the 2014 south carolina book festival held in columbia to talk about his latest book a collection of essays written over the past 20 years. you can watch that now on book tv. >> the rare contribution of big ideas and a truly fun writing. a new yorker by birth christopher graduated from yale and by 24, he was the managing editor of esquire magazine by the chief speechwriter to george herbert walker bush then vice president of the united states and leader of the founding editor of forbes fyi. his books have great titles and i think that's important if you are going to write a book and give it a title and they include the white house mess no way to treat a first lady. not about you patricia i don't

think. supreme court to ship and thank you for smoking by the way. his literary circle list rather represent of the table that celebratebutcelebrated a group w yorkers that met regularly for lunch during the 1920s at the likes of robert, george. the late christopher hitchens. ladies and gentlemen it is my pleasure to introduce the author of that enough about you the cultural critic and if i may say irreverent historian, mr. christopher buckley. [applause]

>> would you please turn your cell phones back on? what an honor to be introduced. it was a connecticut girl that i point out. you will be hearing from her later on. having identified myself as a

connecticut yankee i hasten to point out the -- can you hear me in the cheap seats by the way? i hasten to point out that i have south carolina connections. i spent a lot of time growing up there and in the long going process. he passed away just a month ago, and i miss him greatly. he ran the school of public speaking. and lastly and certainly most importantly though i had the very good sense to marry a south carolina girl that is sitting by the exit.

let's not go there. katie went to medical school while here in columbia and her grandfather was a very distinguished south carolinians whose name was eliot spring and he was from poo portability ande was a classmate of the aforementioned at the yankee institution of the allegedly higher education and when the great war broke out, he volunteered as a fighter pilot and shot down a considerable number. that is a technical airplane term. then he came home and wrote a novel about the cold war and it became a huge bestseller.

they didn't continue to be a writer. but wanting to afford the finer things in life, he went into the family business textiles and had he remained a writer how is that for south carolina connections? does not suffice? ' even so, my in-laws still refer to me as the yankee. but enough about them. as a matter of fact the title of my new book is enough about you. i'm not going to bore you by telling you how wonderful it is other than to say that it's attractively packaged.

the author introductions make me think about the author paragraph on the back of the books. you're familiar with them i know patricia is. these are the paragraphs that the authors pretend they didn't write and consider the greatest writers and f. scott fitzgerald. after a number of books, five or six i sort of got bored about the author paragraph. there wasn't really anything more to say to begin with, so i just sort of started making them up. about the author paragraph in

this book it said that he has been an advisor to every american president since william howard taft. so i was on day number ten of the book to her. instead of waterboarding and the sending of a seal team six day aren't just some terrorists on book tours. they found out where bin laden had been hiding lots faster. so you get a little punch. i was walking into boston, i was walking into in a m. drive time radio into these are not generally occasions of dialogue. that is a greek term.

there is a hierarchy and then down here you have the a.m. drive time that consists of some barking questions between the traffic reports. so i walked into the studio and the host to use a sort of generous construction was -- i saw him hunched over about the author paragraph and this is all that he would know about. as he looked up at me with a sort of bag balm aspect he said you are an advisor of william howard taft?

and now something wasn't right so we could talk about a? and we did. [laughter] i haven't been invited back, but it was kind of worth it. they mentioned a book title, so i thought that i would talk a bit about that. that. would anybody hazard to guess how many books are published in the united states every year? it's about a million. i am not sure they all get read. ..

