are all of these part of the conspiracy? telling us all about? if it is an enough, there are a bunch of other organizations and they are not with some scientific sounding name. these are real medical and protective organizations. in europe which is very anti-gmo come in australia, all over the world there is the epa which we pay attention to wha it comes te global warming or something like that. they say would not pose unreasonable risk to human health and the environment. and i could come up with dozens of these. >> this weekend on c-span, how safe is genetically modified foods? saturday morning at 10 eastern. this weekend on booktv the "los angeles times" festival of books. saturday starting at noon and

sunday at 1 p.m. eastern on c-span2. on american history tv, georgetown university professor bonnie morris on title ix, discrimination against women in sports and the edge issue amendments of 1972. >> now the rest of our "after words" interview with aram goudsouzian, author of "down to the crossroads." >> host: okay, i want to ask you about the title, crossroads, as a physical place but as a symbolic place in history. how does this march marked a historical crossroads? >> guest: the march in a lot of ways is a process for the civil rights movement in the sense it is mostly still in the popular mind at least associated with the tenants of nonviolence

and racial integration as its core goals. underneath that, of course, especially among grassroots organizers, that the civil rights movement is more about us putting blacks in positions of power, into positions where they can lift themselves up. those goals can be intertwined of course but they're not necessarily exactly the same thing. the march becomes a crossroads because it unveils the slogan of black power. lacked power launches this new generation of activists. it gives them a name, a sense of a movement. and i did it gets crystallized and black power you could argue is both an outgrowth and in some ways is rejecting some of this idea. it grows out of the civil rights movement. as i mentioned these are activists who have always been working for blacks to achieve political power and the unified

in their own community to build strength that way. it grows out of frustration in some ways. frustrations with a federal government and with white liberal allies who don't necessarily see themselves on the same page. it also grows out of an enchantment and the rejection of nonviolence as a strategy. that doesn't suggest black power meant violent revolution but least self-defense. if you want to be seen on equal footing in society you should have the right to defend yourself. its rejection perhaps also even in the core goal of integration or working within an established political party. stokely carmichael is coming to the march having organized in alabama and independent third party, and all black party because the choices were he wasn't going to integrate into the republican party. the democratic party is the party of white supremacy in alabama already. so i integrate into the party

that's hostile to your interest? organize your own political party, create black strength, whatever the black majorities whether that's in harlem or the south side of chicago or the mississippi delta, organize blacks in majority. leverage that political power as an independent force. >> host: how intentional is stokely carmichael say here is this march in mississippi and this will be a platform to amplify the black power method -- message or he got so frustrated with the march the black power emerged? >> guest: came to the march for sure with these ideas, with this message even with the slogan of black power. soon after the shooting of meredith, carmichael goes back to atlanta to talk to the center committee, the government on the of sncc why they should purchase me in the march. among the argument for it gives us a platform to advertise our

direction a black power and use that slogan. uses the slogan black power even before the famous rally in greenwood but he doesn't use it as a chant. he doesn't use it as a slogan. midway through the march, sncc is organizing greenwood for a long time. there had been advanced organizers present this is the best place for us to use this slogan and to capture a national movement. when black power is used in that way and projected onto the national news, it becomes controversy, something that inspires many black people. they remember the news that night when black power was in the news and it blew their minds. it had this element of this is a new direction, crossroads. you mentioned the crossroads as having a symbolic valley. mississippi delta, home of the

blues and, of course, robert johnson sold his soul at the crossroads to the devil and the crossroads is a place where you make choices. you come to a fork in the road, not a fork by crossroads, whatever choices you make has enduring consequences. if you're going to travel down that road. so when the slogan of black power is unveiled, you travel down that road. >> host: what's become the fate of black power both as a slogan and as an outlook and an approach? >> guest: that the complicated question because like power doesn't have a single definition. it depends on the responses of those who give black power. for many people, for many liberals and conservatives alike they saw black power as a betrayal in some ways. they saw this as working against what they have been fighting for and they didn't understand the thrust of the new militant the black power has a lot of positive cuts which is as well.

they talk about in terms of political organize, you will start to see black officeholders, black mayors, black sheriffs, all sorts of political power occurring old in the south and the north. that depends on the notion of black unity, black officials looking out for black interests, and people associate that with black pearl. you have to think about black power and cultural since. if it encompasses as does the idea of taking pride in their heritage, pride in your culture, pride in your parents and your identity, that might be black powers most enduring legacy, the notion that black is beautiful, black history is being an important aspect of american history, and important in its own right. so there's no one legacy of black power. it shoots off in some different direction, cultural, political, positive, negative, all of these. both the unifying and also alienating message. it's a constructive slogan but

also destructive in terms of liberal world. it is a complex slogan. >> host: yeah, absolutely, that's fascinating. and one of the things that's striking about this book is its physical, connecticut quality. there's a sense of motion. how did you go about writing and researching this book? >> guest: i saw a pretty early on the basic structure of it. it has a natural structure and it starts one place and the moose enters stores along the way and it means. in that sense it's like a biography. you know we're going to start and end. within their there's all sorts of stories to tell. that structure i could see from the beginning but what developed over the course of the research was i realized with each chapter, each key incident along the march that was an opportunity to talk about some other dimension of not only the march but the broader civil rights movement. when they do their first voter

registration, that gives me the opportunity to talk about within mississippi, the struggles black people faced to register to vote but also within black politics those who work to the naacp, the more established black mississippians who want to ally with whites and fold into the democratic party and also a group called the mississippi freedom democratic party. at the same time running in the democratic primaries as well. so it animates that discussion but when they get to grenada mississippi they do a demonstration where they put an american flag on top of the statue of the confederate soldier and the whites see this as -- t to talk about a desecration to to talk about a desecration to be getting up to talk about visions of the civil war wanted years later and how they're animating these different identities, different definitions of history are shaping how blacks and whites see their place of citizenship in america. when they get to the delta in

greenwood, a chance to talk about black power, and when they get to jackson at the end of the march. it's a story that's the largest civil-rights demonstration in mississippi to at least 15,000 people participated. if you talk to people who participate in this march, this was an extraordinary moment. the march gave you this opportunity to talk about all these different themes within the movement as there is this dynamic quality further south. to get back to question how do their research, i had the luxury of a abundant media coverage. this was a march that was covered by local papers, national papers, international media, newspapers, magazines community and also the civil rights or positions keep their papers and correspondence and records. ever records that could be found in personal papers of civil rights activists but also within the organization. it's also a march that was under

surveillance. the fbi, the mississippi highway patrol, and a group called mississippi state sovereignty commission which was an organization founded about a decade earlier with the expressed purpose of how to preserve racial segregation in mississippi. it included an arm to presented mississippi in a positive light to the rest of the country but also it included a surveillance and there was an informant on the march was part of the civil rights inner circle those are ported back to the state of mississippi. he was classified as informant asked. i don't know the years but he or she produced these detailed reports of what was going on in meetings among the civil rights leaders in the midst of the march. that was a complex source because where to read it through the eyes of mississippi state officials who exaggerate and tend to make up stuff. but it's an important stop for understanding just the giveaways in which the march was being watched.

the last major aspect of the research were talking to people who marched. i interviewed about 100 people who were involved in the march and one way, shape, or form. what that really brought to the star was the human dimension of the. this wasn't a national story about political complex, political ideas but also a story about the actual physical participation of the marchers. many people coming of age. for others it was a unique experience. for some it was a tragic and disappointing experience. bringing out those personal stories i think gave my story just that extra layer that for me makes it resonate. >> host: where most of them have to talk about their experiences? >> guest: i would to just about everybody was more than happy. i talk to people from all sorts of levels that i talked about it through the civil rights of veterans organization in mississippi and that was a great

chance to get any of the african-american organizers who had a long day of the march. they see the context of their longer experience that starts well before 1966 and continues to the present day. they see the march in this larger context. they talk about how it helps to further mission and a black power something that was working for the march and after the march. they said, a sort of deflated a national star in important ways. i talked to white activists who were again part of the organization that was a chance to talk to different people from different perspectives. from those who agreed with the majority of the black organizers, those attended be on the liberal side or the classical liberal side, black power. it deflated what they were working for. adventure sometimes meeting people, you should talk to this person, you should talk to this person. i got a chance to talk to regular people from mississippi who decided to join the march.

