>> general verrilli, i want to switch gears a little. justice kagan talked about your integrity, and as you know i know that from personal experience, but my question for you as lawyers, given the gridlock and the hatred that's in washington, how do we inspire young people in our profession and outside our profession to

follow in the best tradition of public service and bring those people, the best and the brightest, on both sides of the aisle, to really do what we do as lawyers which is uphold the rule of all? how do we do that? how do we inspire young people to do that? >> the best way for me to answer that question is actually just talk about my own life as a lawyer. and i feel a particular obligation to do it now because i do think that, and i encountered this would talk to young people, law students in particular, there is a bit of reluctance on the part of young people, young lawyers, to take chances, take risks, and in particular take risks in taking on pro bono or public interest representations or work, however you define it because of the

concern. this is true of paper you put on the left and people on the right, concerned that it's going to be held against them and that the better course is just to play it safe and not do that because it will come back to bite them. every now and then you actually do see them. we have really seen a situation where it has come back to bite somebody. but what i say to them is what i would say to you, and i hope we could all as members of his profession communicate to younger wars that that's exactly the wrong lesson to draw, even in this poisonous climate, maybe especially because of this poisonous climate, and that i'm 100% morally certain that i would not be a. i'm not have justice kagan delivering that wonderful, wonderful introduction, and i would not have his position as solicitor general had i not done the pro bono work that i did. 100% sure that's true. and if you had in the 1980s

said, well, my goal was to become solicitor general of the united states, one of the first things you cross off your list was representing death-row inmates on an ongoing basis because that was really controversial back then, and you didn't win a lot of friends doing it. but i decided something i wanted to do and i did a fair amount of it over the years to it wasn't the only pro bono work i did but i did a fair amount of it. as it turned out, five of the cases i argued in the supreme court when i was in private practice were cases coming out of capital punishment or death penalty cases. so a big chunk of the experience that qualified to mean to be even considered to be sg came out of having done the work. but even more importantly to me, was that, boy, that's really how i learned to be a lawyer. you go down to the county courthouse in jackson, georgia, or gulfport, mississippi

sometime after arguing a case down there at one of those things. you'll learn a lot about how to be a lawyer that way and you'll learn a lot how to be alone when you're the one on the line and it's your judgment, your decide which issues to press and which issues not to press and the consequences are as high as they are and it's on you to make those judgments and it's on you to carry them out. you learn an awful lot about how to be a lawyer when you're doing that. so without that experience as i said i'm quite sure i wouldn't be a. so i think, and this is not, but making an ideological point here. what you think is a public interest we are a public profession and young lawyers don't understand that the addition of a lawyer in this country is one that is rooted and responsibilities to the public. and in order for them to actually be lawyers in the american tradition, the odds of that public responsibility, and

on top of their lives are going to be a lot better. so i guess that's the message i would urge all of us to try to communicate to new lawyers. all right, i don't see -- >> i was wondering if you could share any thoughts or reflections from oral arguments before the supreme court? particularly if there's any one justice that you dread receiving questions from most? [laughter] >> you mean other than justice kagan? oral arguments is kind of an amazing experience. justice kagan summed it up pretty well. it's not always as she described it. some cases where it's a little bit different, and one thing i noticed, i could be completely wrong in this perception but i've noticed that, for example, patent cases which have argued three, i think i'm the only sg who is argued a patent case and

i've no argued through them. the tenor of the argument is a little bit different in those cases because i think they are cases where members of the court seem to have less of a clear sense of what they think about the right into going into the argument. so the argument just has a different tenor as a result of that. most of the time they seen to me, the justices seem to me to have a pretty good sense of what they think and they're asking really probing, hard questions which is their job and that's what they should do. there will be some cases it will be the chief justice really getting a tough time. some cases it will be justice kagan getting a tough time. those tend to be different cases, but that's their job. they should be probing for weaknesses. they should be challenging the position of the united states in particular to try to work through what the implications of agreeing to the united states' view would be. that's what to do. that's their job. this is a really smart group of

jurists, the justices that sit on the court, and they are incredibly well-prepared. and so it makes it a great challenge to argue but also makes it incredibly warning because you do feel like, win or lose, you feel like they understand what's at stake in the case, they understand what the issues are, and the case is going to be decided on the basis of a legal issue that are really, i really there and at the heart of the case. [applause] spent all right, so i'm done, good. standing between you and the bar, i realize. >> booktv sat down with former secretary of state hillary clinton in little rock to discuss her new book "hard choices." >> getting to the point where you make peace is never easy because you don't make peace with your friends. you make it with people who are