>> pretty catchy.

and you already knew that, right? or you could take another writer who influenced in the 21st century adolf hitler. his original title for mind comp was my four and a half year struggle against lies, stupidity and cowardness. would you have wanted to be the editor? tell him the title sucks. no, you tell him. [laughter] >> sometimes titles get into trouble when translated into other languages. this happened to john steinback when his involve the grapes of wrath appeared in japan under

the title angry raisins. [laughter] >> you wonder how moby dick would have made out. really angry whale. speaking of fish, peter benchly, the grandson of robert benchly, he was at a round table and had a hard time coming up with the title for his famous book. the printer was saying he need a title and they had gotten it down to three choices. the jaws of death. la vice and rising and the shark. you probably figured out the book we are talking about. his father, nathanial proposed

why don't you call it who is that noshing on my leg. you can imagine the opening bars into the movie. titles are problematic. heller's catch 22 was titles catch 18 for the 18 years working on it and then before catch-22 was to be published in august of 1961 the publisher called him and said there is a guy leon bringing out a novel called lira 18 and we cannot have two books with the number 18 in them and joe was beside

himself. so that is why you didn't have a catch-18 situation at the department of motor vehicles today. this book is called "but enough about you" my first collection, some years ago, it is always a big moment in a writers life when you have enough to recycle. publishers hate collections because they don't sell but i am sure today you are going to prove them wrong. having enough for a collection is a big deal for a writer and so i was puffed up and full of self importances as opposed to now. i said let's call it hoove to you. get it?

[laughter] >> that is the classic french word thrown in there. and the trouble is when an american pronounces the word it sounds like a prelude to vomit. and they didn't think this waws a selling point -- was -- and they said let's not call it that. there was a piece in the book about an experience i had. i said let's call it what about a dictator and they said it requires explanation. and was an editor at forbes once and communism had fallen and the

soviet union had fallen and borris -- don't you miss him? he was always getting up and standing on tanks to prevent a coo. and i became obsessed that the russian had gotten rid of a god that failed communism. they had the sleeping beauty to hell on the streets but the lines to view it were shorter. there are alternatives on a surveillance transparency act night now. what do you want to do? i guess we can go see lenon's body again. the perfect date. i thought let's see if we can give him a push. i wrote up a hoax article. i made it say we just received

hot information that the russian were so strapped for hard currency they were going to auction off the corpse but they wanted it to be done in a dignified matter and the corpse couldn't pea -- be -- used for craft purposes. and the auction would be conducted by a sealed bid. so i had to set a price.

and one night about 4:30 in the afternoon, when a news organization, and this was before the 24/7 news cycle in those good blessed days. and we faxed to 40-50 news units and thought we would get an ap story on it. the switch board lit up like a christmas tree and we went home so we would not have to lie. [laughter] >> we are journalist. we have ethics, you know? so a couple hours later i am at home and on the nordic track and the continuing battle of the bulge and i was watching peter jenning's nightly news and up came lenin's face and i thought

holy shit. it was like being a kid and remember when you put a rock on the rail road track and the next day the grandparents were talking about the derailment? so the next morning at about 6:00, my phone range and it was steve forbes. and this was a little earlier than steve typically called me. in fact, steve had never called me. actually, he has never called me ever again. and he said, the russians have gone bolistic and it was like the scene in the movie dr. strangelove. it was like saying it is the premier on the line and he is hopping mad. and the minister of the interior had had to broken into russian

tv programming, into the russian op ophera. but she had a wart on her head. i always wondered why there were no skin doctors because everyone had the wart. and anyway, he had broken into russian programming to reassure he wasn't planning to secretly auction off the corpse. and he took pains to denounce me personal and i thought cool! eventually everyone got their

sense of humor back. six months later i was on the train going up to new york from washington and i open my "washington post" and there was a huge headline kremlin deluged with officers for lenon. this was a hoax and had been a front page new york times story. but it had eluded the 900 readers of forbes. they were, you know, just out there to have this sort of chopka. the top bid came in from dallas, texas. not ross pero.

