>> thanks so much for having me. so invariably when i talk about this book, people say bill cosby, he's so funny. are you going to be funny? [laughter] i have got to warn you i'm not a comedian, but i will tell you one of bill cosby's favorite jokes.

it takes place in the gates of heaven, the pearly gates on a day when so many people have arrived there isn't room for everybody so st. peter announces all these people waiting in line that he is going to have a little contest and that he's going to ask everybody to write down a question. and that god cannot answer the question you will get in. so one after another they come up, write them a question, come back. goes to the back of the line. finally an elderly couple who passed away in the same day come to the front of the line. they write down their question and give it to st. peter. he comes back and he says okay the two of you are in. everybody else looks at them and says wait a second, what makes you so special? what did you ask god?

they said we just asked him when our kids are going to get their act together. [laughter] now what's interesting about, even more interesting about that story is still cosby told me that joe. he told me that he found it on the internet so even bill cosby isn't above taking material. but the original joke there was another word which you can imagine. however bill cosby who as you know is famous for not only being one of the funniest comedians on the planet that done it all these years withou without -- humor decided he didn't really need the expletives. it would be just as funny without it and he took it out and he still gets great laughs

with that story. anyway as gary said i have spent most of my career as a journalist and then on television with nbc and "cnn" covering hard niches -- hard news subjects business and so forth. so people ask me, well why do you want to write a book about bill cosby? well like bill cosby it started out as a child and actually it was when i was nine years old that my mother brought home at least my first bill cosby film. i come from and inter-racial family. my dad was passed away now was blackened by mother is white and she still living.

and they had split up three years earlier. we were living in los angeles and my mother had taken my younger brother and me back to the east coast and we settled in this little town of massachusetts where she got a job teaching college where there were no people of color and my dad kind of dropped out of our lives. we didn't hear much from him. all of a sudden here was this handsome young black man about my dad's age joyously writing at go-cart on the cover of the album telling these hilarious stories about having his tonsils out and smearing the kitchen floor with jell-o to keep the heart monster away. like so many people of that era i just thought they were hilarious and i laughed until i cried and i wasn't clearly aware

of this at the time but i think now when i look back on it here was also a black male figure that i could identify with. then i found out that he was on i spy and despite the fact that it was past my bedtime there he was completely different character, a spy. so at that point in my life bill cosby was quite personal to me in 20 years later in the 80s i was just getting married and starting a family when the cosby show came on the air. my wife and i loved the show. we thought it was very funny but also it was kind of a model for what kind of a family we wanted to have. so i had personal reasons for being interested in bill cosby

but as a journalist i was also fascinated by him as sort of a figure in our cultural history not only as a pioneer in somebody of open doors, really the first comedian to not be labeled a canadian -- comedian, pioneer of children's television with his early guest appearances on sesame street and the electric company and then fat albert. the most successful you will remember advertising pitchman in the country in the 70s and 80s with jell-o ads in coca-cola and ford and so forth and that was all he can before the cosby show. but then as you all know in the

last, after a career where he did not bring recent politics into his comedy and was often criticized for that in the last 10 years he has become very outspoken and very controversial for some very strong stances he has taken. so i really wanted to know, where did this come from? and for a lot of the views that he expressed recently views that he had all along? what drove him and what was his vision of the kind of social impact that he was going to have? plus nobody had done it. he was rare in a figure of his significance of prominence that

no one had written a serious in-depth biography so i decided i wanted to do it. then i discovered why nobody had written it, and in-depth biography. i had met him a few times. i did not know him well but to sort of greet him when he appeared on television networks. but i did know a harvard psychiatrist who was an adviser on the cosby show and a good friend of bill and camille cosby. so i called him and i made my pitch for why he thought bill cosby would be a great subject for a book. he agreed with me and he offered to speak to cosby on my behalf. a week later he called back and said i don't think he is going

to help you. then i got a call from his lawyer telling me you understand you are working on a book. fine, we are not going to try to stop you. anyway i decided to go ahead anyway and started as a list trained to do reporting around since you can't get to them directly talking to people who would talk to me, doing a lot of research and every once in a while i would reach out to cosby's publicist just to tell him that i was still working away. and after a year of reporting on my own i started getting these e-mails from cosby's publicist saying that there were things

that mr. c wanted me to be aware of. of course because i have been working on it for a year i read all of them. i don't know whether they were y homework but then after a few months of that i got another call from a lawyer who said mr. cosby wants to speak with you. i said is that good, is it bad? he said i'm not going to speak for him. he said expect a phonecall. so another month and a half goes by. finally one day i was just leaving "cnn" my job fairs managing editor and i was still in my office when my then assistant rushes to my office and says bill cosby is on the phone. so i picked up the phone and the

