difficult to get to know than others. at the beginning everyone was sort of whispering, they said, well is betty grissom going to talk to you? i don'ti don't think beth the city's going the talk to you -- betty's going to talk to you.

she doesn't really come to our meetings. and so i was sort of nervous because betty was someone who i felt was really important to talk to. and sure enough, i got a lovely note from betty. she doesn't talk much on the phone these days because of her hearing. she said when you come to houston, please come to my home. and it was one of these interviews that i expected to be about two hours, and well, we went to lunch, then we went back to her house, and about 10:00 at night i'm saying to betty, well i think i should go back to the hotel, get system sleep, and then i'll -- some seem and then i'll come back tomorrow morning. she's just fun loving and honest and had the kind of memory where she would just pluck out pieces of conversations that she had with gus back in the day. and she and gus were high school sweethearts like many of the astronauts and their wives and betty's story is a tragic one. gus, of course, during the mercury program his capsule

sinks, so he's sort of given a bad rap for that first space mission of his. and from the early days, of course the women always had to deal with the pressure of, you know, what if he doesn't come back. and gus once told her -- and none of them, of course, there was a code of the military wife and of the astronaut wife which is you don't talk about the danger, especially with your husband, you don't talk about the danger with your friends because it was seen as a jinx. many of these wives had superstitions. jane conrad, one of my favorite women that i got to know during the project she used to have a little superstition i think we can all probably relate to it which was pete's pillow always had to be perfectly smooth on his side of the bed, and his closet door always had to be closed because if it didn't, she felt that something wrong could happen, you know? and this was just, i think, a reflection of the fears these women had to digest and sort of

just live with. gus always told betty that he didn't like her wearing black and she always said he -- she thought he felt that the only time i should wear black was to a funeral. and purposefully she didn't end up wearing black to his funeral. he always told her, listen, if something happens to me, i want you to have a party. and so early on in the space age she promised him, she said okay, i'll have a party. gus, of course is one of the three crewmen that died during the apollo 1 fire, and this is really nasa's first large scale tragedy when three men perish in a capsule that catches fire on the ground. and this was a very revealing part of what these women went through, because it was so excruciating. the way the deaths were reported within nasa, which was

relatively new, was, of course, an official man from nasa always had to tell the wife. so her closest friends or were always called before to say, you know something bad's happened out there on the pad. i want you to go to betty's house right now. but the women knew that they weren't allowed to say anything. they just had to stay with the widow until the official word could arrive. so it was very definiteliment in the case of betty and the two other wives of the apollo 1 fire, betty ended up suing nasa's largest contractor, north american, for $10 million later on in the negligence of the building of the apollo 1 capsule. and as a result, she was basically ostracized from togethersville by the other astronauts, by the other astronaut wives for, you know not touting the party line for going against the company, the

organization. pat white was a tragic story. she never really got over her husband ed's death after apollo i fire as her friends believe, and while they were planning a reunion many years later, she actually committed suicide which was very difficult. and they sort of saw her as the final tragedy of the apollo i fire. so, you know, a lot of heart ache in this story, but of course just uncredible american moments -- incredible american moments that somehow weren't seen as necessarily important to report back then because we weren't as focused on women's stories and the fact that behind every great man there's a great woman or behind every moonwalker there's a strong woman waiting back on earth.

and it's just, it's a whole other sort of constellation and perspective on what it took to get to the moon. do we have any other questions? >> hi. do you know, and it could be your next book, the astro kids how do the children fare in that kind of high pressure upbringing? >> well in many ways it was, as i've talked to many of the kids, it was sort of, you know, growing up inside clayed -- in the cradle of the american dream. you know, lush green lawns a pool that was shaped like one of the space capsules in the middle of one of the neighborhoods in the space burbs. you know the kids almost remember fondly oh, those were the days. our mother would lock us out of the house and say don't come home til dinner, you know? you all are giving me a headache. [laughter] and this was great because we'd