but it was a letter only an american could have written. it said we just completed our corporate head quarters down here in dallas and our interior designer thinks mr. lenon would take a fine addition to the lobby. so anyway, there was that story in the book. so i could tell that story if i could get a word in edge wise. and they said no, we are dead and dictator, and it isn't really selling. and this, i don't know, maybe this knows to the whole pointlessness of attempting satire in america because you are in a loosing contest with tomorrow's front page. i was introduced once where i spoke in ohio at a civic

occasion at is 11 a.m. in the morning where you are looking out at at sea of a thousand and 50 shades of blue hair with old women and husbands that have been dragged along. elmer, you are going to get some culture today. and the host introduces to me, the chairman of the election committee, introduced me as a satyrist and she kept repeating it and going back to it. he first became a satist and she kept going back to it. i see we need a title and i ran around and said let's call it bass holes. and the story behind that is as

follows. i used to right short humor pieces for the back page of the new yorker and i became fascinated and obsessed by the proliferation of books on fly fishing. you used to go stand in ice cold water up to your you know what and don't catch a thing but you go home and had a good day. and people brought out books that invested them with mystical attributtes like fly fishing through the divorce or how i found god fly fishing and they would have arguments over which kind of fly fisher the apostles

were. so i wrote a book on that. and one of the books was peter benchly novel callcalled "gills" about a vengeful bass. and then there was bass holes and it was an attack on fish to the tourist. you go to the guy that barne's and noble behind the counter and the book they wanted was bass

holes. and so he would go no we don't carry bass holes. i read about this in the new yorker. i said to random house. i have done the market research. there is a hunger in the land for a book called bass holes. and they said no. you know the prissy new yorkers. so i still needed a title. i said i got it. let's call it. look out president park. and their reaction was pretty much yours. what the hell is he talking about? well, the story behind that was that i went to work at the whitehouse in 1981. this was shortly after john

hankly shot president reagan and members of his staff. john wilkes booth to avenge the south and reagan was shot to impress jody foster and you have the reason for the political assassin. but it was an attention getting to that. if you remember the traveling staff of mr. bush's. the french call it entriage. and you were given a briefing by the suspected service to see what to be looking for in an audience like this to be an extra pair of ear and eyes. it took place in a dark basement room in the old office building

that is next to the whitehouse and looks like a cake. sitting in a dark basement watching home assassination movies. america's least funny home videos. and you had expert commentary by the agents and some of them had been at the attacks. and then we had this really arresting bit of footage of an attempt on president park of south korea. you surely remember president park. and he is at a podium much like this. slightly larger crowd.

5,000-6,000 people. this is much smaller than my typical one. [laughter] >> and the stage is full of secret service guys with glasses and machine guns. and ms. park is sitting over here sitting down looking up. do you have to do this when he speaks? sit there and sort of -- well she is looking up at him with this expression of, i just love his speech. this is my absolute favorite part. he is getting to the part about where he will dump dust on the american auto market. and so in the middle of all of this a guy appears and starts to

walk down the aisle in front of the podium, taking his time and practically pausing to smoke a cigarette. he gets to there and reaches in and pulls out a 357 magnum and he sort of takes his time getting comfortable to get a good platform and he practically gets comfortable and starts firing and president parks does this -- like this happens all of the time. and you know, you can almost here him going i hate this part. i am done with being up here. and now this secret service detail census something is amiss. panther like reflexes.

and one of them does something i thought was interesting from a career point of view. he goes and takes cover behind ms. parks. [laughter] >> boom. boom. and let's hope it never comes to this. he is trading shots with this guide using the first lady as a shield. and it is very quite in the room now. i was just a pot smoking english major who went to washington to do a speech writing gig and i was having a sort of i don't think i am in kansas, toto moment. and a briefing agent said we don't do it this way. and i said that is good. he said if something goes down,

which is a phrase i have managed to live my life up to without the phrase it is going down occurring, he said if something goes down you have two choices. he said you can duck or you can take the round. [laughter] >> i said i got the duck part. what was the second part again? i was fond -- as fond as i was of george herbert walker bush i was confidant that if it came to that i would go for the duck option. but random house said, you know, south korean presidents are not big selling points so we needed a title still. so i said i got it.