first words out of his mouth are congratulations. what are you congratulating me for? all of a sudden we are good friends. he said i have a process when i write my comedy routine called floating the boat and i'm going to help you load the boat. now what he was calling that day to do was to give me the name of the people from early on in his life in philadelphia where he was born and went to college at temple, who he thought i should interview and i might not otherwise be aware of or if i was wouldn't talk to me necessarily without his permission. but what i discovered in that first conversation is what would then remain true for the next year in my dealings with him was

that once you get bill cosby on the phone or you get to him in person it's never a short conversation. he loves to tell stories and in fact that's really how he communicated. he was unlike anybody i have ever interviewed before. first of all i could never schedule him. he would call me unexpectedly usually, usually late at night. usually he had something that he wanted to tell me but i realized that once i had them on the phone he would start telling stories so my job was to be ready with questions that needed for the book. so in all the intelligence in the book i had about 15 hours with them. most of it was on the phone although i did spend a weekend

traveling with him on the road which was fascinating and it's how the book ends. what his his backstage rituals like him because he has so incredibly punctual shows up early, very early for flights i had a lot of time with him and on airplanes and cars to interview him and i also began to have worked so long without any access to him, i knew what i needed to use that time for. early in his life there's no record of all of bill cosby. he grew up in a housing project so the book is i think a very different book than it would have been if i hadn't had access

to him but it is not an as told to book. it's mostly a book of reporting. most of it comes from my own research and also extensive interviews i have done with hundreds of people but most valuable he reported from 60 of cosby's closest associates or friends that knew bill cosby before he became famous, people he grew up with in the richard allen holmes housing project in north philadelphia, people who he met in the navy, his best buddies in the navy who introduced him to his wife, his commander in the navy, his best friend from temple pic for he became a big star and also a lot of the people who were not only on the air but behind the scenes and all of his iconic shows, the

people who were behind i spy, the producers and the director and even the prop guy on the cosby show. these are the people that really saw the real bill cosby. i know you are going to have lots of questions as writing about cosby i know lots of people have different connections with them. i will end this part by people asked me well what surprised you about cosby that you write about in the book? i will say three things. one is that the answer to the question i sort of started with about bill cosby and his feelings about the impact his work was going to have on society i can say very clearly

and i think i show in the book that bill cosby always was as they say in the black community a race man. he may not have always brought racial material into his comedy but he was very aware of first of all what it would mean to actually have an entertainer like him, just being an entertainer. starting in the 60s he was a big supporter privately of civil rights causes and organizations. later it's interesting the cosby show at the time was criticized by some circles and sometimes remembered as being a show where the huxtable's really weren't that black and so forth. you know, i argue in the book

and i show very clearly that in fact there is a tremendous amount of black culture in that show. there is jazz and black art and of course spelman college which is a historically black college. at the time the show was on the air at those institutions were really starting to the challenge. cosby not only made it a big theme of the show, he used his clout to get a spin-off show called a different world about life in a totally black college but on television. who else but bill cosby would have had that idea and then he backed it up, he and his wife with a 20 million-dollar donation to spelman college which at the time and still remains the largest private donation ever given to an hbcu as well as millions to others

and whatever you think about some of the things he been saying recently very publicly about the need for better parenting and education and so forth in the black community and there has been a very robust debate that might describe that in the book, bill cosby has backed that up by going into schools, talking to kids, talking to young people, talking to gang members. so he hasn't just talk the talk. he has also walk the walk. the second thing i would say about his personal life is that for all of the good fortune he has had and all the riches he has accumulated he has had a lot of suffering starting with his

upbringing. an alcoholic father who essentially abandoned cosby and his brothers and a mother who joined the navy largely absent from the house during his childhood, struggled in school. though we have a high iq he dropped out. he flunked the tenth grade twice and then he dropped out of college. he barely got into temples because he charmed the track coach into giving him a track scholarship. later when it became apparent he was estranged for a decade from one of his daughters and then of course he lost his son in a murder which was tragic, in a tragic way. just as he was really starting to fulfill his promise.