i got to march with martin luther king and they got to meet stokely carmichael and the catchy chant black power. it was an important impact who they were. it was supposed in some ways shake your mind, to make you think about what bus does exist for the future. >> host: speaking of the future and the time continuum, i'm curious what should opinion is on what are the major civil rights movement in this country today? >> guest: the biggest one we've seen is of course the movement for lgbt equality but if you want to think about where that movement was in the mid '90s to now, talk about a dramatic transfer mission to if you had told me in 1995 that most of the american population would see gay marriage as an implicit rights and is something that is obvious and should

happen, i think would've blown my mind 20 years ago. it's a movement that started again in the '90s, might have been considered a radical notion, now it's become mainstream thinking. it hasn't followed necessary the same ethics of the sub rights movement because we live in a different context, a different era. popular culture in particular helped shape this movement. think about just the radical change in notions and possibilities in that one aspect. that's the one that jumps out at me in terms of comparing and contrasting civil rights movement's. >> host: and with other political issues that go on, issues around voting, issues on structural inequality that the president just spoke about that in december and then you mentioned the lgbt movement, what has changed in the past and what lessons are gleaned from the past from this march in particular from the civil rights movement broadly?

>> guest: inc. about the movement for african-american equality as you alluded to in particular. with the movement was most successful at was sort of folding into some basic citizenship, the civil rights act and the voting rights act destroyed the institutions of jim crow and a guaranteed access to vote but on the march king was talking, the march was very important for martin luther king's evolution in terms of think about these issues of structural inequality. at the same time he was about to launch a major campaign in chicago. and chicago talk about a big northern city weather isn't legal segregation and jeff issues, intermix issues of race and class. then he comes to mississippi and he has a personal force in connection to the plight of the poor black mississippians. that sort of defenses understanding and he sees the march as a chance to hide fight, to create a national conversation. that's one of the great

tragedies for him, the press never picks up on it. they never carried the story that he wants. some of that is controversial of the black power, some of it is the nature of the press. he's never able to shift the conversation into that larger structural issue. obvious issues of race and class remain today. you can sit tight into drug laws, federal justice system most dramatically. i talk about in the epilogue, and i focus on these, i try to follow some of the main characters and talk about poor mississippi but a phrase i use, the idea of a long road to freedom that meredith used himself at the beginning of the march. the road to freedom is a long, long road. we haven't walked that road yet, clearly the visions rooted in this, tied to class are still very strong in many ways. >> host: now, to be perfectly honest, i didn't care or don't

care about your own ethnicity in reading the book, like i love you expertise and to me that's all that matters. but i'm sure viewers are wondering about your own ethnicity. did your own ethnicity shape in any way, shape, or form you are living in the south or the research and writing about this book? >> guest: interesting question. it's a big part of a white am and who i have been and moving to the south was a relatively small community and people don't have stood, in memphis, the number of people that never met an armenian before. so sometimes they ask where are you from? i would say i'm from boston to know, where are you from? they want to get at why i was doing what i was doing. of course, was doing a course in african-american history. but i don't know if being armenian necessary has fed into my interest in african-american

history. i really think i got into african-american history for two reasons. one is i think and to some fundamental questions about what it means to be an american. maybe that is tied to my experience because as an armenian i thought about what it means. but african-american history in particular, i consider myself a storyteller wasn't anything else. i think it provides a this narrative dimension data just find it fascinating and want to work with. >> host: okay, that's an interesting figuring in the writing and research of this book. did your people ask that? >> guest: sometimes. especially more often, less as a writer, more as a teacher because i'm teaching a course that deals with african-american history. i teach at the university of memphis. they are curious sometimes, because for many of them they

didn't understand why would you want to teach african-american history? it's not your history. i tried to explain its everyone's history as americans. and more broadly in the world because it shaped the world. for me i come at it from the broader narrative and sort of broader perspective as an american history but it's not the only way to right, this is my perspective. >> host: and in terms of forming a perspective, what historian sheet you? what historians would you recommend everyone reading as a truly provocative and memorable historians that teach us something? >> guest: i can honestly focus that question on the sub rights movement, if you're interested in this narrative history and want to read a more extensible, there's a great book by taylor branch. those are stories, the subtitle is "the king years" and he focuses on martin luther king

but it is a much broader story the net and he does a wonderful job of painting really the broad sweep of human history through the civil rights movement from about 1954 to 1968. for many academic historians they appreciate his work but they also try to push the movement a different direction. there are two greatest wins of the mississippi movement who really shaped the whole future direction of the civil rights. a book called local people, a story of civil rights in mississippi, and when you tell that story it doesn't follow king's life. he is not the main story so we highlight sort of the longer traditions of black organizing dating back to the '20s and '30s and he talks about some of the main, the aspect of grassroots organizers, when sncc

shows up and have a try to work with local people. the other book in the light by charles pena who is both a historic a sociologist called i've got the right -- the light of freedom. wider social change happen, how does organizing work? he tries answers the question from a more analytic standpoint. how do you get people to register to vote in? it starts with the process of making those connections on a family level. both historians highlight the importance of women in the movement. the media focuses on the male leaders. if you look at the cover, it's mostly men. martin luther king, stokely carmichael triple what happens when you look at the civil rights movement on the ground? who are the people organizing mass meetings, the glue of the movement? very often women. these historians helped to highlight that. what i wrote in "down to the crossroads," trying to tell the story, the story within the

story of all civil rights history from and since it's a great story and it's got martin luther king and is a nonviolent mass march and trying to incorporate the the new civil rights movement to how women are important, how international context is important but that's another aspect. and also lack power is a much more public and slogan at a much more positive slogan than the previous historians attested to. to give you a good example, neil joseph, among his books waiting until the midnight hour. he gives us to see black power and within the number of other stories but he gets to see in the new frame. he pushes us to think of it in terms of its positive aspects, it's uplifting aspects, and the weight shifts the whole movement. >> host: can you speak in more detail about women's role in the movement itself and women's role

responding to the movement, particularly white women? >> guest: when we are talking about the active grassroots organizing give got to look at a key roles of african-american women, particularly to the institutions of local communities. how to get people involved in your movement? you've got to get them into a mass media, a church. who does the work for the church? who's the backbone of the church, the backbone of the committee? it's women. who's making -- it's very often families. if one member is involved, other members of the family will be involved. it's a mother figure. so women become key connectors between families as well. they are sort of the social network that exists that becomes the political network. he also asked about white women at a time to talk about that in the march. there's an interesting stories of white women on the march who come this is right about the time when the women's movement is in its nascent form.

white women who were on the march who have been active in the sub rights movement but at the same time are seen within, the movement is bringing to the floor with acr gender inequalities as well. to talk about how they're getting hit on all the time and it doesn't become a public story because if you bring up the story of blackmails sexually with white woman and a context, that will escalate into a scandal. underneath the surface these women are holding meetings and talk about what does it mean to be equal. so launches this generation of feminists and someone's going out of the sub rights movement. for black women it tends to be more obligated because they still see race as their primary oppression in 1966. many of them will become feminists but in a letter context and in a different time under different circumstances. it's sort of to pass that merge that are important within

feminism, but at the same time intertwined. >> host: yeah, i want to revisit the question i asked but in a more direct way, and that is, so you are a historian. the air is sorting not new to you, the issues are certainly not new to you but beginning of launching into this particular book what did you learn that you did not expect to learn? what would you most surprised to learn after finishing this book? >> guest: a lot of things. there were two great mysteries to me, just sort of the mysteries that i was never able to uncover just as a historian which i found passing. one was the identity of this informant ask the i mentioned before. they are paying someone to report back to them about the happenings of the civil rights meetings. i don't know who it is and it would have been interesting to know but, of course, it's

impossible. the of the great mystery to me involved the motives of the man who shot james meredith and we haven't talked about him. a guy named aubrey. at the time he's in his early '40s, and wishes james meredith people assume he's another white supremacist and a figure he's associate with the clan, the early newspaper coverage editorial blasts them as another man full of hate. but once they start to investigate, they are confused as to why this thing to do. not that he was average a little bit this guy who had never said anything, had no known connection to any white supremacist organization, whether the ku klux klan or what. his motives aren't mr.. he is still alive and to try to call it a number of times. he lives in the same house in a subdivision outside of memphis that he lived in at the time and has never revealed his motive.