i will call it thu. and they looked at me. and there was a story in the back where i was 29 years old when i went to washington, d.c. to be a speech writer. i was going to be the chief writer for the vice president of the united states. i thought this is big. this is really big. this is going to change history. my speeches are going to be reprinted in full on the front page of the new york times. they will be analyzed by the cremlin. and then i got there and it took 72 hours to get to where no body cares what a vice president says. we could never get press

coverage for his in town speeches. the only guy we got was this guy from c-span who would set-up his camera and press record and then go smoke in the lobby and this was in case someone shot him so they would have b roll. and then the cold war heated up one day. remember the cold war? don't you miss the cold war? so much more fun than this one. the polls declared marshal law and russian tanks were moving in and i wanted to be the guy to pick up the phone and say go to death com three. i sometimes do that but we remain at death com four. so in the west wing, they said

to mr. bush in recognition of having been a fine vice president and good team player they say george will give the u.s. response to this provocation and now every media outled in the world cared what bush was going to say and i thought yes. this is all about me. and so he was giving a speech the next day and so i wrote the speech with a little input from the grownups. and everyone was there. live network feeds. and being a highly educated person i went to bartlet's familiar quotation and found a

quote and you know, it is always nice to have classical parsley on the plate and it was pretty apt whatever it was. so mr. bush is up there giving his speech and what a magnificant man he was. we are realizing how lucky we were to have him. i am sitting at the staff table with admiral murphy who was the four-star navy admiral who was mr. bush's chief of staff. and i had been with benedict monks at school and i thought i knew about authority figures and then i went to work for a four-star admiral and boy are

they strict. he said as the greek historian -- and he was looking for a constinent and he was going on and admiral murphy is now giving me the eye ball of death and i am going i didn't make up this word. it was like being in a lamaz class. i was saying push. push. you can do it. and finally it slipped out and admiral murphy came up and jabbed me in the chest with his fingers and said next time say

plato. [laughter] >> so that was the dawn of the platonic era. bush rhetoric. but random house said no i don't know about calling it that. so there was a piece and i said let's call it wish i had said that. this was a piece i did for all things considered the npr show. i had been called for jury duty in washington, d.c. and this is a civic duty of every american, you know. but it isn't an experience i particularly recommend in washington, d.c. there is no more way to put it.

and the poor judges and you know, he is going through the questions and we are all trying get out on a technicality and he said does anyone have a connection to anything in law enforcement and i was married to a cia officer at the time and i thought this is promising. but remembering what poor scooter livey went through it isn't a good idea to shoutout the name of the your wife who is a deep cover cia officer. but i wasn't about to let it go so i held up my hand and his

honor looked at me and i said your honor may i approach? and i had seen this on law and order. [laughter] >> and he said approach. and i thought cool. so i approached. and spent the next three weeks on the jury. but i was telling a friend of mine about my big rhetorical moment in court. he served with the special forces in vietnam and he said stow is like the first time i got to say cover me which put my big moment in perspective and it got me thinking most of us don't get to say the cool lines that you hear in real life and others hear in movies like charge! or sponge clamp or sutures or 3,

2, 1 launch. or up parascope or in my case down para scope. let's get out of here. screw the survivors this is my career. there was a story my a dear friend who whom this is dedicated to. it is reportedly a true story. a magistrate in scotland was sick and tired of seeing this guy brought before him in this courtroom again. he looked down at his nose and

said mcdougal you have been found guilty of the crime of public drunkenness and it is the sentence of the court that you should be taken from here to the place of execution and hanged by your neck until you are dead and may god all mighty have mersey on your soul and mcdougal faint and the bailiff looked up and the magistrate said i have just always wanted to say that. thank you. [ applause ]

>> so any questions, bulk questions were asked and i believe the limit is ten but you can place orders for additional ones. i would be happy to fill up the balance of my time by yielding to you. yes, in the back? [inaudible question] >> you just heard it. mr. bush was a delightful guy to work for. he was the paradox -- the paradox of writing for him was he was better without a text.