your adversary, who have killed those you care about, your own people or those who you're trying to protect, and it's a psychological drama. you have to get into the heads of those on the other side because you have to change their calculation enough to get them to the table. i talk about what we did in iran, a lot of economic pressure to try to get into the table and we will see what happens but that has to be the first step. and i write about what we did in afghanistan and pakistan trying to get the taliban to the table for a comprehensive discussion with the government of afghanistan. in iraq today, i think what we have to understand is that it is primarily a political problem that has to be addressed. the ascension of the sunni extremists, the so-called isis group is taking advantage of the

breakdown in political dialogue and the total lack of trust between the maliki government, the sunni leaders and the kurdish leaders. >> more with hillary clinton saturday at 7 p.m. eastern and sunday morning at 9:15 a.m. on c-span2's booktv. >> c-span to provide live coverage of the u.s. senate floor proceedings and key public policy events. and every weekend booktv, now for 15 years the only television network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. c-span2, greeted by the cable tv industry and brought to you as a public service by local cable or satellite provider. watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. >> next on "after words," ken adelman, director of arms control in the reagan white house has written a firsthand account of the historic 1986 nuclear arms talks with the

soviet union in his book, "reagan at reykjavik." is interviewed by journalists romesh ratnesar. this is an hour. >> host: welcome and congratulations on this terrific book. let me just start by asking the obvious question which is, why now? what made you decide to revisit this chapter of the cold war 28 years later? >> guest: someone asked me to the date i want to take you to write the book? about 28 years. because i was there. is most important weekend of my life. it was in many ways the most thrilling weekend of my life and i have been telling people about it for a long time. in the movies start to be produced and i was executive producer of the movie with ridley scott, the producer, and michael douglas playing reagan, and the net started about eight years ago. so i was involved in that way,

and then the movie stalled and this happened and that happened, you know, on and on. i was thinking it's a good story. why don't i just write it up? a counter argument is i've written five books before and i decided that was enough for moses, is going to be enough for me. his sales were higher than my sales. someone said the most valuable copy of one of my previous books was unsigned copy of which there were i think virtually none, and unsigned copy with a receipt from the bookstore where i said i was going to write any more books. then going in my mind and i thought why not? so i decided to do it. let me take the more i looked into it the better it looks. >> host: you said at the outset that reykjavík has been relegated to a footnote to history, largely forgotten and

the general public is only vaguely aware the summit took place. what is it that has been misunderstood by historians, by the general public that may have cost people the kind of underestimate the importance, which included leaf is extremely important event in modern history, why has it been so overlooked? >> guest: overlooked because the general paradigm that the soviet union fell, the soviet union following is a gigantic event. the end of the cold war is that you can't thing. no dispute about that. the conventional wisdom is it's the old system of the soviet union, the economic bankruptcy of the soviet union, the fact is this section of dying leaders in the soviet union, all that brought down the soviet union and nothing from the outside mattered at all. >> host: so you started to look into writing this book, were there other looks, other

historians, other participants and the events on reykjavík that done their own books? >> guest: there's memoirs by george shultz, secretary of state, other memoirs at the time that no one really did a deep dive into what happened, and the best thing is no one had the notes, both the americanists and the russian notes. went to that enable you to do? that enabled utc them raw anti-peek through the keyhole of the little conference room, put your air to the door to listen to what they said and 410 after hours. don't know about you, but i've never talked to anyone for 10 and half hours. f. i ever talk to my wife about long i think short walk out the screen. they talked about the most important issues in the world for 10 and a half hours. without notes, without talking points, without staff

involvement, without memos. and so they must have felt, ronald reagan must have felt that this is more like me than any time in my presidency. and mikhail gorbachev must have thought this is more like me than any time in my time as general secretary. and michael reagan, ronald reagan's son, you did a real insight into my dad. they don't show his mind at work. this shows his mind at work. minute by minute and his character house of representatives so these notes from the summit in addition to the other documents, where are they? were defined the archival material? is this available to the general public if they want to go and look at this stuff or did you have to -- >> guest: some of it is at the reagan library. some of it has been put online. some of it is that reykjavík,

and it's been scattered around. what made it the more i look at it the more wonderful story, what made it such a wonderful story is first of all the story. this is a little, a weekend, a stormy weekend in october there was rain lashing at the windowsill in a creaky old house in the middle of nowhere, a desolate spot in a desolate place, iceland, and said to be haunted the neighbors called it the haunted house or the ghost house rather than the hotels. and even on the eve of the summit the prime minister said that his family believed in ghosts, and if the house, if the hofdi house house was haunted he thought that goes would be most welcome there. so over the weekend in this kind of agatha christie like setting

of the most amazing things happened and they happened to two characters, mikhail gorbachev and ronald reagan, or among the most interesting and intriguing and here's meta- characters in the tone century. and thirdly, besides the setting and the storyline, the ups and downs, emotions, the ins and outs, and besides the two characters who are fabulous, is the consequence, 48 hours that ended the cold war. >> host: let's get to reykjavík into second and i'd love to give her some of the stories that you have from the weekend but, of course, this is a memoir and sort of a journalistic history of the summit and with the kind of endgame of the cold war. when yo you are working in the reagan white house and you are at the reykjavík summit in a very prominent role, did you believe or did you anticipate you might someday want to write a book about your experiences? did you keep a diary? were you able to consult the notes from that time? >> guest: no. and it really was stupid to