as to why he shot james meredith. just an interesting political story, this to me was one of the most interesting sort of stories from the march, when meredith was shot a lot of people within the movement figured it was a conspiracy. the mississippi police were an odd because this guy was able to walk out of the woods and shoot james meredith three times and walk back to the woods. seemed like people were paralyzed. that pod wasn't the case because mississippi highway patrol, it wasn't in their interest for someone to shoot james meredith. they would be doing a bad job if that were the case. the more interesting part is that white southerners think that this conspiracy as well against them. they figured that somebody in the sub rights movement paid this guy, this government is, he's not even from mississippi, they pay this outsider to come shoot james meredith, to wound him, not to kill them, that's

why they use birdshot rather than a single bullet because he wanted to wound him and it would be a big story and they would turn into a great national march. that conspiracy theory doesn't make any more sense if you because this was the weird story. need a conspiracy i think holds ground. these competing stories that develop and the conspiracy theories on shooting james meredith that white southerners off as a conspiracy against them come segregatisegregati on and use it as a weapon against the civil rights movement i find it absolutely fascinating story. >> host: amazing. so wrapping up, what's the final thing you would like viewers and readers to know about this book? >> guest: again i see the book as a way to tell a broader story about the civil rights movement by telling a very specific dramatic story about the civil rights movement. it occurs over three weeks when i see the movement at its crossers but it's a classic story, historians know something about the meredith march of this

book tries to expand it and eliminate it and it should soften all these different directions pick a teacher chance to think about if you're going to read one book on the civil rights movement i would hope you might consider reading this book. >> host: as i said it was connecticut, colorful, well researched and had the combination of images, research and it just made the main characters pop. there's a relevance that resonates with issues today that we've already talked about. so thank you for your time. >> guest: i really appreciate it. >> tonight on c-span3, a discussion from the organization of american historians conference in atlanta about the 1964 freedom summer when civil rights activists registered black voters in mississippi.

it's part of a special friday night edition of american history tv beginning at eight eastern on c-span3. >> c-span to providing live coverage of the u.s. senate floor proceedings and key public policy events. and every weekend otb, now for 15 years the only television network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. c-span2, created by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. >> at the national book festival in washington, pillage prize-winning historian taylor branch talked about the civil rights movement and his book trend 12 -- "the king years." this is 45 minutes. >> thank you, jeffrey, thanks to

all of you for coming. this is a very exciting time and hope to use of this overwrites history to look forward rather than backward because i think all of you as citizens on an equal share of this country devoted to the idea of equal citizenship and that we should aspire to the mall of the civil rights era in which the the eight year-old children who were denied the right to vote advance freedom and democracy is by studying its basic principles and taking risk to make it real. [applause] something this overwrites movement is about our past but it's also about our future, which has a number of implications for those of us who are not students, one of them is that we should be concerned when our schools are teaching only reading and math because history in america, the only country in the world founded on an idea is how we learn what citizenship

means. [applause] >> our citizenship to some degree is paralyzed by the age of gridlock, and i think that we are to some degree responsible for it are self. and am going to try to challenge you with a little bit of that, along with we normally get inspiration from the civil rights era, and it is there, but it is also sobering the degree to which the comparisons between now and then leave us all little bit behind as far as applying those lessons towards the future. this little book, my compact a book, is dedicated to students of freedom and teachers of history. the reason that i did it and shed so much blood by eliminating 90% of what i'd written over 24 years was

because teachers over the years have complained to me that it's half right. my trilogy was half right. storytelling is what makes history accessible to students. they learn things through human stories, not the abstract categories and argumentation and labels of analysis linked to date. they get involved with stories and, therefore, that's good. however, 900 pages of stories is a lot, even for a college teacher. let alone for a high school teacher and so they said, try to pursue the stories and do something that is a little more compact introduction to this era, if you believe that it is so vital not only to our past but to our future, and that it is crucially misremembered. we in the united states have a terrible history of misremembering our history when we don't want to remember it.

we can turn it upside down. i was born and grew up in atlanta, georgia. and it was in my textbook that the civil war had nothing to do with slavery, that the slaves were better off here than they had been in africa, but the people who restored white rule in the south were known as the redeemer's. that's still true. is a religious word. so we have to be very careful because race and citizenship and freedom are tricky. we are in a tricky era right now. i'm using this book to try to teach students now. we had an experiment last spring at the university of maryland. i live in baltimore. to teach a seminar on the basics of civil rights history and citizenship, to a seminar classroom in baltimore with online students from russia and

the solomon islands and all around the world. we are going to do it again for credit. our goal is to cut the tuition cost for students by 90% and to open up to the world, people who can with some skin in the game and some prospects for credit, gain access to the master and the lessons of civil rights history for the world. there's a revolution coming in higher education. just like the revolution that has come in newspapers and made detroit a shadow of itself, and that has affected the book industry itself. this new short book has something called an enhanced e-book edition that i can't read myself, my own book because i don't have an ipad. you can read along and e-book for a fraction of the cost of the regular book, and when it says president kennedy had an interview about vietnam and civil rights by before he was

killed, you can click on it and actually see the interview, not just the interview, the outtakes when you walter cronkite stand up in the rocking chair and start gossiping about sailboats. enhanced e-books are amazing. so there are revolutions coming in all kinds of aspects of american life. in some respects they are thrilling. and other respects they are chilling. because none of us wants to be a part of the industry that gets made obsolete. and half of our politics is the same that's what black people are for. they are the ones that should be an industry that's obsolete because they been used to it for 200 years. blue collar works went out of work, farming out of work. all of the brunt of that fell on black people who have been behind. the great lesson of our future is to what degree we are willing to look to the inspiration and the discipline of american history to form public policies and public trusts together to

help us have rules and public policy that will advance and help us address the very, very service problems that we face the way they did in the civil rights era. when an invisible minority that was 10% of the population with none of the traditional tools of politics, no armies, no newspapers. they were not in the newspapers, the newspapers wouldn't but most other social events but they wouldn't even refer to them by name. they had no banks. they had no police force. all they had was a willingness to study and sacrifice for the basic principles of american freedom to lift the rest of the country towards the professed meaning of its own values, and they did it. and it's an amazing story and is accessible to children today in part because it was children in

that era who are leaders in it, confronted problems that made adults mumble and stare the problem in the knee is rather than in the eyes. you had college students, and in 1963 in the freedom rides and in the sit-ins. at a time when we were so addled by the prospect it was such a foreign concept that the first sit-ins were dismissed as anti-rates. young people, particularly young black people can't be addressing serious problems that were befuddled the united states and make the president of the united states, at that time dwight eisenhower, sound addled. but they were not addled. they were confronting it. by 1963, when the rest of the country was saying essentially that this race problem of segregation in 17 states that takes basic freedoms away from a whole segment of our population is wrong and somebody should do something about it, but not me,

not now, and i can say that i myself, growing up in atlanta, it had finally won be done. i've been trying to avoid it my whole childhood, and i said what i get really impossibly old, like 30, i'm going to stick my toe in this race problem, and no sooner had i said that at the age of 16 that it turned around and turned on the tv and there were little children in birmingham marching into dogs and fire hoses singing the same songs that i sang in sunday school and not running from the dogs and fire hoses and not wait until they were 30 and that waiting t till they of any of te damage is that i had growing up middle-class in atlanta. and it was so stupefying to me that eventually it changed the direction of my life since it was against my will but where did that come from? it was their activity, this stupefying gambit by martin luther king when his whole movement was about to go down the tubes, was condemned by every political figure in the united states from george wallace and opportunity to