he wasn't a guy of the text. mr. bush had these wonderful contra varieties to use a word my dad would use. he was the most athletic of people and captain of the yale baseball team and he had this sort of funny karma where after he left the whitehouse in '93 it would have been he was an avid g golfer and we went out to play in a pro-am celebrity golf tournament where clinton was there and clint eastwood and

others. it was being televised and he hit and spliced it off into the female spectator. and the woman is lying there and the medics are applying pressure bandages. and mr. bush is a nice man and me runs over and he is apologizing and saying sorry. but because it was televised they had to keep going. so a couple hours later he is lining up his putt on the 17th hole, i guess it is called. and he looks over and there is a woman in a wheelchair with her

head swabbed and in bandages and he runs over and starts apologizing to her and says i am sorry. and the woman is looking up and someone comes over and says mr. president that is someone else. she was hit by clint eastwood. [laughter] when i first went to work for him, we went on -- we were always going on trips because part of the job of vice president if someone dies is you have to go and grieve. this body was you die, i fly. when whenever we were in a foreign country we would go to the american embassy and do a moral boosting and he was very

good at it. this was after the hankly shooting. and he told a story about reagan, which i think is eloquent, and he said one day he went to see the president in the hospital and reagan is on his knees mopping and mr. bush says what are you doing? and he said i spilled water and i didn't want the nurse to have

the clean it up. and in retrospect that is a story that could be told about george bush. we would have been down there mopping up the water or whatever it really was. and he used to, you know, he was a houstonian and he would stay in washington, d.c. so the staff would have dinners with family. he was also -- i will tell you something else, he is the most sentimental man i have ever known. here is this flinty new england guy and george bush has the tear ducts of a grandmother.

if they played the national anthem he started blubbering. a marvelous man and one of the best things in my life is having the adventure of working for him. one more story? or another question. [inaudible question] >> not my headline. [inaudible question]

i had a blog that from my old friend tina brown's new website called the daily beast and i have had a column in the national review at the same time. you know about national review. and in mid-october of the election, in the company of a number of other conservative writers. david brooks, kathleen parker, a number of them. wrote a blog in which i gave my reasons in an argument about why i was going to vote for obama

and not mccain/palin ticket. remember who else was on that ticket. [laughter] >> well, well, well. and then the beast, tina, put that headline on it, sorry dad, i am voting for obama. well my dad died in february and was well past giving a shit who where was voting for. sorry to put it that way but -- and i would not say it would be an exerating to see all hell bloke lose. but the tea pot was made larger when the national review fired me as a columnist which was funny because i was on the board of directors and technically

owned 1/7th. and the story sort of took on a life of its own. are you asking me did i regr regret -- i would rank myself

among the 41% in obama's current non-approval ratings. i am a little disappointed. and i think at the time, i said, one of the reasons i am going to vote for him is because i think he, as was said of fdr, had a first class temperament. i am not so sure about that -- whenever i see him giving a speech, i think this is a dignified, attractive, smart guy. but i think he is a little aloof. he is a guy who spent four hours

golfing with mayor bloomberg recently. didn't ask mayor bloomberg one question. if you were president of the united states and you had four hours with a very smart mayor of new york might you ask a question? mike, how do you handle this or that? am i rattling on? i think this is one of the remarkable things about george w. bush and one guy was on tv last week, a very smart guy and i were talking about george h bush and he said i think he may have been our best foreign policy president and i think we

are starting to realize just how extraordinary a guy we had in george bush. a guy who was willing to go back on read my lips at an enormous political cost to himself. how many people on the national stage are willing to do that?

