[applause] >> this is booktv on c-span2, television serious readers. here is our prime time lineup. tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern, experiences as an alzheimer's caregiver. at:00, the story of a tragic car wreck due to a texting while driving. prime time programming continues at 11:00 p.m. with vaccinations. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> up next on booktv, david cross recounts his road trip to all the presidential libraries. he speaks from the franklin d. roosevelt presidential library in hyde park, new york which is home to the annual roosevelt reading festival. this is about 40 minutes.

[inaudible conversations] >> good morning, everyone. i am the deputy director at the franklin d. roosevelt presidential museum and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the eleventh annual roosevelt reading festival. when fdr established the first presidential library at his home in hyde park he imagined it being the premier research center for the study of the roosevelt era and we are consistently one of the busiest research rooms in the

presidential library system and one of the reasons we love this so much is we get to see the fruit of the labors of all the people who use our research rooms throughout the year so it is our pleasure to have you here. let me quickly go over the format of the day as well as a couple housekeeping matters. the first thing is will everyone take out your electronic devices and turn them off so there presentation isn't interrupted today? thank you. the other housekeeping matters if you find somebody on staff here today, that would give you one of the roosevelt library buttons that would get you into free admission to the exhibits we opened a year ago after our 3-1/2 year innovations so we encourage you to check out the new exhibits. finally i want to thank our friends from c-span who are filming here today. they are great at showing support for our public programs

still i appreciate them being here. our distinguished guests will speak for 30 minutes after which there will be an opportunity for questions and answers. because c-span is filming what i would like you to do is coming up and line up at the microphone so they cannot only capture your question on tape but also your smiling face to see how much you are enjoying yourself. after the question and answer period i will with the guests out to the lobby where he will be happy to sign all of the books that you are going to buy at the new deal museums for. so david cross is a free-lance writer and trial attorney who lives in philadelphia. his trial manual, how not to think like a lawyer was a best-seller on amazon in 2013. his earlier book cross-examined is a collection of published essays on literature, history, music and travel. his new book, "chasing history: 1 man's road trip through the presidential libraries," came about from the desire to flee the criminal court room of philadelphia in order to get to

know the presidents a little bit better. when not writing or litigating he spends the bulk of his time quoting bob dylan and trying to decide which dvds he would take to a desert island and no box sets are allowed. david is married to his lovely wife, nicole, and his loving father david, so ladies and gentlemen, david cross. [applause] >> good morning, everybody. it is a delight and an honor to be here at the franklin roosevelt library to discuss my book. when i decided to take a road trip across the country to visit the presidential libraries i really had no idea what it was i was going to find and i had no specific point of view at that time. i had heard the academic

criticisms, these are all joy and mausoleums for ego, they don't confront us enough with both sides of the president. and the most damning of all criticisms academics have levied, that they are like theme parks, that young people might come to these places for fun. so when i came i didn't know what i was going to find. the first library i visited happens to be the franklin roosevelt library and that was pure serendipity. i live in philadelphia. it was the nearest one and i came out to this library and fell in love with this place and as i travelled across the country i can't say that none of these criticisms are ever worthwhile, but i found so much that was positive about the

libraries and franklin roosevelt did a lot of things but this is one of them. everybody interested in american history and everybody interested in the presidents needs to thank franklin roosevelt for coming up with this idea of the presidential library because we didn't have this before. there was nothing like this in other countries. i thought when i started this trip who would be opposed to this? who would be opposed to having a presidential library? and when roosevelt was president most of the presidents used to put their documents in the library of congress but documents went all over the place and we all know lincoln's documents went all over the place, some presidents had a bonfire, many of the papers were eaten by rats. george washington was the first person to have the idea of the presidential library.