malcolm x. to use small children in those demonstrations as young as eight and six years old by the thousands when they could only get the conditions in the movement in birmingham were so intimidating to black adults that they could only get 10 or 12 with the greatest martin luther king "i have a dream" speech sermon in the church, they could only get 10 or 12 of those. they were terrified that they got 1000 kids to march on may 2, if they cut another 1000 to march on may 3. and it melted the emotional resistance to dealing with the fundamental issues of american freedom as presented by race, not only across the united states and not only in me as a 16 year old, all around the world which is one of the reasons that the civil rights movement is a greater inspiration outside the united states today than it is inside. they were singing we shall

overcome when they took the berlin wall down. they were singing we shall overcome when nelson mandela came out of prison and said that the answer to apartheid is not armageddon. but a multiracial democracy at great risk and great effort to all of us. this inspiration has gone around the world and we have been to some degree trapped in it and i'm going to give you two reasons that i think we are trapped in it. they all go out of the book. they are not the kind of thing that i try to teach young people in absorbing the stories and inspiration of this, but they are ideas that i think we should address today as citizens in a gridlocked democracy. i mentioned them by the way, thank you for jeffrey brown, but i mentioned them to gwen ifill on the "newshour" the other night and got a real double take. i said that the greatest unexamined question in american politics today is to what degree the underpinnings of partisan

gridlock our racial? white -- [applause] and as we get out of this, she kind of danced around a little bit and we came out and she said, do you mind if i as president obama faq to interview him, whether he thinks the underpinnings of gridlock that he's suffering with so much and that is threatened to shut down our government and everything else right now our racial? and i said, of course do. she said i'm going to throw you under the bus, and sure enough the very next day she got an interview with president obama and said, this historian says this, and obama danced all around it. [laughter] it is dangerous, it is a delicate, but raise throughout american history has been the gateway to the advancement of freedom into the blockage of freedom. it's a gateway where we go

through. two ways of looking at it. 1963, 50 years ago, segregation ruled. 17 states, george wallace had just been inaugurated governor with his famous speech, segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. he talked about nothing but raise. 50 years ago in september this month, he flew to baltimore, my home city, and announced that he was going to run for president and never mentioned race but he never mentioned segregation again. he turned on a dime when the march on washington and those birmingham demonstrations made it obvious that in the future, overt segregation and talking overtly about race was no longer going to be respectable. he switched his message adroitly. he said he was running only to restore local government against big government by bureaucrats, to radical judges and tax-and-spend legislators.

and that he had never denigrated the race of any person or group of people in history, and people wanted to believe it and that's the beginning of this remembered history and that's the beginning of the book category of modern politics. and if you don't believe that big government opposition today and that the notion that what makes me say -- safe and free as not all that painstaking guys that we built up over two centuries of democracy for oregon and for our politics, but the pistol that i carry into starbucks, if you don't believe that that's not driven -- [applause] -- by race, ask yourself why is it that big government is only a slogan and never analyzed. what part of big government? big government and the pentagon? the big government and foreign policy? the big government in the homeland security agency that frisks you but whenever you get

into an airplane? no. it's only the big government that could conceivably put you in the position of common citizenship with somebody that make you fearful or makes you anxious. that's big government. that's where it comes from. [applause] that's why obamacare works only as a slogan that mentions obama and, therefore, a racial signal, and obamacare and a piece of legislation without anything about it and doesn't address the fact that if you got rid of it, the presumption is that we would have a nirvana system to our medical system works miracles, but it also is by far the most expensive one in the world, and we have convinced ourselves that it is a rational system to route every payment including for a dental checkup through the vast bureaucracies of profit-making insurance companies. [applause]

so the notion that we are imprisoned in a system that is a choice between obamacare and an unspecified nirvana that is not really nirvana is a measure of our gridlock and it is driven by irrational fears and apprehensions that is similar to the fear and apprehension that all of us face about things that confront us in the modern world. you and me in the book business, my book business is dissolving in many respects. we all have to adapt to that. now, lastly and i want to take questions because i'm trying to essentially say that our democracy is as simple as these wonderful stories of the eight year-old girls marching into the dogs and fire hoses, but it's also basic and challenging as democracy itself. we are not getting with it very well today. it's easy to say that gridlock all belongs on the other side of people who are fearful and/or testing a big government and

transmitting their latent fear and hostility on racial grounds to the government itself, which among other things is antipatriotic. our whole different sense that a beginning has been about what we can build. the tea party was a purely destructive movement. it's great that you go back to basics but it was about revolting against a foreign government that had allegiance to the king. the hard work began after that. what kind of government are we going to build? everybody from george washington to abraham lincoln to martin luther king is saying we're going to build something together through government, of the people, by the people, for the people. that's what's patriotic. that's what they have in common. that's why called the modern civil rights movement modern founders. they're doing just what they did. our side, the people who appreciate the movement is complicit in our gridlock for two reasons and they're not easy to talk about. i want to throw them out because

i think we need to get out of this, out of this notion that the only hope we have is for the other side to drop in. [laughter] [applause] the people who appreciate the racial aspects of advancement in american history, historically, from the very beginning of our republic through the civil war, through the progressive era, through the civil rights era, now today down to obama, the people who appreciate the racial aspects talk only about race. they don't enlarge it, they don't pay attention to the lesson that martin luther king and the suburbs movement, all of us talk about the larger premise of judgment, of justice and use race as a doorway to talk about it. the people on the other hand, who showed up at the march the of the day, and

civil rights movement got rid of segregation in the south, some of the chief beneficiaries would be white southerners. because their whole system was imprisoned psychologically, economically and politically in a system of segregation that depended on trying to keep people degraded. integrated everyone and when segregation went, what did you hear about? the sun belt picking apart of the sun belt when it was

segregated. it was a warm belt. we were poor. my mayor in atlanta said estimates the civil rights bill passed, not quite 50 years ago, the city of atlanta built a sports stadium on land it didn't own with money it didn't have for a team that had located and lured the first professional sports team, the atlanta braves, from milwaukee to atlanta. it opened up the whole world. every politician in the south who cusses the civil rights movement stands on its shoulders for its prosperity, for the hope and dreams other daughters who now can go to princeton and yale and even my university, the university of north carolina the only admitted nursing students when i was there in the 1960s. we take all this for granted. we need to have an open-minded discussion where we are all more comfortable about talking about race, but we are not paralyzed

in talking about race only. we are not careful we are going to insult some spokesman for different racial groups that we are diminishing them by talking about things that they set in motion that liberated everyone. a larger justice. so let us all, the reason that civil rights education is so valuable is because it's accessible to children, it's because it addresses issues of freedom that affect all of us. it makes race a gateway to the promise of democracy, and that when you recognize the deficiencies of democracy today in race, in our jails, in our poverty rates come in our school to joe, in our drug wars, it is not imprisoning you there in the race issue and in hopelessness, but it is going through that have to realize the larger connections and the possibilities that the civil rights movement once opened with less resources, let's hope

facing more difficult problems, when an audience like this in my lifetime would have everybody's of palms sweaty just for fear that a mixed audience would draw either the client or the police or would have somebody's father lose their business because the customers thought they were race mixers. that kind of terror is gone in every breath that we draw. our gratitude for the kind of freedom should never be taken for granted through this history. we not only regain the bounds of what it means to be an american is devoted to freedom, but we regain the tools, the habits, a literacy, the cross-cultural genius at the heart of america to address the problems before us. thank you. [applause]

>> thank you. that's a very, very kind. i was trying to mix in a little schooling with inspiration, what i appreciate that anyway. because i just don't want us to be complacent to this stuff is too serious. so if we are nothing but what we are doing wrong, we are not come as my old football coach sick and if it's not hurting it's not doing any good. we have time for questions until they stop us, and i have raised some difficult ideas but the questions don't have to be on any of that. you can ask, this is a vast subject. the first question the other day was plaintively come is a return that martin luther king was only 5'6"? yes. next question.