ride our bikes, we'd go to the pool, you know? that's sort of the memories of togethersville and the space burbs. but i think, you know, it was very difficult having a father who was a hero a father who was a hero but often an absentee father because they were away training so often. one of the astro kids remembered, you know, it was sort of strange. it was like dad wouldn't be home a lot but then suddenly he'd be there s and "life" magazine would be there, and we'd all be doing a photo shoot out on the kiddie swings out in back and eating ice cream. we never did this in real life. [laughter] so, you know, it was just probably what a lot of kids in hollywood deal with now or, you know, like i said their lives were or made almost reality shows. and so there was a brunt of dealing with that. just i'll shower one more funny -- share one more funny anecdote which was the wives were always sort of kidding and

complaining that they had to really drag their kids in to even watch the space launches you know? little johnny would prefer to be watching "star trek" but, you know listen your dad's doing some important stuff there. they didn't really -- oh, yeah my dad's an astronaut? my best friend's dad is an restaurant, he lives across the street. and it was the world that was normal to them, and the wives tried very hard to keep normal and grounded. >> you kind of alluded to how much the lives seemed to change after the apollo program ended and i was wondering if you could share some of the restaurants' or the wives' thoughts on what was it like when that ended? they feel like it should continue and almost was there like a sense of ptsd amongst these families at that point? >> yeah. i think, you know everyone was pretty sad when nixon ended the apollo program and, you know,

these wives -- who i see today and i think in history they are continue to be seen, and i've told this to them as sort of our pioneer space women. i mean, these, they were the pioneers. their husbands were doing something we had never done before, you know? just the surreal moments of going out in your backyard, as jane conrad remembered to me when her husband was up there on apollo 12 walking around the moon, and the house had just cleared out. she'd had all the wives over for a party. it was about 5:30 in the morning, and she wandered out by the pool, and she just looked at the moon and sort of stared at it. and i think we can all feel this when we look at the moon and just think about, wow, i mean, we went up there as a country, as human beings. but she said, wow, you know? she looked at the moon, she suddenly remembered when receives a little girl how she used the look for the man in the

moon. and then she said, wait, this is trippy. my husband is the man in the moon. [laughter] you know? and she said for this one moment she had almost this mystical feeling of charity. after all, this was the late '60s. people were into that kind of spiritual stuff. she said it, basically vanished in a moment and there she was back going inside to do the dishes. so moments like that. but to get back to just the fallout after the apollo program, i think probably the host prominent example is -- most prominent example is looking at buzz aldrin and his wife joan. buzz, like many of the guys had a very hard time coming back from the moon after the flight, the family, the crew members and their wives would go on these fabulous round-the-world tour, especially after apollo 11. they went all over the world presenting moon rocks and little lucite cases to the queen of england, etc., heads of state. and while they were on this

tour, joan shared her diary with me that she kept. and she starts seeing sort of buzz spiraling out of control a bit. he's been outspoken about his own alcoholism and depression that he dealt with after coming back from the moon, and that was something that joan felt acutely and, obviously, it changed her life. she and buzz ended up getting divorced, and they have three kids. she has this one entry in her diary where she says, you know she was trying to tell buzz, you know, i think our lives will eventually return to normal. and buzz just looked at her, and he said joan, i've been to the moon. nothing's ever going to be the same. and that was, i think, true for many of the families. >> lily, when we were in the book tent yesterday we saw your new book that you're talking about, and you mentioned how you flipped a page in a magazine, and a story came to life. if you have a moment at the end will you talk about the red leather diary and the incident

that caused you to almost flip a page and find a book there? enter sure, i will. let me -- i'll save that for a moment and, please. >> hi. i've not read the book yet but i look forward to reading it. my question, i don't know the ages of these women you're referring to, but my question is in your research with them did the idea ever come up or the conversation with the commercialization of space travel would think of them consider, like the upcoming touting of virgin galactic would they do that themselves? >> you know, we should get a thai in here and have one of these companies spend one of these astro wives into space you know? [laughter] i did ask many of them what they thought about going into space. back in the '60s i spent lots of time with "life" magazine, of course, and you have articles about we're going to be putting up a hilton up there. a couple of the astronauts had