he was meticulous about protecting his paperwork but he did not have the chutzpah to say let's create a presidential library for me. that took franklin roosevelt and franklin roosevelt came up with that it and we all talk about we are in the most partisan of times but if you read through the arguments that went on about whether or not to allow for this library that is right here, whether or not to allow it to take place, you would realize there has been partisanship for throughout our history. a lot of people thought it was a bad idea and the man who thought was the worst idea of all was hamilton fish who is from this district and cut if roosevelt said it was sunny he said it was dark. we know some hamilton fishes out there. this is not a new thing and he said this is a terrible idea. first of all it is that giant monument to this man's ego and

more importantly we got the library of congress. why not put him there and what he said is we have to drive -- if roosevelt has when everyone is going to want one of these libraries. that is a great title, driving from "to podunk. my publisher didn't think so. any title that requires five minutes explain is not a good title so i didn't call it that but when you come to the roosevelt library and you come to a lot of other libraries you see this wonderful thing which is when you go to where roosevelt was, when you see the hudson river that he is to actually look at, when you are in the house that he lived that, we get closer to him and it is one thing to read about a president and another thing to be where he is and if you are a writer this is a wonderful opportunity.

it is a wonderful opportunity and let me get started. i have a power point presentation here. this of course is the roosevelt library. this is actually a different room from where the research takes place but this is what you would find if you went to the back room and saw where the researchers were doing their work and as you see the gentleman back there with his camera, that is how most of us get our information, we bring in a digital camera and i remember when you use to have to come in and had to request and they had to xerox, now you can just come in and get to snap pictures. i came into that room and i was interested in finding out i want to know how the presidential libraries came about. i want to know how franklin roosevelt did this. the gentleman who introduced me, bob clarke, wheeled me up one of these carts which you can see

and open up the first box and took out one file and what is wonderful about this library is it is before the freedom of information act took place. the archivists and even the white house before franklin roosevelt left the white house were able to organize the paper's very well and i look to this file and 20 pages were cross reference to. in other words it might be something nick cabinet members said and then cross reference to those and i thought if i am a writer and i could note this it looks like i have done this for six months so for all the books we read, this is why my book, "chasing history," why i dedicated to the archivists because you don't see their names. they may not even be alive anymore when you go up to that file but for the mud,s and doris kerns goodwins they couldn't do what they do without their work and why do they do it?

in this world where everything is self aggrandizement kaimac as i drove across the country and met archivists i never met so many people who loved coming to work every day and they love their role in this and they are not going to get their name in many books, some of the mark in my book but for the most part they are going to have that feeling that they helped bring history about and this is how it looks. this is a card you are going to get. these are for anybody to go to. a lot of people feel are you allowed to go? yes. anybody in america can go and you can hold a document that franklin roosevelt signed or winston churchill's son and. here is something with fdr. when you look at that it is hard to describe how exciting that can feel to see the actual

material. here is a cartoon that came about when he was fighting to get this library put forward and they are saying here is fdr as santa claus giving himself his hyde park memorial. there was a lot of opposition. one lady send him a check for $1 and -- $0.20 i think and said i couldn't send more because of the economy. there was a lot of criticism about doing this. you learn sometimes by bumping into something about someone. everything i always read about roosevelt was asked at pearl harbor, he was depressed, couldn't believe the navy was gone and here he was thinking about his presidential library to next day. roosevelt kept his hand in everything and one of the things you do, you look at these presidents and learn lessons about how to live and you see roosevelt would never have had to say you know what? this guy ran my bank account, i

didn't know he invested that or i did know this, if you look at the documentation he keeps his hand in every pot and his car that you can see, the mansion, this affected me, looking at his elevator and you all can go look at this today if you want to do that. you read about somebody, you understand somebody and we all know about his physical limitation but when i saw this heavy wooden elevator and was told he would pull himself up and bring himself down on it for exercise, you realize, his wheelchair was not like a modern wheelchair. it was heavy and you realize the upper body strength he would have had to have to do that. this is a driveway used to walk down that entire driveway so again, in a book i like a lot by tony horwitz, confederates in the closet, a character who is a