>> i want to compliment you on a gorgeous, eloquent speech, form of wisdom really. just want you to listen and be totally impressed. and i think the most ironic thing with your speech is that the people who can benefit the most, who work about 300 yards from where you are speaking are not here to listen as we did, a beautiful speech. thank you. >> thank you. >> just one quick comment on the. members of congress didn't show up at the march on washington 50 years ago either. there were only a couple. and 1963, what they did instead was they had a quorum call to spread upon the pages of the record the names of anybody who was not there, because they wanted to attack anybody who

showed up at this march. never be convinced that the march on washington 50 years ago was a warm and fuzzy event. there were riot troops stationed all around. they canceled elective surgeries. and to me, the most, and they eliminated, they banned liquor sales for the first time since prohibition. they were so scared of this thing, but to me the real kicker is that major league baseball, which has played right through floods and world war ii and everything am a week before the march on washington postponed not one but two washington senators again the day of the march and the day after for fear that we would still be cleaning up the results of armageddon. those are the unspoken signals of race. most of us who deal with race deal with it 99% subliminally. before we deal with the concepts that we frame, it's not to say that framing concepts is not and do with it and adjusting and govern ourselves as not our

highest duty. but we are kidding ourselves when we think that we are in complete control over this thing and that all of us to some degree are not racialized. racist is a difficult word because it means overtly organizing your whole life around the system but racialized, we are all racialized and the question is what other going to do about and how much of our minds, souls and inspiration are going to apply to it. >> my name is toby henderson and i wrote a book a few years ago called why you talk to white and it was about the questions i get asked by my peers because i learned to speak well, i guess. >> speak why, that's all right. spent when i was interviewed a few years ago during the don imus debacle, i got asked, a comment was made about, you just explain some things to us on the

radio in a way that made talking about race, safe, for lack of a better word. so as i listen to you now and agree with a lot of what you say, what strikes me is we need some kind of language. we need to learn how to speak about race so that it is not threatening to either side, any side, all sides, whatever. how do we learn that language in a day of antagonistic internet comments? demo is somebody says something, and the world we live in? >> very difficult because people, when you try to raise the subject at all in today's media age, people are only listening for the first spitball. when they get the first spitball the conversation is that because it's going to be trying to get a spitball going back the other direction. that is our atrophied public discourse. the civil rights movement, but

the thing is the civil rights movement never took, they faced that problem, too big they couldn't get stuff in the newspapers but that wasn't the end of the. that was the beginning of the. what ever going to do about a? to have to write down the names and addresses of all the reporters and start badgering them and send them what we think these stories are? to we have to to we have to as by our words with witness and sacrifice? we need to make the real challenge is never to take any stumbling blocks in racial dialogue as the final stumbling block where we give up and say, you know, they have to drop dead. i think the key, which you probably, it sounds like you already have, is that every conversation about race as it has affected american democracy should begin with the premise that talking about race makes us bigger. it enlarges the store but it does not pigeonhole the story. and that's not to say there are not some people who talk about race who would want to use it as

a grievance to bring people over the head and you are not opening up, but we need to displace those people by conversations that say this is the gateway. historically and every other way, the gateway to a larger freedom for everyone. are no magic answers, but i think the first answer is, never take it is failure as the end. it's the beginning of the question how do we get around it. thank you. ..

>> i hope that one day you'll take this on to expose the tentacles of racism and discrimination that have permeated our society. my question is: there's sometimes pain when we delve into the story. and what haunts me is some of the photos and the images of that period when we would see black men hanging, being lynched, but there would be a picnic, there would be a festival with children. who were those people? who were those children who are now adults? what fear do they have in going into that history? that's deep, man. >> uh-huh. >> how do we deal with that? that trauma that we have all experienced as a people, get

through that trauma to get to the healing side? >> well, that's a tough to, that's a tough question, but you open up one part -- i can't tell you how many people i interviewed in mississippi going back 30 years or more now, how many black folks said that they were raised being told in their household do not talk about emmett till. why? it's dangerous, and number two, it's embarrassing. the story is dangerous, it is painful, and it is revealing of our helplessnessment so -- helplessness. so the notion of avoiding a racial discussion is not just a white issue because you're afraid you might offend somebody or display your ignorance that you need to get over. the great model for that is robert kennedy who was as silly about race as anybody, but he kept banging away at it. he was existential. he would do something to somebody, and he'd feel guilty about it, and he'd talk to them

and ask why, and he grew doing it. but the images of lynchings, they are very, very difficult issues for both races. but to we, they are, they are little emblems of how quickly people can in the future those people will adjust to those memories, and we remember about race what we want to remember. and you can, to the degree that you can turn it upside down. and that's what we really have to guard against in all of our conversations, to go through that pain and say there's something bigger and better on the other side, but it's part of the courage that it takes to be a democratic citizen in a country that says the people are the ones who are responsible for the government. if the government's screwing up, it's not just the people in the government, it's me. diane nash, dye ran nash is one of my favorite people from the civil rights era. some of you may know her.

but she was a leader of the sit-ins, the freedom rides, everything. her family was harassed by the fbi, and in one of my interviews with her, i said, diane -- i showed her some of these fbi documents, and she says, oh, i don't bother with that, that's just hoover. i said, what do you mean? she said, yes, but i blame us for hoover. we left him this a position of arbitrary secret power for 50 years, and anybody who studies american government in the sixth grade should though you're going to get just what you got, an autocrat whose world was small and wanted to run things. i blame us. so here's diane nash who's black and cannot vote herself, but she's assuming responsibility for j. edgar hoover instead of a sense of victimhood. and so that is an amazing example to me of kind of wisdom that these young people -- she was only 23 years old when she's

doing all this stuff with j. edgar hoover. so there's a lot of wisdom here, and there are no easy answers, but it really does make our history just enthralling, i think. thank you. >> thank you. and keep on keeping on. [applause] >> yes, sir. >> so on the subject of this national gridlock, i was con contemplating maybe we could ask fort dietrich to develop a party-specific plague for one side or the other, i really don't care which. [laughter] but be absent being able to do this, what do you think is the path forward on how to solve this stupid, crazy gridlock? >> you've got to apply all your heart, soul, mind and body to trying to detach some people on the other side from the irrationality that they're trapped in. the anti-big government side, it does seem to me, has pretty much reached a cul-de-sac because there's a larger and larger body of the people -- it appeals to

fear, anxiety but also pride in the sense of saying, well, if i didn't just have all these public obligations and people asking me to, you know, pay a small amount for food stamps, i'd be better off. i don't need any of our public conveyances, anything that we have. i'd be better off digging my own plumbing. that appeals to people's pride, but it's not true. and we have to figure out ways to show people that if they had the same initiative, the same education, the same genius in sudan or in you uruguay, they wouldn't have the same -- we get an awful lot from what we've built together. our checks clear. our roads meet. the public space is a glorious example of our cooperation, but it's all invisible, therefore, can be taken for granted. and it makes people susceptible to politicians who are saying

you may be scared of all these other people, and you'd be even better off if you listened to me and strangled the government in the bathtub. and we have to figure out ways to peel off people. because some people are that way. very, very wealthy people are lobbying and spending a lot of money to, basically, have the government pay them. but they rely on great masses of people who are deluded by propaganda, and we have to figure out how to address that. yes, sir. >> yeah. i wanted to get back to the kids you were talking about. are we getting a generation of teenagers to, say, 8 or 9-year-olds who are going to be capable of doing what those kids then? and particularly with reference to the common core, in an effort to really force feed competence in this generation coming up, are we losing any way of inculcating them in the history and the culture that they're going to need to -- [inaudible]

>> and it is a dangerous. that is, to me, one of the scariest things that we are de-emphasizing american history in our core curriculum in the united states. you could turn it around and say if you're in my generation and you have benefited, because i think that the breakthrough in birmingham in 1963 opened up doors for equal citizenship for our whole generation far beyond what they did. we're indebted to them. we could repay young people. young people did something more us. we need to do something for them by helping to restore that education and by really studying and not approaching young people on the basis of what we may have heard. some young people are far more liberated and natural in their views and our antiquated prejudices, and they're free of them, but some of them are still getting trapped in them.