the this crack pot scheme that they would open a chain of a and w root beer stands on the moon when we eventually colonize. so yes, some of of the wives, some like a former tough marine woman named lo cunningham, now lo walker,. >> i said, yeah, i would have gone up there in a heartbeat. trudy cooper who ended up flying in the powder puff derby, she would have been up there in a minute. but some of the wives were like oh are you kidding? i want to stay down here with my feet on the ground. no zero g for me. and, of course, thaw all hope we will -- they all hope we will continue to explore space and push the envelope as their husbands used to sayment i will just -- say. i will just mention very briefly the red leather diary, my first book because i think it reflects on why i want to tell this kind of story. i grew up in chicago and moved

to new york to go to barnard which is a women's college of columbia university. and it was really in new york -- i'm a city girl though my husband's from georgia, so we absolutely love savannah -- but it was of in new york just with that departmentty of people and i think -- density of people and i think walking around and looking at these old buildings and windows lit up that i just, you know just sort of naively, i guess, as a young woman just the incredible amount of untold stories that there are and how everybody has a story and that somehow i just wanted to be able to reveal system -- reveal some of those distant stars, i guess. and so very serendipitously i have to say, i feel quite lucky. i have -- one of our dogs is named lucky, but strange things happen to me. or maybe i see the world in a different way. and so i notice things that seem almost fairy tale-like.

like they were meant to be. but i came out of my first apartment building in new york shortly after i'd graduated, and i was working as a news clerk at the new york times which i always say was like the devil wears prada but without the prada. [laughter] lots of bow ties and still, you know, the old school newsmen who would give me bits of advice. and i really wanted to be a novelist which i'm actually going to return to for my next project which is going to be fiction. but i came out of the building, and there was just something too good to resist which was a dumpster. and not any ordinary dumpster because it was filled, i could see, with about 50 old steamer trunks. and these are the old kinds that were brought on the titanic, you know? vintage labels from paris and monaco and the french line. and, listen, i'm not a dutchster diver -- dumpster diver by trade.

but what do i do? it's 8:00 in the morning i literally climb on top of the dumpster and start going through these things and there are old flapper dresses and a whole vintage collection of handbags. and among this sort of urban treasure wreck was a red leather diary kept by a woman from 1929 to 934 at -- 1934 at the height of the depression. and a long fairy tale, true fairy tale short, i ended up tracking down the diary's owner at 90 with the help of a private investigator. and befriending her. she had wanted to be a writer. she hosted a literary salon. she was a renaissance woman who had had love affairs with men and women as a young woman, and her story had spoken to me so much that i ended up telling the story of how this chronicle made its way back to her and was sort of given as a gift to the rest of the world.

and so i think telling that sort of forgotten woman's story was very intriguing to me. little things i remember from professors saying to me at school, you know, the good stories are often little margins or toot notes -- footnotes at the side of the page. it's not the typical heroic model, but it's the other side of the coin. and i think certainly it was that tradition and that desire and hunger to tell redemptive women's stories, something that it's telling an untold story, but this is also sort of emotional catharsis for the subject when their story which has been sort of under the radar is finally revealed to the world. and i know from speaking to the wives that not only did this book take them back in time but

i think that they feel very gratified that people cower about their -- care about their story. and i don't think many of them call themselves heroes because they were so in support of their husbands and would have seen that as arrogant and inappropriate. but i certainly see them as heroines myself, and i think they have the right stuff. [laughter] so i'm going to end there and thank you so much. [applause] >> our special booktv in prime time continues tonight when we air several "after words" programs including "company man: 30 years of controversy and crisis in the cia." at 8:55 p.m., we'll talk with the authors of "the triple package: how three unlikely traits explain the rise and fall

of cultural groups in america." and then it's george nash on the crusade years 1933-1935. herbert hoover's lost memoir of the new deal era and its aftermath. booktv is this prime time this week here on c-span2. >> at the end of the day, i think the economy is going to continue to need enormous monetary stimulus, and so i think that the fed will not be raising rates for quite some time. but i do i am optimistic that the u.s. economy is going to accelerate. and i think one of the core thing here one of the core dimensions is the fact that last year the u.s. economy grew 3.9% -- 3.9% -- 1.9% with fiscal drag reducing growth by 1.3 percentage points. so without that fiscal tightening the u.s. economy would have been growing over 3%. >> well, as you know, cbo does not make policy recommendations and that's very important.