a law high school offered him a chair at law and he replied he could not accept a chair but a sofa of love. [inaudible question] >> i wish we could turn back the clocks. i think they are making fools of us. i think these devices -- to use

a point that you probably heard down here, you would have to pry this from my cold dead fingers. but i think there has been a terrible tradeoff. who -- we live in the age of gotcha. what politician would dare to be original or say something -- you know? i think it is made politics harsher and it is, of course, a fallacy of the highest order to be proposed that politics is nas

nastier now than it used to be. but i think it is -- the 24-7 internet loging has become the reason of discourse. you can start a revolution in egypt which twitter. is that a good thing? i lived in england for three

months. i am the only person you will hear utter the words i am wintering in wist cheer this year. my wife has more advanced degrees than a person with a lot of advanced degrees. she got her diploma from the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine and she would -- this is a very intense three-month course given at the most prestigious school for

tropical disease. she would bring home her homework and sit next to me on the class and i would be reading the original greek and make the mistake of looking at her text book which would be opened to some two-page color spread on some revolting form of nematode and then she would say what is for dinner? a highly educated woman, my wife, and i do love her. and now all of the world will know. well -- >> [inaudible question]

[laughter]

>> the story of my first book tour in 1982, i was at a bookstore in berkeley called black books and you will be stunned to hear it no longer exists. and i was excited by this because it was one of the high churches of bookstores and i arriv arrived. i was a little lit. i arrived at 8:05 for an 8:00 reading and there wasn't one human being there. there were hundreds of chairs and not one human being and the

lovely lady manager was saying traffic is terrible tuesday nights in berkeley at around 8:00. you know? and i said yeah, yeah, i noticed on the way in from the airport and my taxi was going 70 miles per hour. she disappears and five minutes later there are four people in the seats spread out and all of them hispanic. she had gone into the stock room. so my first reading from my book and her team was generous to have them all go to the cash register and buy it.

this was her version of honesty. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> booktv is on facebook. like us to get updates and comments. >> if you go back and look at coolidge he was a conservative hero and he had a gold standard tax rate. he got it down to 25%. and he fought like crazy. it started with wilson in the '70s and when you look at what the socialites said about coolidge you want to remember

they were from fame families that endorsed different models. here he was prissy and cold and not giving out favors. she said he looked like he was we know -- weaned on a pickle -- it was temperamental -- he was of temperament and a shy person. but he had a political person. he knew if he didn't talk a lot people would stop talking. and a president or political leader is bomb barded for request and his silence was a way of not giving in to special interest. >> author amity shales will take

your calls at noon eastern on c-sp c-sp c-sp c-span2's book tv. we asked what are you reading this summer? >> the first one is a book about tip o'neill and ronald reagan, the president, and how they had opposite views but forged a relationship and got it done. i think the present day congress can use that advice and i will be interested to see how it relates to the present day. and i look forward to reading that book. and i have other books i have been interested into the fdr new

deal. there is a book out called "fear itself: the new deal and the origins of our time" and he looks at the politician of the new deal and how fdr put together a coalition of northern liberals and southern conservatives at a time when comm communism and socialism was rising all over the world. also with a balance in the book. the holocost fdr state department and i have long felt the state department and fdr didn't do enough to rescue the jews from europe in the

holocaust. there was documents showing the united states could have done things like bomb the railroad tracks leading to the camps and didn't do it because the war effort was taking center stage and they didn't want to deviate from that. and "double down" is another one about the 2012 election between president obama and mitt romney is going to be fascinating. and the outpost by jake miller talks about the galer in afghanistan. i tried to visit the wounded warriors at the navy hospital, the walter reed hospital, and it

shows bravery on the part of the soldiers and the outpost is about a book about the bravery and how they banded together. and finally so you don't think i am too serious there is a book called i-pad and i plan to read this. ...

to strike down the defense of marriage act. this program is about an hour. >> it's wonderful to be here today. we have so much to talk about. i thought that it would be useful to share with people a former how you came to write the book and the experience and then step back and talk about the framing of the book and get back into some officials you make in the book. so