and they're also not being educated. so we have to encourage the good part and try to rescue our education so that it makes the kind of citizenship example from 50 years ago more pertinent to today. thank you. >> have we got teachers to do it? >> have we got teachers to do it? we have some. our best teachers today, i think one of the saddest things -- i'm not an expert in education. i've just met enough teachers who were heroic to me. gosh, i met teachers in idaho, the gilda lerman teachers, at 10:00 on sunday night they're googling diane nash to try to present to their students the next day that would be accessible. they're heroics but they're really undermanned. we are slipping into a notion that we accept the idea that

being a teacher is more or less like being a military draftee was in the 1950s. you can only do it for four or five years, and then you're going to be burned out. soar the heroic, but we do not as a whole society treat teaching, both the content and the professional core and life of it with the seriousness that it deserves if it really governs our future if the information age. [applause] >> could i ask you to restate your question for the president? >> thank you. yeah. >> over the years dr. king has been repacked in a lot of -- repackaged in a lot of ways by corporations, you know, a mcdonald's place mat, a day of service. how do we go about reclaiming dr. king and making it clear this was one of key progressive voices of his time? >> great question. did everybody hear that? dr. king has been repanelinged by everybody -- repackaged by

everybody, how do we go about reclaiming the genuine? first of all, i do believe that personal stories are the key to that. the if you reduce somebody just to a concept or an idea or a label, then it can be refuted with another label, and you can have ralph reed like he did the other day say that dr. king's whole career was about saying that it's only the content of your character and that it was a movement about families and not about politics and public change. when anybody who's studied martin luther king's career for five minutes knows that i have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its greed delivered on, you know, on the mall. he came to the mall to do that. this is about our public purpose. so to say that, you know, that he's an anti-government person too preposterous. but that's what happens when you, we and they reduce everything to sound bites. the stories are key.

you have to pick the right stories that people relate to. one of the reasons that i was obsessed to try to put down a storytelling record of this whole period is that storytelling things, things that are human are harder to refute. that's why we are all eternally grateful that in the depression that the roosevelt administration took those oral histories of slaves, the few remaining slaves who could talk from personal experience about what it was like. otherwise slavery was an idea. and it was as vulnerable to anybody else's counteridea, that they were well off and they were all happy. but you had, you had personal testimony, personal testimony matters, and what the rest of us need to do is to find a bit of personal story about martin luther king that illustrates the part of him and his public ministry that you want to pass on and reserve. it's there, but we just need to

do a better job of passing it along. to me, the greatest thing about martin luther king was that he could speak about religion and politics in every speech constantly and was never accused of mixing church and state. which is remarkable. and it's because he did it with such an amazing adroitness. he'd say you want equal souls? fine, you want equal votes? fine. they both lead to justice, they go through race. and he's not trying to subject one to the other which is how you get in trouble with that. and there are examples of that. so i think the best general notion about how you refute the tendency, it's a proven historical tendency to distort and even invert lessons from race to make them more compatible with what you want to believe is to preserve personal stories that have the truth if them. in them. and that's all the time we have. i'm sorry. [applause] thank you.

[inaudible conversations] >> tonight on booktv, three books about journalism. at 8 eastern, gabriel sherman on his book, "the loudest voice in the room," about the creation of fox news. then warren cole smith, author of "prodigal press." and robert moraldi discusses his biography of journalist seymour hersh. a special friday night edition of booktv on c-span2. >> i remember on saturday the first conversation i had with a group of people at that table with the 2 on it.

it wasn't about where you're from, what's your school like, but it was about ukraine. it was about politics, it was about our beliefs on education and religion, and i was after that moment i was like, wow, this week's going tock intense. -- to be intense. but it's been really cool to see the evolution of all of our friendships, all of our bonds from talking about politics, our experiences, what we've learned, who we've met, and this is an experience i'll never, ever forget. >> i've always kind of been really cynical about it, i can never go that far in politic, and politic is the such a caustic environment, but kind of slowly through the the week different speakers have kind of chipped away at that opinion that's been, like, so ingrained in my head. maybe i do want to make a difference and run for something hoping and kind of stay local in my community. because like president obama said yesterday, he told us, you know, don't get cynical because this nation doesn't really need any more cynical people.

that's not going to help usm"kwy relieve the problems that we have. >> one of the things and i know that gets brought up a lot about our generation is our social media. we're ablegs to express our opinions very easily. you know, we can just send a tweet about what we think. and i think that starts conversations, and we like to talk a lot, so there's conversations, social media, and we like to get our opinions out there. >> i think this whole week has been about learning. i come from a small town where it's very politically 40 knowledge nick, and there's noto get your opinion out without being ridiculed. and this has given me an opportunity to learn other viewpoints and get my ideas out withouting with shunned for -- without being shunned for thinking differently. >> a weeklong government and leadership education program held annually in washington.

sunday night at eight on c-span's "q&a." >> at the council on foreign relations, former u.s. ambassador to south korea stephen bosworth argued that the u.s. should establish formal relations with tea to facilitate an agreement on their nuke laugh program. he was part of a panel that also included a former south korean foreign minister. this is an hour. >> ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. my name is richard bush. i'm a senior fellow at the brookings institution, and it's my privilege to chair this meeting today on the north korea issue 20 years on. it was 20 years ago this spring that it was a really bad time to be a specialist on the korean peninsula because we were

inching towards war with north korea. former secretary of defense bill perry writes in a book he did called

. >> each of these gentlemen has served his country with distinction both in government and in the academy. they have thought about these issues for a long, long time, and i think they will provide us an outstanding perspective. you have their bios if front of you -- in front of you, and so i don't need to go through the details. i think you'd rather listen to them than to me. what we're going to do today is, first, ambassador bosworth and ambassador han and i will have a little conversation about some framing issues, and then we'll open it up for your contributions. so to start off with, was there

a point in this odyssey when the outcome we have today became inevitable, or were there some inflection points where we could have achieved an outcome that's much different and much better? steve? >> well, first, i would like to thank the council and to thank you, richard, for the opportunity to be here. i was just thinking to myself you said 20 years ago, and it was 19 years ago almost to the day that i first met dr. han who was then-foreign minister or recently retired foreign minister, i'm not quite sure which. but i was in korea with my good friend and colleague, and we were coming from the korean energy development organization in new york to take a sounding in seoul as to where we might be going with that enterprise. i think there have been a number

of inflection points. this is not a shakespearean tragedy destined to end in a certain way. i think at various points there was the opportunity, and i hope will still be the opportunity, to gain some degree of control over what seems all too frequently to be a kind of inexorable dissent. i would point out that it is not always as -- it has not always been as grim. from 1994 to 2002, we know that the north koreans did not produce plutonium. now, they were doing other things, undoubtedly that we wouldn't have liked, but they did not produce plutonium, and they did not start new production facilities. i also happen to think that in the year 2000-2001 there was an opportunity to, i think, at least modestly set a new direction in the relationship and in north korea's course.

and here i fear that the u.s. domestic political timetable got very much in the way. and that was the period from the transition from president clinton to president george w. bush. and even since 2001 there have been opportunities which for various reasons either because of our domestic politics or our concerns about other events in the region or because of north korea's own intransigence we were not able to take advantage of those. but i don't think it's shakespearean in its ultimate course. >> okay. what's your perspective on the question of inevitability? >> well, actually, i lectureed on what rich chard oaz -- richard posed the question

before we came here. thought about it. of course, there are people who say we should have used for sticks or more carrots. but looking back over the past 20 years, i think if i, i'm a little provocative here, there were two major occasions where we probably would have and should have done things differently. and one is back in 1992 when the iaea found out that there was discrepancy between the amount of plutonium that the north koreans reported and the iaea and the international community suspected that they had. we insisted on what is known as

specialty inspection which put the north koreans into a corner and gave them the need as well as opportunity to get out of the npt system and the agreement that they subsequently signed. and that started the whole thing which ended with the geneva agreed framework. now, if we had not put the north koreans to a corner and continued with the inspection arrangements of the iaea monitors and the cameras and all

that, it was not necessary to have the negotiation that led to the geneva agreement. so in this case we, in the interest of probing the past, we sacrificed the control of the present. so i think we could have done differently, we probably should have done differently in this case. and when the time came for north korea to get the main bulk of the light water reactors and, ultimately, dismantle all their nuclear facilities, then the opportunity came to the north

koreans with aq khan and all to develop uranium enrichment or highly enriched uranium program. now, the second case i would mention is in 2002 when we had enough of a reason that they were getting into this uranium enrichment program. we, well, in this case marley the bush administration -- particularly the bush administration pushed for scrutinizing or having north korea admit that they have this

program which also then led to the dismantlement not of the north korean nuclear facilities, but of the geneva agreed framework. and in this case it was sacrificing the present in favor of the future prospect of north korea engaging in the uep. and so if we had kept the geneva-agreed framework and dealt with the heu issue in a different way, i think we most probably would have come out with a different outcome. >> okay. thank you very much. thinking about the present now, i wonder if you could elaborate on what each of you thinks is the nature of north korea's threat today.