because policy choices depend in the just on the analysis of the consequences of different courses of action but also in how one weighs those consequences, what values one applies. there's nothing special about our values. it's up to our elected leaders your and my elected leaders, to headache those policy judgments -- make those policy judgments. our job is to help congress understand the consequences of alternative courses of action. >> this weekend on c-span, views on the u.s. economy with the cbo director and experts from td bank mit and the university of maryland. that's followed by the first press conference by new fed chair janet yellen saturday morning at 10 eastern. and on booktv, live coverage from the virginia festival of the book. first, a panel on african-american history followed by -- [inaudible] on the impact of foreclosures and evictions in the african-american community. that starts saturday at noon on c-span2. and on american history tv who

might have been "time" magazine's person of the year in 1864? historians decide saturday morning at 8:25 eastern. then at 1, join historian john -- [inaudible] to talk about the pick. live on c-span3. >> now, a forum with panelists that foreign policy magazine tribes as some of the -- describes as some of the top global thinkers of 2013. the moderator at the university of denver is former u.s. ambassador to iraq christopher hill. this is a little less than an hour and a half. [inaudible conversations] >> so thank you all for coming. this is panel one of our session with global thinkers and we're very pleased to have three of

our foreign policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers here at this panel which deals with global challenges; climate change, austerity and the return to authoritarianism. so we're going to have some science, we're going to have some economics -- that would be the dismal science, i guess -- [laughter] and then we're going to have some issues of politics and security questions with the return of authoritarianism. so what i'm going to do now is introduce our three panelists, and i'm going to start with erica chenoweth who's sitting in the middle there. erica's the co-author of the award-winning book "why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict." erica, along with co-author maria stefan, found that campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts.

ie, gandhi works. moreover, her research showed that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable democracies less likely to regress into war. our second panelist seated to the immediate left is thomas herndon. thomas is a ph.d. student at the university of miami -- university of -- you wish it were miami i guess. [laughter] >> oh, yeah. [laughter] >> we're going to have three inches of snow tonight just -- >> there we go. >> so the university of massachusetts at amherst and the co-author of the influential essay, "does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth?" in this essay herndon and co-authors michael ash and robert poland point out errors in reinhart and rogoff's widely-cited economic study, thereby undermining the the intellectual foundation for austerity programs that slash budgets and social spending around the world. so we look forward to hearing from thomas on this.

and finally we're very pleased on the extreme left of the stage here, if not on the political spectrum is stephanie herring. [laughter] stephanie is weather and climate extremes project lead at the national oceanic and atmospheric association or noaa. she published a ground breaking report that sought to explain the connection between human cause of climate change and extreme weather events like hurricane sandy. stephanie, very pleased to have you join us. so i think we're going to start with erica. i have a set of questions, and i think you've all had a chance to have a look at these questions, so i don't think there are any curveballs or knuckleballs in these questions. so let me start with the first one, erica. your research with maria stefan showed that nonviolent resistance has been more than

twice as effective as viability resis tan -- violent resistance in overthrowing authoritarian governments, so how do you explain that phenomena? >> yes. so the main finding is that nonviolent resistance is quite a lot more effective, and the main reason is because of the power of people participation. in fact, what we with saw is that the average nonviolent campaign just in raw numbers is four times larger in terms of the number of active participants than the average violent campaign. and if you look at the number of participants as a proportion of the overall population, there are 11 times larger than the average violent campaign. and what happens when you have these large numbers is that the campaign generally is much more inclusive and representative of the society as a whole which means that the participants in the campaign might know somebody in the police forces they might know somebody in the internal security forces they might be friends or neighbors with economic elites, and those are

the sort of pillars of support on whose obedience the authoritarian relies to maintain power. so the more people are involve ised the more likely there is to be an opportunity the to sort of leverage those internal relationships in society. it's really -- >> the clerk will read a communication to the senate.