reactor says it t k os you, that combination of history and landscape. that is the brilliance of franklin roosevelt's idea, to combine the history and the landscape for scholars and for anybody else who is interested and here you get the opportunity to sit and look at the cabin he created. this library has been recently refurbished and i wanted to show if you go to this library will find both sides of franklin roosevelt and a little bit more about that. the next one i went to was the kennedy library and i write the bay of what? is a complicated issue what should go into a library and what shouldn't. to understand john kennedy you need to understand addison's

disease and his physical limitations. these are things that bypassed in that library and i spoke to the director and the director told me we don't go into the personal things because they are so relatively. it was interesting because after i had that conversation i came to the roosevelt library and i am looking at that lucy mercer thing you just saw and i look next to me and i was here at the anniversary and who is there but eleanor roosevelt's granddaughter and i was ready to catch her as she fainted, i was ready, but she didn't. in case anyone at the kennedy library is watching this i think it is going to be okay. beautiful library on columbia point, jutting out into the waters that john kennedy actually sailed in. he had chosen to have his library in hovered and it was such a fight. harvard was so unhappy about

that, so much fighting going on that we was unable to do that. there is a lot of talk about kennedy and classical music. and there is an argument going on between bobby folks and john kennedy folks because they don't feel body has been given enough attention in the roosevelt library does a great job incorporating eleanor because she is such a part of the story. bobby's family is interested in maybe going off to a different place. i would go and i would do a research topic everywhere i went so what i wrote about in the kennedy library was hampton haws and how he got pardon. he is a jazz pianist. if you want to hear that story and no where to get it, "chasing history". gerald ford, once he gets a library is the official.

everybody gets a library no matter what. is library is very interesting, though. the one problem with the library which the director would tell you is the museum is 100 miles away from the archives. so as she told me, she wouldn't want anyone to go through the difficulty she has to go through. hi everybody that that was not a great idea. they have a disco hall here to talk about what was going on in the ford years. one of the nice things about the ford library is he was willing to put good things and bad things. there is the famous stairwell we all recall from the end of the vietnam war and when henry kissinger said there were going to do this, why on earth would you put that in your library? ford said it is history. each of the library's tends to create a replica of how the office looked at a time of that

president. an example of the difficulties these libraries deal with, this is a type of video tapes that probably stood for eight years. very difficult to access. the w library has to deal with e-mails, there is a lot of technical issues each of these places have to deal with. this is what i saw for several hundred miles. then we get to the hoover library which was interesting because i came to the hoover library of a whale lot of people might come to a library not knowing a lot about hoover, knowing only what my teacher had told me which was he didn't care about the depression and was very grumpy on that car ride with franklin roosevelt. it is a great library. some of the funniest archivists i nestle, they tell me, that is a quote, or third world of presidential libraries from one of the archivists.

she said no one ever announce his office from the hoover library. what they were doing when i was there was having a pool and they were all guessing and many of us are in offices and we have these basketball fools and so forth. there pool was how many days a year did hoovers spent in his vacation retreat? i saw them discussing this and fought this is cool. i learned a great deal about hoover there. this is the house he grew up in. had a really keynesian childhood. and after going to the hoover library i was so interested that ended up getting his memoirs. i am the one who has read his memoirs. the first volume, i tell you, is very interesting and very funny.

he had quite a sense of humor. that is one of the things that academics don't comprehend when they criticize libraries for not showing both sides and so forth and they say you can't be confronted. you can be proved -- confronted by positive information as well as negative information and dogs confronted by some things about hoover and is the first step. is not the last step to go to a presidential library and then you learned everything but what you do if the presidential library does its job is you are going to go out and want to read about that president and there he is. tom schwartz, he is one of the people who created the lincoln library which changed the way we do these libraries and now he is the director of the hoover library so he went from the top to the bottom. he got tired of having to beg

for money every 12 months from the state legislature so he is happy to be in the federal system with herbert hoover and if you are doing a road trip you have to stop at captain james t. kirk's future birth place. then i get to independence, missouri, and this place is as interested in truman as springfield is in lincoln because he went back there after he was president. so the town is really everywhere you go, truman street, have some truth and coffee and let's go to the truman bar and here is something we won't get in the future, letters. i just ended up reading all of his letters to his wife and they are so touching and you really