yet all this charming good looks but he struggled in school until he was diagnosed as dyslexic and cosby had been so thrilled by that breakthrough that it makes a part of a cosby show and commits his wife to helping children with learning disabilities about to get a doctorate from columbia and his son gets murdered. there are so many highs but also so many lows in bill cosby life. in the final thing i will say this about his work, about his comedy. and it's interesting because cosby has been seen anything for so long as this sort of mainstream entertainer, somebody who crossed over. some people have even described him as sort of a knuckle tom,

somebody who you know, and it is true that he has mass appeal but what you will see in the book is actually he has always had a very original distinctive and sometimes -- vision for what he thought was funny and how he was going to manage his career. and sometimes it has led to failure. between i spy and the cosby show he had three consecutive tv shows that didn't work. even after the cosby show he had a couple of tv shows like some of you probably know. he had some movies that were successful in the 70s but he also had some real bombs in the 80s and the 90s. but i started with the bill cosby joke and i will end with a bill cosby saying what which he was famous for nbc tweeted hundreds of times a day

literally to this day. it is bill cosby said i don't know what success is but i know the key to failure is trying to please everybody read and what you will see in this book is precisely by being willing not to please everybody cosby has pleased millions. i would love to hear your questions about bill cosby. [applause] >> yeah i have a question. did he ever tell you or do you have an opinion as to what he might have done with this life if he had not become a comedian? >> gas, so as i said he was a lousy student.

in high school he wanted to be there at athlete or a jazz musician. he spent most of his time doing those two things. i think that by the time he was in his late teens he wasn't good enough for either one of those things although he was pretty good to really become a star. so he joined the navy. and it was really in the navy that he starts to develop real habits of discipline and some goals for himself. but he decided he wanted to do because he had grown up in philadelphia, he decides he wants to get into temple university. he got in even though he had a combined s.a.t. store -- score of 500 by talking the track coach into giving him a track scholarship. his plan at that point was to

become a phys ed instructor and specifically in junior high school which is what he saw as the formative age where he thought somebody had been there to guide him you know, he might have been straightened out earlier than he was. even after he discovered his talent in comedy and ended up dropping out of temple he continued to be a dream ended the talk about i'm going to do this one enough that i'm going to make enough money so i don't have to worry about it but then i'm going to go teach. his first sitcom in the late 60s the bill cosby show, he played a high school phys ed instructor. later actually after that he had

an opportunity, the university of massachusetts had instituted a program for professionals who didn't have additional academic credentials and bill cosby came to perform on umass campus one day and he thought maybe bill cosby would be interested in the program. he reached out and cosby enrolled in the university of massachusetts again without a college degree, without a proper high school degree and got first a masters in a doctorate. do you know who was the happiest person in the world the day he finally got his diploma? his mother. his mother worked her entire life is a made up was a bright woman who would have to drop out of school herself and give

dreams of becoming a teacher. he had broke in her heart by dropping out of school so many times. i have a great picture in the book the day after he received a diploma. he threw a little party at his house in massachusetts. his mother anna is sitting on his lap beaming. you know that cosby expression where he is pursing his lips and his eyes were twinkling? that's an expression she has and if you look at this picture you say that's where he came from. >> how did he get chosen for i spy and what was his relationship with. >> that's a great story and i tend -- spend a lot of about talking about i spy and even though it only lasted for three

seasons was just as historic in its own way. so leonard was the producer of i spy one of the most successful television producers alongside danny thomas with the danny, show and the merv griffin show and dick van dyke. the james bond movies were just taking off so all of a sudden all of these people wanted these james bond like shows. it leads to uncle and get smart. the idea for a spy show was really novel which was it would feature a pair of spies working together. one would be wider one would be black. he pretty quickly chose robert culp the young tv actor at the

time to be the whites by partly because there were so few african-americans on television. there was no obvious choice for who the partner would be. so sheldon and leonard worked closely with karl reiner who w was -- who ran the dick van dyke show. and one night just as cosby is starting to take off and his first comedy album had come out he appears on the tonight show with johnny carson. one of the people in the audience is karl reiner's teenage son rob reiner. rob reiner thinks it's the funniest thing he's ever seen

and he wakes up his parents are out to a big hollywood event and he waits until they get home just to tell them he has just seen this comedian has the funniest guy he has ever seen. when karl hears about this event arranges to see a tape of bill cosby and as soon as he sees it, an african-american he thinks maybe this is the guy shelburne is looking for for his spy show. so they arranged, cosby was just coming out and they arranged to bring him into the dick van dyke show and there was a meeting between bill cosby and sheldon leonard. that's how it gets started had no acting experience.