sort of nuclear and otherwise, and who is threatened? is it south korea, japan, the united states, china, all of the above? sung-joo, do you want to talk about that a little bit? >> i think it's everybody who is threatened, actually, including north korea itself and china. if you put them in any rank order, i think the country, the party that is more threatened is south korea. not only by the prospect of north korea actually using the nuclear weapons, but also because what it does to the opportunities for north korea to engage in provocative actions, the possibility of accidents,

you know, especially because much of this program is secret, and there's no opportunity to unsure nuclear security -- insure nuclear security or safety. what it does to the military balance in general. or what it does to the possibility of a military conflict and so on. next to south korea i think it is north korea and then comes japan and -- because of the proximity, because of the presence of the u.s. military personnel and facilities there. and china itself with approximately not only with the weapons capability, but also the

fallout that might come from whatever might happen in north korea with its nuclear facilities. and then this medium to -- in medium to long term the united states, of course. so probably russia is the country which is i think also threatened but not probably the least so among the six parties. but everybody is threatened. >> steve, do you want to amplify on that? >> i agree very much with what sung-joo just said. we all share in the threat. to be more, to elaborate just briefly on that, i think what

possession of a credible nuclear weapons program gives north korea is an even greater ability or capacity than they now have to act with impunity vis-a-vis south korea, vis-a-vis the u.s., the things that they have done over the last 40 years for which in most cases we've found a way to i wouldn't say punish, but at least make that not cost free. if they have a credible nuclear weapons program, and i'm persuaded they do, i think that changes the balance in northeast asia in a very alarming way. the other casualty, of course, is the global non-proliferation regime which for the united states in particular has been a cornerstone of our foreign policy for half a century or

more. which has been if you look at what's happened over that period of time remarkably successful. there's leakage and things happen that we would wish didn't happen, but nuclear weapons have not become sort of the household acquisition of very many countries in the world. and i fear that north korea's example is not a constructive one in that regard. i am somewhat puzzled and bemused by the fact that in u.s. foreign policy and in the foreign policy of most of our partners and friends the prospect that iran might acquire nuclear weapons has become sort of the number one alarm, fire alarm in the world. whereas north korea we know has nuclear weapons, and we kind of

proceed i wouldn't say with indifference, we express a lot of outrage about it, but we don't seem to do much. so i find that bemusing, to say the least. >> i wonder if there's another casualty here, and that's the u.s. policy of extended deterrence vis-a-vis japan and korea. if know has a proven -- north korea has a proven ability to hit the united states with nuclear weapons. >> well, of course, the soviet union had the same ability during the cold war, and we managed to find a way to make extended deterrence credible. i believe we could make extended deterrence credible in the case of northeast asia if we had to, and we may have to begun what's -- given what's been going on. i do worry about the pressures on other countries in the region as i know the chinese worry about that. that if north korea goes nuclear and seems to be getting away with it, so to speak, internal

political debates in, say, japan and conceive my in some future -- conceivably in some future existence in south korea. could change in a way in which the possible option to go nuclear would no longer be as unthinkable as it is now. so i think it does change that, the potential tone of that discussion. >> sung-joo, do you want to comment on this? what south korea might do if it was clear that north korea could hit the united states and, therefore, perhaps call our commitment to south korea into question? >> well, i don't really think that the commitment or idea of extended deterrence especially vis-a-vis japan but also

vis-a-vis south korea would be very much affected by north korea's ability to hit the united states. even with the capability, the u.s. is much more defensive, defense -- defendable than either japan or south korea from north korean attack partially because of the technical capability, technological capability and the distance involved. and so i don't think it's simply wishful thinking that that would be the case. clearly, there'll be a debate in south korea as to what we should

do under those circumstances. if there is the slightest sign of the united states weakening its commitment. but i don't think it will ever come to a point where south korea will actually decide that they will have to do something by way of nuclear route. >> okay. thank you. so we have a situation that is somewhat dangerous, highly frustrating because we haven't been able to take advantage of the opportunities, puzzling as steve said and bemusing. so what do we do about it? is there any chance that at this late date we could actually get a mutually-acceptable negotiated solution? does the united states and japan and south korea just have to accommodate to an emerging reality, or should we think

about some kind of containment? steve? >> well, i think we, we are containing at the moment. if you look at our basic options, none of them are very encouraging or attractive. as you suggest, there is the option which we may be moving toward, simply accepting north korea as a nuclear weapon state de facto if not dejury but if we have nuclear weapon -- they have nuclear weapons and we're not doing anything about it, it seems to me that's something you can't just rule out. you find people who talk about the need for east regime change this -- either regime change in north korea or a forceful military response. if i could figure out some way to make that happen without putting 25 million south koreans

in grave danger, i would be all for it. but i've not been able to come up with a that. so i think any political or moral basis the notion that somehow there is a military response here is just not right. there is a school of thought in the united states and i noels where which argues -- i noels where which argues china should take care of this problem. they're north korea's ally, and north korea's very dependent upon them for certain material benefits, so why don't they just do something about it? and in part that's sort of where the u.s. has been over the last couple of administrations. having spent more late nights than i want to recount talking to senior chinese officials about this, i don't have a high level of confidence they're going to do that. their dilemma's even worse than ours, because they don't, deft do not want -- definitely do not

want north korea to become a nuclear weapons state. china we can't do much about. [laughter] but on the other hand, they don't want north korea to collapse. today don't want to have to deal -- they don't want to have to deal with a unified korean peninsula which they assume would be with under south korean sway, if you will, with a military relationship with the united states. that's, from their point of view, is a decidedly negative change in the so-called correlation of forces. and they don't see a lot of middle ground between them. what they end up doing is advocating that the u.s. and other countries engage with north korea. now, we tried to do that, we try to do that many times and i, again, having worked through all of the possible alternatives too, i think we have in the end no choice but to try it again. and i think while we're unlikely, to say the least, to

get north korea to unilaterally capitulate on its nuclear weapon withs program before we sit down to talk to them about it which is the view of some americans, i do think that as in the so-called leap day agreement which for reasons i still don't completely understand fell apart quickly, i think there is the opportunity to at least slow down the north korean nuclear program. through freezes on testing, other things including the production of plutonium and conceivably something in the area of uranium enrichment. those are very tough things to bring about, but i sort of am of the view that there are three things that are fundamental to us in dealing with north korea as it is, not as we would like it to be, but as it is. and this is not original with

me. sig hecker and other people have argued this, that we should be, we should be working toward north korea not having any more nukes and north korea not having any better nukes and doing something about our concerns about north korean export of nuclear material. the so-called three nos. and i think that is difficult to achieve but not impossible. and that is for me a place of, to start. >> okay. >> and then you move on over that, after that. and getting them to agree to give up their nuclear weapons program i don't see happening in the near or medium term, but in the long term who knows? and as people have said if you don't try, you never will succeed. but i advocate that only because i don't see any more attractive alternative.