are able to see a different time and different place. i am very concerned about the future of our presidential scholarship and this is one of the reasons, nobody writes these things anymore. they do a great job at showing both sides of the issue and it is funny. they did this incredible job about discussing truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb and attack some of the things we grew up hearing and the quote eisenhower saying this would have ended soon anyway and other people who say it page after page after page says the same thing, my uncle walt told me i would have died if he hadn't dropped the bomb, thank god truman dropped the bomb. only one guy disagree. he said that was so dumb. my favorite part of my visit to the truman library, there are

more things downstairs then upstairs. here is the army caught that i saw downstairs, his cards, his id and interestingly, the hotel towels that he and his wife stole as they drove across the country. [laughter] >> so i went to kansas in 2011, tough economy, a tough town, let me tell you, not a lot happening. this is main street, not a lot happening and i went to the tourist spots there and i told this lady, this elderly lady who seemed like she hadn't seen anyone come in in quite a while and she said what you doing here? i said i am travelling across the country to visit all the

presidential libraries and she said you don't know how lucky you are, we have 1 across the street. [laughter] >> i just have to have the museum of telephony. eisenhower, interestingly, there have been a slew of new books on eisenhower in the last couple years and people are now looking at him and do. the feeling has always been he was vague, and connected, didn't understand what he was doing and now people are looking at him and taking another look at that. that is one of the interesting things that happens with presidential history. there never is a ending to it but you look back and eisenhower's time and there's not a lot to complain about in terms of how the economy was going and many things that were going on. and of course much of it deals

with him as commander in chief. thank you starbucks. when i did my trip i was staying in kents a lot of the time and visiting the library so wherever i was i was able to get a coffee and i was able to plug in and i was able to write my blog. i don't think i would have made it without starbucks. nixon as he always does pushes things to the level where you start to have some problems and when i was at the nixon library, kim was the director is there, there was an absolute civil war going on between the folks at the national archives and the nixon people, much of this had to do with the watergate exhibit which was up there which went along the nixon line. if you bendixen's book, arguing

his total innocence on it. not particularly different from what clinton does in terms of his impeachment museum by the way. bob bosh technical i interviewed did the original watergate exhibit. tim created a new exhibit which the folks at the nixon library are not too crazy about. is a very good exhibit but there's a lot of debate about what do we do, what are these libraries for? are they for the president's point of view or history's point of view? there is the funny signs that he put on because somebody complained there is a statue of mao, a chinese person complains, this doesn't mean the united states government is supporting now which seems a little obvious, there are some hit the pictures in the eisenhower museum as well. and recently he wrote an op-ed piece about his concerns that the nixon library people are

going to put up an exhibit involving vietnam. so the question is, is this up to the libraries or should there be some governmental board that really looks at what the content is? i will say one of the great things about these libraries is they're all different. they are not going to holiday inns. everyone of these are different and a lot are like their president and i don't want to get what i would get if i looked up on the computer or wikipedia. i am ok hearing other interpretations of history. history is an argument without end. nobody can tell us, certainly not in this country, what the proper history is. this is his house, band this beautiful place where they seem to be constantly having weddings which is interesting.

then you get to the reagan library. the reagan library brings in the most money and the reagan library certainly does whatever it wants to do and it is a gorgeous library on the top of simi valley. .. >> i was looking at the speech he gave about the famous evil empire speech we all remember, and i found out, first of all, he had meant to do that in

england but had been blocked by his own state department. so he snuck it in the bottom of a speech that he was going to do in orlando, florida, and he's hoping that his state department februaries don't see it -- folks don't see it. about a day before he was going to give the speech, some of them did see it, and he ended up making the speech anyway. everyone said, oh, my god, he's crazy, how can we have him say this. well, when i'm at the reagan library, a jewish dissident spoke, and he talked about when that speech came out, he was imprisoned in a russian cell. and he heard about that speech. somebody left the pravda out, and it gave him so much hope. and he was in solitary, so the only way he could communicate with either talking through the toilets or doing morse code, so he tells the person next to him in morse code, and they all told each other that the united states president had finally said the truth about the soviet soviet union. so, again, you can be

