is now at the american foundation in washington, and it landed on the cover of the magazine did we need to adjust to this new reality. it makes couples stronger and live up to their potential. >> one of the pairs of authors that you worked with was nancy and michael duffy on the q-and-a program they covered it as well. what was the process working on the presidents club plaques >> i wish i could say that i

came up with a bad idea because it is such a brilliant idea. but they have been working on that for quite some time and the idea came to them after they had written a very great book on billy graham and they realized the degree to which the presidents talk to the x. president and how that shaped the presidency itself and that is what gave them the idea to explore the presidents club in a thorough way. it's practical reasons for this to be possible. but what they found was that the presidencies were actually made a stronger sometimes and challenged by people inside this

club and what was interesting is that you had over a dozen characters all of whom had relationships with each other going to words the past and towards the future. we have an introduction to certain key partnerships all along the way because it helps the reader keep track of who the characters are and it helps them overlong chronologically without -- while honoring history as they actually happened. >> so the right to they write the presidents club, what was your role, what part did you play in the book? >> it's to structure the book and give an architecture that makes it so accessible to the reader so easy they forget that

there are all these multiple characters on stage at once that they can see and not feel overwhelmed by it. i think if you are bored as an editor there is a chance that the readers will be, to too. we have to make sure the inside knowledge was made completely transparent to the reader so that they know where things came from and how you know things. but essentially when you have the authors as talented as nancy and michael you just get up in the morning and get to work. >> what did you do when you first got the manuscript? >> it came in sections.

the first thing you do is leave the office. you have to really lock your self someplace else some place else and completely immerse yourself in the buck. there were times i would leave the buck and still be living in the middle of the nixon administration and want to get back into it. you want the ability to sort of sink into the story to see all of its beauty and so that you can occasionally make it to be more beautiful. >> do you take a red pen to it or a pencil? as a reporter and editor it allows me to move back and forth

so that they feel they can look at those notes and absorb them as they would on their own terms. >> is there an author that you worked with and are working with that is better known as karl rove did he choose you or did you choose him and how did that relationship became quite >> i had to audition for it. he asked me to go down to washington and it was the first book that i was asked to edit. i've been a journalist for 30 years. and he had read up on me and what stories i had covered. we had the politics in common. i had actually covered him as an editor for many decades.

basically my argument is you should hire me because this is my first job and i can't screw it up. and it worked. >> is it different working with a personality like that and it is working with maybe nancy and michael who are not as well-known? >> i think every writer has to put themselves on the page so it is a process by definition that makes writers feel vulnerable and i think the job is to protect them and also make them feel comfortable. no you can't start the book at age 30. you have to start with a lot of the pain of her childhood including your mother's suicide

and father leaving the home and you find out later that your father wasn't your father. you are learning to meet your real father. all of those issues have to be on the page as difficult as it is to talk about because they are part of what made you view and if this is going to be a biography, you know, than any to include that. and he told me later that often times when he gets stopped by the readers they bring up the childhood experiences like his and that is one way that you make a personality that seems to be on stage more accessible to people. are there a lot of the nonfiction political books? >> yes.

i work on nonfiction. and some of the books are not so much political as they are journalism. a book on afghanistan. a book on veterans, a book on the meat bracket the industry that has now become an oligarchy. a lot of books that involve journalists spending many years of their life digging into some of the issues we face and try to make them readable that they want to spend a lot of time with. >> you can watch this and other programs on linux booktv.org.

dan mccarthy is the editor of the american conservative magazine on the subject of american foreign policy. this is just over an hour. we are in the sovereign state to think of american foreign policy in this hearing we hope to discover whether it is a business to send our liberty and way of life against enemies real or imagined going after the