because it was the most important weekend fo of my life that i went on with my business, did whatever i did. what was remarkable about this is i chased down wonderful documents of reykjavík at the reagan library, washington, d.c. i found after the book went to press that i had in my files a letter that ronald reagan wrote to me about reykjavík, and saying nice job, and it's not in the book. so the most personal document of reykjavík, ronald reagan's letter to me a few days later, is not recounted in the book while i go chasing all these other documents all around. it was not -- i saved nothing. >> host: i imagine many of your recollections from the weekend you may have found some discrepancies when you finally went back and actually looked at research into details. >> guest: very few. i'm telling you because, i mean,

i can go for years and not tell you anything i did that whole year, or decades and not tell you. but when something like this happened, you remember a remarkable number of things. when you trace it, you can look at the photos, for example. i'll give you one example. the summit was a surprise. everything about reykjavík was a surprise, and so the kgb and the cia and the secret service knew about the summit before the state department knew. all right? so they go in to reykjavík and rinse all the rooms in the house. then the secret service goes to the u.s. ambassador in reykjavík, not an overworked capacity. nothing happens there, but he enjoyed deep-sea fishing so is the perfect deployment for the ambassador to iceland, and he was told that the president is going to be in your house on

october 9, 10th, 11th and 12th, and the ambassador was quite excited about it and he said, but the bad news is you aren't. they are going to take over your house. the ambassador by that time tried to find a room. he could not find a room, and he left. so i remember thinking to myself, it's pretty shabby treatment of the u.s. ambassador to italy think all these hundred years have happened between iceland and the united states, the only thing that ever mattered in the u.s. ambassador is nowhere to be found. so that was my memory. years later i hear that his wife said that he was at reagan's side and who's doing all this, and you know, then his widow, and i thought gee, maybe my memory is just wrong. for the research of this i looked at reams of photographs

of the white house photographer in those little, whatever you call, snapshots, rolls of film that people used to have for the white house photographer, and there were very few taken inside hofdi house but there were a lot taken at the ambassador's house. you see him appearing in none of the pictures but even when we had lunch with the president twice at the ambassador's house, his own house, i'm thinking to myself, i remove her commune, that was right. he wasn't there. his widow, i'm glad she thought he was, but he wasn't. >> host: let's segue then into the start of this summit. it's october 11, 1986. reagan and gorbachev, this was the second face-to-face meeting. they met in geneva one year earlier. what had transpired between the first meeting in geneva and the start of the reykjavík summit?

what with expectations of the american side going into the second meeting between gorbachev and reagan? >> guest: the expectations are very low. gorbachev did arms control was tough at that time. reagan was thought to be an out of control hardliner that put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation at that time. you know, things weren't panning out. his main priority was to negotiate with the soviets and to show that he was a great negotiator, to bring peace. it's remarkable, one of the remarkable part of the research i did was on the plane to detroit in 1980 to accept the republican nomination, stuart spencer, an old advisor of his set, ron, why are you doing this? why do want to be president? and reagan sent to them without hesitancy, to end the cold war.

who in the right line in 1985 anybody was going to end the cold war? and as it happened the other way to do that. he had an approach. he had an outcome. he said we win, they lose. and his approach really reducing nuclear weapons, having star wars, the sdi, extending military might and delegitimizing the soviet union with the evil empire, the focus of evil in the modern world, that communism was going to end up on the ash heap of history. all these things were deliberate six-year attack before reykjavík. and so he had a strategy to i don't know if you ever thought about it but you don't know what ronald reagan would've thought about but, you know, what he did. he had this strategy, and it was thought to be a summit, reykjavík, that was not going to be a summit. in fact, the remarks on the south lawn of the white house and the president is going to reykjavík said this isn't even a

summit. it's a meeting to prepare a summit. >> host: it came together very quickly. >> guest: 10 days time. we spent six months preparing for the geneva summit. back and forth, back and forth. this was 12 days. >> host: and yet a huge amount of tension decisions on this -- descends on this kind of figure 3000 euros i think you said. >> guest: 3172. >> host: you have all three networks show up, the a team from various television broadcast networks. and you. you were there in your role as arms control director ugly. so tell me about what your responsibilities as you understood it would be going into this weekend. >> guest: as we understood it my responsibilities would be nothing. nothing substantive happening. this would be a grim and grit

kind of, grim and grab kind of summit, it would be a media event, and thought to be that gorbachev needed to elevate his stature within the soviet union, and how better to do it than to meet with the president of the united states in the middle of nowhere, and offer a meeting of the. so that's what we expected. that's what the cia had told us. that's what the american ambassador in moscow had found out that's what the soviet ambassador in washington have told us. so we were going along with the kind of photo op summit on that, and all of a sudden, boom. and we knew the moment came the first morning when reagan and to which i met. we were sitting in a bubble, a bubble is room within a room. it is totally secure, and it has big latches on the outside so they can't be bogged.