>> sung-joo, do you disagree? >> no, i don't disagree at all. i -- >> yes, please. that was a way of asking you to respond. laugh -- [laughter] >> this is really a good opportunity to look ahead by looking pack. >> yes. >> which is the title of one of the sections in the book "going critical," actually. obviously, i don't have any magic potion to solve the north korean nuclear problem, but if i can dwell if some generalities -- in some generalities, i can offer some principles or guidelines in our policy making, and i came up with six, seven of them. and it goes, one, we should not

sacrifice the present for the sake of the past or the future, as i mentioned earlier. secondly, i think pragmatic and strategic goals are more important than principles or ideologies. and in both casesover 1992 -- cases of 1992 and 2002 those were pursued or pushed in north korea very hard more in favor of principles than the practical results at that time. even now those people who are opposed to adjusting this precondition of concrete actions by north korea before coming to the six-party talks, they're saying we are sending them the wrong message. this is against our principles and so on.

i think that is something that may not be very productive way of doing things. third, i think if we're not going to get a surrender document which we cannot at this point, i think give and take is very important. and so as in the case of the geneva accord, i think it's important to give them a stake, to implement an agreement when it's signed or to even sign an agreement. it is important to integrate both carrots and sticks and now, of course, the use of them. and to specifically answer your question, i think negotiated arrangement is better than other options including sanctions.

and six, i would say half a hoe is certainly -- loaf is certainly better than no loaf at all. even as you go, ultimately, for cvid in order to get there you have to settle for some less than perfectly satisfactory goals. and finally, we have to always remember that in order to reverse your course, you have to stop at some point. when you drive an automobile, you can't suddenly go backward. so it is important that we seek to stop the increase in north korean nuclear arsenal, nuclear capabilities before actually reducing and dismantling them.

.. >> i see a question back there, center right. >> michael crap on, the stimson center. could you both to give us your assessment of north korea's new leader and the stability of his

regime? >> he's your neighbor. [laughter] >> well, there are basically two assessments. one is that -- did you say north korea or the leader? the leader. kim jong-un is his own man. he is in fairly good control, and the others forget that he exhibits more vulnerability and weakness than control and powers. naturally, i would go somewhere in between. probably on the side more to his

vulnerability and weakness, and the fact that he might be more acting and, acting in several, acting his role, decided by others. but he is on the way to become his own person, and initially the execution of his uncle in law is an indication of his more

sense of insecurity and his weakness in his strength. but that might contribute to consolidating his power ultimately. >> i think one of the disadvantages of not having virtually any contact with the north koreans at all is that we know very little about how they are being run at present. i think there's always a tendency in the u.s. in particular, but outside north korea in general, to assume that somehow this one person is the decision maker in the north korean structure. i have never been convinced that all of these senior generals and party officials and others with a deep personal stakes in the continuity of the regime are going to give all of 42 a 30 year old person with virtually

no real world experience. so i tend to think that there is a more collective form of decision-making in north korea about which, quite frankly, we seem to know very little. and i think as time goes on, we will see perhaps more coherence but i think the execution was not a sign of the the weakest or strength on the part of kim jong-un. i think it was a sign that there were people within the upper reaches of the regime who didn't like jang song-taek, and thought he was taking too much of the cream off the milk, and that in the end is what i did it. but i have no real way of knowing, and i am always come again, i'm used by people who contend with great certainty what north korea is doing and why. because i don't think we really know very much, and never have. >> okay. next. right here.

>> thank you. mike billington, i'm with executive intelligence review. you have both mentioned the importance of carrots and, of course, the general framework have very strong carrots with the nuclear plant, food and potentially a rail development. and it is such an approach going on now between south korea and russia and china. in fact, park just sent the head of the rail up north while obama is coming to discuss with russia and potential with china also building rail connections potentially the oil connections would be with it. and yet obama and the neoconservatives here seem to have no interest in such an engagement, as you call it. spin is that your question? >> there seems to be nothing like that coming from the united states. don't we need the u.s. to be engaged in this process of

discussing the rail and other developments that already taking place the? >> maybe not. i thought for a long time that one of the many keys to the situation is a consensus position in south korea asked how they would like to see it turn out. and, frankly, the divisions within the south korean policy have always been, as they have been within the american policy, a major obstacle to effective action, vis-à-vis north korea. this is alternately designed to produce a new form of engagement come in this case economic engagement. i would think we have no objection to that, but i may be sticking. >> sung-joo, any comments? >> just wrote an article in

korea on the occasion of president obama's visit of korea, and i was suggesting that the u.s. actually consider adjusting or modifying the precondition or six-party talks. there's no guarantee of course six-party talks will solve the problem in any fundamental way, but certainly would be better and they could start to resume it. and so i don't know about any big formula, or initiative, but the obama administration, president obama started out with a very forward, taking posture

and then right now, in a very stiff mode. it has to be relaxed somewhat. >> over here. >> with the spectrum group. i have to put myself among those americans you describe as having a general feeling why don't the chinese just fix this. would you elaborate more on what the calculation that you proceed to go through is? it just seems from the american prism that they would be better off with a major trading partner, unified south korea, than they would with a potentially enormously troublesome nuclear armed and unpredictable north korea. >> i guess i would become more and more reluctant with the advance, to try to explain with other countries what the natural interests are.

and i think this is particularly true in the case of china. i don't know china at all well enough to be able to tell chinese have spent their lives decide whether national interests are, how they should behave, vis-à-vis north korea. i can point out to them the advantages and disadvantages of various course courses of action the end only they can make that decision. and i think they simply, on the periphery, they have many, many countries on the periphery and they don't like to see change in any case. and particularly not change on the korean peninsula. i don't know if this is ever going to be reassessed or what they might do, but my strong judgment at the moment is that they may appoint a little more pressure on north korea here and a little bit more there, and they may certainly want to give us the impression that they come in the interest of a better

relationship with the u.s. and regional harmony, are prepared to do a lot of stuff but so far i haven't seen much evidence that there is much follow-through to that. day, as i said, they don't like the decision they are faced with. a nuclear weapons state on the one hand or a unified korea on the other. and they are looking for some middle ground and so far they have not been able to find one, which meets the ultimate objective of causing north korea to give up its nuclear weapons state. >> scott herold, right here. >> thank you, richard. scott herold of the rand corporation the ambassador, i wonder if you could put the north korean nuclear issue in the broader context of security threats that north korea poses to its neighbors and the region. including its chemical and biological weapons programs concluding its cyber and

unmanned systems program, conventional strike capabilities. there are other areas that north korea poses, risks and challenges and the nuclear one obviously gets the most attention but are there any prospects for enhancing our engagement with north korea in other domains? for example, the aftermath of a certain use of chemical weapons we managed to get some forward progress there. is there any progress to begin a relationship with north korea in a different domain or to put pressure on them to come forward and make progress in some other area? >> well, clearly there is the need to address the other issues, not only chemical, biological weapons, but missiles as well. but at the same time i don't think it's advisable to mix the nuclear issue with these other issues. it will only make the issue more complicated and difficult beyond

the one we have, which is already in very much complicated. and so the other issues are very important and serious implications, but we have to deal with them separately. >> i very much agree with that. i would simply come back to something i at least indicated earlier, and that is all the other things are important and we should be trying, along with our partners in the region, to deal with them. but to deal with them, vis-à-vis a nuclear weapons state north korea is much more difficult than getting them without north korea having nuclear weapons. it makes it that much more complicated. >> i saw a hand over here. yes, scott snyder. >> scott snyder, i'm here with

the council on foreign relations. as you all know in the last couple of weeks the north koreans have threatened to conduct a new form of nuclear talks, and earlier this week south korean foreign minister said it would be a game changer. i recall last year in the context of hosts third north korea nuclear test in the hope of practice and susan rice said we're going to go through the usual drill at the u.n. which one will it be this time come after fourth nuclear test what do you think the international committee will treat it as a game changer or do you think it will go through the usual drill? >> well, everybody is quiet. first of all i don't know if to be a for the nuclear test or not. i would suspect yes, at some point. win, i don't know. maybe next week, maybe next year, i don't know. my inclination would be that it

will be the usual drill because i don't sense that anyone has made the sort of strategic decisions that would be required to do anything other than the usual drill in response to a north korea and nuclear test. >> north koreans have happened of -- habit of bluffing, but at the same time they usually do what they announced that what they will do. maybe not exactly in the same way that the project, but they will. so we don't know when it will be, but they will probably follow through on that.