confronted. i mean, when i was -- when ronald reagan was president, there wasn't a thing he did that i thought was a good thing. and then i came and heard that story, and i thought, wow, that's a completely different perspective that i'd never looked at. so that's one of the great things that we get. it's also the only library with a pub. [laughter] reagan, when he went to ireland, he had gone, he had gone to a pub. he wasn't a drinker because his father was such an alcoholic, but he went to a pub x after they closed the pup down, they shipped -- the pub down, they shipped it out and put it into the reagan library. and here's air force one facing out to simi valley. yeah, if you want to call it a theme park, it's a theme park. i'm not offended if kids come and have a good time and want to read books about ronald ray a began. it's the first step and not the last step. richard reeves, who i spoke to,

who writes about reagan. and then you get to lyndon johnson. "bull" was his nickname in high school, short for a two-word phrase i won't say. [laughter] but, you know, again, history and landscape. where he grew up looks pretty much like it did when he was there. it's the school he went to. and this was his original home. and then we see his ranch. and now if you're -- the people at the roosevelt library don't know how lucky they are, because if you're an archivist out there, you need to be able to take care of hereford cattle as well. [laughter] because he said i want it still to be a working ranch, and it is. and he also said no one should ever have to pay to go to the lbj library, so there's no fee. and you've got to love a place that combines the liquor store and the post office. [laughter] and there it is. doesn't it look like johnson,

stoll lid, strong? his wife came up with the idea of actually turning the papers into a work of art here, and they're all just these file after file after file after file of the folders that makes up what johnson did. of course, lyndon johnson is about accomplishment. robert caro, who i interviewed for this book. yeah, wonderful: there's his, there's his outline behind him, if you can get up close and read and see what's coming up. but, of course, he visited, and his whole first book is about the hill country. but he says when he first saw those red files, he almost turn around and went home and came up with a new project. he also, it's funny, when i interviewed him and told him the project i was doing, he said that's really, that's going to take a lot of time and effort, and i didn't really listen. and then you think back and say robert caro said this is going to take a lot of time and

effort. there i am, you can see i'm as happy as can be -- [laughter] i've got a roosevelt mug, a bush-schofield book, i'm in heaven in austin, texas. and this is where the bats all show up at one point of the day in austin. then we get to the george bush library, and this is when it starts to become hard to get your hands on any archives. i was able to find a lot of documents in which bush told the oak ridge boys that they're great, but i wasn't able to get a lot of documents about the arms race. i wanted to look at the letters nixon had written to him, and they were all considered too high security even though there is no soviet union. so i worry about what, what the robert caro who wants to do the thing about george bush is going to do when he can't get his hands on these documents. and we all heard he jumped out of a plane, what, a couple weeks

ago on his 90th birthday. so god bless him. there's, of course, where john kennedy was assassinated. and then we get to little rock. care for another placard. people sometimes ask if you had any advice to president obama what would you give, and i'd say don't get too involved in your own library. one of the problem that is the clinton library had -- and i think it's because of bill clinton's own involvement -- was that he doesn't realize how interesting he is. and so we got all the accomplishments of the bill clinton years, but without sort of an art and a way to understand it. of course, we all know that these libraries get redone and redone and redone, and it's evolution. and so i'm sure it'll, it'll move on. but you get a lot of these kind of placards. and then they had a discussion of the impeachment, although they didn't mention she who will not be named. [laughter] but they did have someone saying, well, you know, i think it's very fitting that he was

acquitted on lincoln's birthday, because only great presidents like lincoln and clinton ever get confronted with things like this. so here's his house and a few feet in front of it is his, is a train. taylor branch, who i interviewed, who discussed how difficult it is and, of course, central high where you see it looks exactly like we all remember it on the films, and it's one of those goose bump moments. i had the opportunity to see president clinton up close and to shake his hand, and watching him and the people in pennsylvania he was speaking for just really drove home the difference between these presidents and the rest of us. as we all know, a remarkable man. and then last but not quite least, jimmy carter. jimmy carter's library -- until the roosevelt library rebid theirs, i -- redid theirs, i