bubbles generate a pretty big, and women had the ones for the arms control talk a uk 25 people in the bubble. in reykjavík the ordered the smallest bubble ever because nothing ever happened in iceland and none was ever classified. with a devastating side-by-side right next to each other on folding great chairs, the kind that wal-mart would be ashamed to sell, cheap as could be, and all squeezed in almost need to me, aside from site. so we are in this bubble. and schultz is telling us what he knew about the first meeting. and all of a sudden -- george shultz, suggested that all of a sudden the latch opens up, the door swings open, we look up and there's one of these seven-foot eight-inch secret service agents who says the president of the united states.

any red-blooded american do, we all stood up and going to belly. reagan looks at all of us and says, this would make a great aquarium. and then we come to a crisis because there was an eight seater there and there are nine of us now. and it was the chief of staff of the white house. there was the secretary of state. there's national security advisor, and the arms control director. so i knew that it was going to stay, and by god, i know is going to stay, i needed to do something fast. so what i did was offer the president my chair. i said sit right there, mr. president. and i hit the ground. i was on the floor and meanwhile, this gigantic secret service guy had latched the door once again, and so we were in there. it was a great, great moment because reagan cracked a few jokes and he said, gorbachev is really serious about doing things, and we said in what way?

and he kind of try to tell us like an approach that gorbachev was taking, and we sat there or about 30 minutes. i was gently leaning against the presidential niece, and we knew that, oh, god, our assessment was wrong. the reports were wrong. this is going to be the real thing. >> host: reagan and gorbachev at this point, they don't know each other that well. they've had the meetings in geneva, exchanged pro forma letters and that kind of thing, but they haven't had a lot of heart to heart time. so reagan is basically the leaning of his from -- gleaning this from gorbachev that way. he could already tell. >> guest: something different here because the geneva summit was very well scripted. in many ways it was an ideal state conference summit. everything was very well scripted, very political minded and nothing much comes out.

an ideal state department. this was just the opposite. nothing was scripted. nothing was ready. it wascome as you are and there was no protocol. and one of the things i missed that is sure to put in the book was during the whole weekend, we never shared a meal. they never shared a drink. they never shared a social event. where in geneva it was just like a ball. it was like they were double dating, and this had nothing. and neither of them were that busy outside the main talks, but it never occurred to anybody why don't we invite gorbachev over to lunch? >> host: so back to the bubble. what's he like in a setting like that? is he in command of the issues? is he actively engaged in what you guys are talking about? >> guest: what he did was he told us that gorbachev was serious, told is the core which offer they wanted to lower nuclear weapons, told those gorbachev didn't seem flexible

on sdi, was very worried about it. and all that was good and all that was right, and then he tried to tell us exactly what kind of proposals gorbachev came up with, and those were the smash it could have turned to shultz, trying to figure out what it was that gorbachev had set as well, and shultz wasn't anybody. because the whole lingo of arms control was awfully specialized and complicated, and very few people knew it and very few people, even fewer needed to know. so they got all screwed up. but reagan and said, oh, my god, he gave me a piece of paper. and some he brought out the paper and reagan thought that was a very kind thing for gorbachev to do. we all thought that gorbachev knew his man. he was going to take what those numbers. we dove for the paper and

thanked the president very much. then talked about what it meant. >> host: so you deal with a lot of the sort of details of what was discussed in terms of how many nuclear weapons each side was willing to cut and to what size. as many people remember, and as you detail in the book, sdi, strategic defense, star wars as it was known then, just described again what was sdi? why was it so important to reagan? and why didn't gorbachev opposed it so vehemently? >> guest: it was so important to reagan because it got us out of the kind of nuclear impasse that we've been in since the 1940s, 1950s. that as reagan thought about it, two gunmen come to cowboys with

a gun to each other said. and there was mutual not an election anyone to get away from the. it was very value-based and you just want to get away from the. gorbachev thought oh, my god the united states can do anything, sdi is certainly real but it's going to make our ballistic missiles, negate american -- soviet power and it's going, if we tried to compete it will ruin of the soviet union. and so reagan had this mystical view of what sdi could become. gorbachev had a frightful view of what sdi would become, and all of us knew that it was both small and that time relatively insignificant research program in the pentagon, but these two guys just elevated it. and i think that gorbachev's view of it, that is going to bring down the soviet union, brought down the soviet union. >> host: so reagan didn't