after he was cast, i describe in the book how he that he was in the first table reading call but culp still saw a genius in him how he could add live in like the fact that every time there was a line that referred to the characters skin color he would change it and he would see that he didn't like the racial humor either which they had in common. and then when they went to shoot the pilot episode which they did on the road in hong kong on location after the network executives saw the results of that they wanted cosby. he only held on because sheldon leonard went to bat for him and culp not only said he would quit

if they fired cosby but he made it -- he was also a writer and he decided he was going to in secret write a half-dozen episodes for the show that would showcase the cosby character and give him an opportunity to show that he could act and also by the way also allowed him to have been romantic interest and a girl which of course the network had no interest in at that time. heaven for a bit. anyway, he and culp became incredibly close friends. if anybody remembers that show, the most memorable thing about it was the relationship between the two of them and it genuinely

reflected their relationship but also reflected something else. they kidded each other all the time. one serious conversation they had while shooting the show was about this whole issue of what it meant to say we are in inter-racial team. basically they decided that their statement was going to be a nonstatement. by not calling attention to it and by showing america the model of the people who are genuinely friendly but that alone would be revolutionary and by the way for all of you tv movie buffs it forever changed the model for the buddy genre as they call it. before that it had been bing crosby and bob hope and "cosby" and so on. if you think about it after bob hope and bill cosby nick nolte,

mel gibson and danny glover, will smith and tommy lee jones so all of that starts with cos cosby. [inaudible] >> well you know as i say there is more in the book about not just how -- that cosby died in but who he was and about their relationship which is never been reported before. to understand the relationship you have to understand the difficult relationship cosby had with his own son. he was really looking to be a different kind of father than his father was. if you go back to his early comedy album he has two daughters before he has a son. he loved his daughters and he told me some very funny stories about them but he also talked

about how much he wanted a son. she starts complaining about the axe chromosome and the y chromosome. cosby says my response responses whoever had at last it's their responsibility. so when ms was finally born it was a joyous occasion. he's on the cover of "ebony" magazine. they put cosby on the cover holding his son. ennis grows up to be this incredibly charming and handsome kid but he has this -- problem and it's a real source of frustration for cosby given how much he cares about education. it leads to a lot of conflict

including one scene which i describe in the book were cosby and this had lied to him about why he hadn't turned up his homework and take him out behind the barn and gave him a spanking. finally after all these years of frustration on both of their parts and this is an undergraduate at morehouse college and -- [inaudible] and it turns his life around. that they ennis was murdered cosby found out about it when he was in the process of taping a new sitcom that he had started at the studio out in queens. the first thing, he was

completely stunned that his first reflexes i've got to go there. i've got to go to california. they wouldn't let him leave the studio so he had to sit there for several hours being briefed by the police and still didn't know what had happened. the one witness who had reported the murder was so shaken up at the time. finally they arranged to take cosby out of the back of the studio to his townhouse in manhattan and eastside. by that time he's completely surrounded by media. cosby who was aware throughout this said although he was in shock and in grief america would be watching him and in some ways how he dealt with this would also be a signal to others and

how we dealt with the tragedy. he was very determined and he saw that, he realizes realized as he was approaching that he couldn't just duck into the house. he had to say something to the media. a lot of people remember he goes to the door and he turns around to the press. [inaudible] and then he goes inside. so the impact, well he didn't talk to me about it. he wasn't going to talk about it directly although i did talk to a lot of people, the producer who broke the news to him, the people who were with him that day and the burial and so forth

and two things come out. one is, cosby it turns out after he discovers his life's calling of being an entertainer was an incredible workaholic. he just works all the time and i think he gets that from his mother who worked these 12 to 15 hour days as a mate and his grandfather who was sort of in the absence of a reliable male father figure his main role model who is a factory worker who not only works this grueling job but refuse to use public transportation because he didn't want to have to sit in the back of a bus or deal with any hassles in the age of segregation so he walked four miles back and forth to work every day. those were his models. so cosby has dealt with a partly by working. he always worked hard but he

probably has worked even harder after ennis' of death and 10 days after the burial he not only went back to work on the sitcom but he insisted on going back on the road. his wife camille didn't want him to do it and she asked their friends psychiatrist to travel with them to make sure he was okay but cosby said novus is what ms would have wanted. i've got to show that i can still make people laugh. but the other thing which is really striking is that some people and i think we can all agree to this probably one of the worst if not the worst thing that can happen is to lose a child but some people who have been through that can't bear to be reminded of a child that is lost. cosby is the opposite. not only did he bury ennis on his estate in massachusetts where every time he goes home he can see the gravesite come he keeps reminders of ennis with