think theirs was tops this terms of modern gizmos and so forth. it's about five minutes away from atlanta, feels like a different world. the it's a wonderful library. and here's something where he just shows one day in the life of a president, and you see all these meetings and discussions and things that are going on. now here's -- you remember the reagan game. i would have played their video game, but i didn't get my ph.d. at -- [laughter] very complicated. [laughter] and then where it all ends is i went out to see george w. bush library be opened. after they invited me to fly out, they told me i couldn't be there, but i could watch it on c-span in the basement. there's the director, alan lowe. but i had the joy of actually getting inside the c-span bus, and as you can see, i snuck through and did it anyway. [laughter]

okay. and there we have it. so i'd be delighted to answer any questions. [applause] >> and if we have any questions, if you'd, please, come and stand at the mic and ask your questions. please come inquire. [inaudible conversations] >> oh, come on, people. [laughter] [inaudible conversations] >> all right. >> how long actually did it take to do all of this traveling and writing? >> well, the traveling took me about two and a half months, and that was the easy part. it wasn't until later i realized what robert caro was probably telling me. i thought he was saying the trip would be hard. the trip was easy. i know if anyone's read books that combined traveling and is

history -- and history, they look easy to write. it becomes very hard because you start thinking, well, now i'm talking about myself too much, now i'm talking about this too much. so the way i wrote a book, which i wouldn't advise anybody to do, was i wrote everything and then spent, like, two years editing, editing, cutting, cutting. the thing was about a thousand pages when i first wrote it, i just put everything in. so it took me a couple years to write it. >> did you ever, at any point in time ever feel caught up in those political or divisive school of thought camps at various of the libraries? >> well, the only library that had any was the nixon library in terms of different people in the library having any different issues. most of the libraries i went to i didn't even know who was from the archives, who was from the foundation. i mean, it's pretty seamless in most of the libraries.

everything gets along pretty well. i go to the nixon library, and i walked through -- in the nixon library, you go through the bookstore, and then if you want to go to the archives, there's an elevator right behind. so i asked the lady who worked for the foundation, where are the archives? she's standing, say, where you're standing, the archives are where the door is, three feet behind, and she says, i don't know. [laughter] and i said, really? i was picking up on all these weird things. and then somebody came up to me who i -- he told me don't use his name, so i call him mark stealth in my book -- [laughter] and he just started spewing. this is his library. and they're not letting us tell his story, and many of the do sents -- doe sents have quit, and a half tally's a liberal, and he's just trying to push this liberal view. so it became this thing where

the two sides weren't even speaking to each other. and, you know, when tim naftali became the director, he made a comment which they were very offended about which was -- i'm not here to run a shrine. and he, basically, took over the process of doing this watergate exhibit and wouldn't allow any involvement from the foundation. and it took him about two years to put it together. and then they, then he said you have a week to respond. so they got a few more weeks to respond, and then they wrote, like, 150-page thing. really saying we understand -- which bob boss stick had a lot to do with it -- we understand it's going to change, but we disagree with this and this. for instance, it often says the white house did this criminal act, and they would say, well, the white house is a building. who are you saying did it? and they had a lot of other

criticisms. tim naftali said i'm not changing anything, you know, i'll quit. and so, again, i thought it was a very good, i thought it was a very good exhibit. but right now they're still going through that, and they're planning to put some exhibits together. they don't have a director. i don't think they want a director. [laughter] >> was it as much fun as it seems to be now in the retelling? >> yeah. i was nervous the very first day because i had read many of -- i'd read books where people do these trips, and on the first day they always talk about how great they feel, and they're thumbing their noses at everyone outside their car because they're going to work, and they're taking this trip. i kept thinking i can hardly wait to start this trip, and then i started the trip, and i felt nervous. what happened? i was supposed to feel this. it's like how women are supposed to get that instinct to clean the house before they have their