him wherever he goes. you have probably seen him in a sweatshirt to say hello friend which wherever he performs now either he wears one of the those sweatshirts or he has one draped over the chair when he sits in performs. that was what an asset to everyone, hello friend. another thing that people might not have known although i think we will find out more about it now, cosby and his wife camille over the decades have acquired what is the boat -- most valuable but also the most significant private collection of african-american art in the world and for the first time they are going to loan it to the smithsonian in november. it's going to be an exhibit which is going to be huge deal in the art world but in addition to all of those priceless works dozens of paintings and likenesses of ennis made that he

keeps in rims and all of his houses. he talked to them. he delivers news to the family. he talks about ms. of ennis' friends in college and high school cannot talk about that in the book. ennis is a president in his spirit all the time now. >> one of the criticisms of your book has been that you did not delve into the dark side of cosby. i certainly agree with the fact that you didn't but i was curious as to how you arrived at that decision. >> a number of things. first up i never intended this book to be a steamy tell-all. it was not the kind of book. i really want to focus mostly on cosby's impact of legacies as an entertainer but also as a social figure as i said earlier.

i also knew that he was not going to talk to me although when i got access about his private life and anything i reported in the book about his private life including ennis and other matters i was going to have independently report. it was very important to me that anything i reported in this book about that, about anything else too but particularly about his private life were things that i have been able to independently confirm. so i do get into his history of infidelity but is probably a lot of people remember there was a young lady who came forward exactly the time that ennis was murdered claiming that she was cosby's out of wedlock daughter and i tell the story of the

relationship. cosby always denied that but he did have a relationship with the girl's mother and i described it in detail on how it happened and so forth. a couple of other cases that i was able to independently confirm. there are other stories and allegations about cosby's relations with women and behavior that have circulated but ultimately i felt i couldn't independently confirm. there were no definitive court findings. nothing into the criminal justice system or there were no independent witnesses and i knew that this is was going to be talked about when my book came out but i didn't want to be in a

position where i repeated allegations that i couldn't independently confirm. and to stand before group like this and that they had been in the book you would have said well if you put this in the book what independent evidence do you have that they haven't and i would say haven't and that wouldn't meet my standard journalistically in writing a biography that's going to be on bookshelves but hope for a number of years so that's basically why. i stayed away from a serious although if you read the book you will see that cosby is not always the same. i talk a lot about not just his personal indiscretions with how tough he can be with people, sometimes violent with people so i would ask anybody to read the book before they judge how objective it is.

anyone have any more questions? >> yeah, please. >> now that you've completed this book what's next for you? >> that's the question that a lot of writers dread. i have a lot of thoughts. i haven't committed to anything yet. but i think for me in my career i worked in music for a very long time and i loved that job and i was fortunate and honored not to be the editor of the magazine from off the decade but then after i left it still exists but is not what was.

and it has disappeared in the form that once had had and then i went to television which was a great experience. television is immensely influential but it's also very fleeting. so it's been very gratifying to me. this is my second book. some of you in the back can also see my first book which was a family memoir but to really research subjects that i'm interested in and i think other people would be interested in and out than to tell those stories in a way that's not just a tv sound bite or even just a newsmagazine story and then to realize once you have done that there is sort of a permanence to it.

you talked to a lot of people in the publishing world who have been in it forever and they will tell you about all the lows but you know i think books are still wonderful treasures. to be able to write a book and then to have people read it and be moved by it and to be touched by it and have their thoughts provoked by it and then want to talk to you about it, that's pretty special. i'm definitely going to keep writing books. [inaudible] >> so although i was under no obligation because this was my idea, it came around to me i thought because he had cooperated and been helpful he should have a chance to see it. so i didn't send it directly to him but i sent it to his representatives and his publicist and also -- who have

been helpful. they reported back and what i heard from them was they weren't wild about everything that was in it. there were-somethings about his personal life that would rather not being in the book but they knew that everything i did report and write about in his personal life i had very solid sources so they respected that. and i think they also on cosby's behalf appreciated the fact that although i think i analyzed his comic genius i also taken seriously. one of the things i found interesting over the years, one of the reasons he has questions in the press not just about what people have reported in his private life but partly because going back to his early days of success in the 60s when reporters would do feature stories about him he would often talk to them very seriously

about what was going on in the world in the civil rights movement and the politics of the day. but the pieces would appear and they would make cosby look like a happy-go-lucky comedian was not engaged. he always wanted to be listened to and taken seriously. i think they appreciated the fact that although despite the funny side i also described his serious side. i have had a couple of phonecalls. yet again out of the blue from cosby. they have never been within overall verdict about the book but they do make me realize he has read it. there is one in particular that is telling. you asked about i spy. one day the phone rings late at night and i pick up the phone. he never introduces himself. and he said franks told era.

he deserves more credit. now the story behind that is that cosby was having so many problems as an actor from the very beginning of i spy that sheldon leonard decided to hire an acting company. he hired a very distinguished african-american stage actor frank silveira. in fact the original shakespeare party part in 1962 was frank silveira as the supreme leader. so he contacts frank and he flies him out to the desi lu lot and shop the show and have them stay there during the shooting to help cosby whenever he needs it with acting. and i mentioned frank silveira but cosby felt that for

everything i say in the book about how sheldon leonard and how they help them along the way particular in terms of how the act he felt the third person who was instrumental in now was frank silveira. he was calling me to say essentially further editions of the book, maybe you can say more about frank silveira. but it's very telling because the first conversation i have with cosby when he called me, he said and i talk about this in the book, he said if you are going to write this book i wanted to honor the abolitionists. now abolitionist was his pet term for white mentors of his going back to sixth grade teacher in the projects in philadelphia. the white track coach ugandan into temple, sheldon leonard and

bob hope and other white americans who he felt had helped him at a time when it wasn't obvious he was going to be a star and not many people, white folks were going out of their way to help black folks and to lift them up. so he wanted their stories told and their stories are in the book. in frank silveira's case it was very important i think once cosby started to give me access, a lot of what he was wanting to make sure happened was that the people who he felt deserved credit for helping in his career got that credit. please. do we have time for one more? >> what was your overall impression of him? did you like him as a person?

>> well, he was always very nice to me as i said. i didn't spend that much time with him but again he was sort of eccentric in the way he reached out to me but that was fine. he was very nice. first of all i was fascinated. both by his mind, because my parents were college professors. i spent my career in journalism so i'm used to people who think and express themselves and have been rewarded for doing that in a very linear and analytical way. cosby is the opposite. he is not linear at all. he zigs and zags and he doesn't talk in arguments or even full

sentences. he talks of sort of creative spurts. i talk about, even at the height of his success with the cosby show often he would come and with ideas that the writers initially expressed them seem completely off the wall. the writer sometimes didn't even know what he was talking about but then it was a show and once they work with it and develop it it turned into magic. what a great example to tell in the book is because at one week and he said they think we should do an episode where the huxtable's -- lip-synch. do you mean like karaoke? is that going to the funny? anyway they went with it and they develop a storyline about the huxtable's putting on a performance for the grandparents on their anniversary singing ray charles which is now one of the most famous, literally one of the most famous television episodes of all time.

so it was fascinating to me. he was completely unapologetic about it. what was really interesting was i talked about how he was unlike any other interview. i still had to make sure even though he would go from story to story, decade to decade. luckily and partly because on my head down this research when he was throwing nicknames out about people i knew who they were. i would not have otherwise but i always made sure i was getting everything down even if i didn't quite know how it was relevant to the book. i discovered in going back to write from those interviews and conversations that everything he said was so incredibly vivid. these amazing details which i hadn't even noticed because i was writing them down to make sure i got everything. you can see why as a result he

he's such a great storyteller. betty told me, we were discussing his approach to comedy and he said you know ma mark, getting a laugh is a secondary thing for me. he said number one is what he calls putting you there which means telling a story that's so engrossing to get caught up in the story and along the way he finds a way to make you laugh. the other thing i was really blown away with in terms of my view of him is just how resilient he is. you will see in the book, and we all know about the highs but you will see all the lows. you will see the setbacks in the personal struggles about which i talk about. and yet whatever he has been faced with whether it's been

good or bad he just keeps going. he goes back to work and goes back on the road and i was ultimately very moved by that. i didn't want it in this book to tell you what to think about bill cosby and i try to put you there myself you know in the way i write about it, not bill cosby in retrospect once we all know these things but what it felt like at the moment when it was all happening. but i think whatever view you come away with from the book in terms of bill cosby you are going to be impressed by just how he just keeps picking

himself up and moving on. to me that's a lesson for all of us. [applause] >> thanks so much for having me.

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>> >> end a policy adviser at of sarah palin mccain campaign but the reason i was asked to moderate is to distinguish a train international security studies. and west is a soldier in service of our country 34 years and graduated as a valedictorian from 1966 that was point and was awarded a rhodes