>> the next three hours are your chance to talk with author and historian michael korda. the former editor-in-chief of simon & schuster is the author of numerous best selling books, both nonfiction and fiction. the oxford graduate will discuss his books on toes car winning film makers -- on the oscar winning film makers of his family. >> host: michael korda, who is alex kellner? >> guest: alex kellner was the name that my uncle, alexander

korda, was born with and which he changed when he moved to biewd past as a university student because it sounded deeply jewish. at first he spelled it corda, then he changed it to korda because it looks hungarian that way. >> host: what did he do? >> guest: he was, perhaps, the prototypical film producer, film czar, also film director. he directed his first film at a teenage age in 1914 and directed at least a hundred and perhaps twice that many movies during the course of his life and produced i don't know how many. many, many, many. europe, united kingdom where he eventually settled and, of course, in hollywood in periods when he was there. he was an affable genius, and

being his nephew was a full-time excitement. >> host: what was his influence on you? he, your father and your other uncle? >> guest: well, you know, first of all, an enormous respect for talent of any kind. by definition, people who were good at making films are good at recognizing all sorts of talent even if they don't share it themselves. and secondly, although they were intense, intense on making the best possible film and intense on making profitable films, they also had a great capacity for insuring what they were doing, for having fun and for the friendships that came along with their business relationships. they were enormously influential in my life. >> host: so what was your childhood like? >> guest: well, barring that great unforeseeable episode of the second world war which my father and myself and my mother

led us to, first, canada and then the united states in the late autumn of 1940 because alex found himself unable to complete three films in england. one was the jungle book and the third was that hamilton woman with vivian leigh, and the only way to get them done was to go to california. so we all went off to california, and that was a huge upset in my life. before that i thought of myself as english, and those thoughts occurred at 6, 7 years old in children, i don't think they do, and i suddenly found myself plunged into a new world and not going back again until after the war was over. so my childhood was in no way

difficult, but was a constant succession of ups and downs and changes and moves that were very unsettling. which is probably why i stick close to home now. >> host: in your book "charmed lives: a family romance," you write that: like my father, alex went to immense trouble to see that the korda children were spared the grim deprivations of his own youth while at the same time believing that an unhappy childhood was essential to suck. paradoxically, because we had not suffered, he was unable to take us seriously. >> guest: i think that's true. alex had gone through so much being born in hungary in an age of fierce anti-feminism, being poor, unimaginably poor by any standards that we can draw today when the father of the three children die at a quite young age for them and then becoming in his teens the mainstay of his

family, making enough money to support his two brothers and his mother. and alex was, in any case, by instinct a survivor no matter what happened; first world war, second world war. alex kept on going and kept surviving. he loved us very much, but he didn't take seriously people who had not had that experience of having to scrabble and fight for survival. >> host: why did you not go into the movie business? >> guest: well, i thought there were enough kordas in the movie business to begin with, and the second thing is i could not see myself as having a real talent for the movie business. it struck me that the only thing that i knew how to do was play with words and so it became associated with words, and eventually i became a book publisher, and then i became a book writer. i think that that was actually quite satisfactory. i don't think the world needs another korda in the movie business.

>> host: you fell into publishing accidentally. >> guest: quite accidentally. i never thought of it as a serious profession, in fact, i didn't think of it as a profession as all. i was a consumer, it never occurred to me how they're produced or why they were produced or any of those things. and i came over here after completing my education at oxford to work with my cousin on a book in which i participated. when that failed, i went to cbs as a script writer which is really hard to imagine how grubby that is. it was like the shape up for a long shoreman. you went every morning to cbs and waited until they provided you with a book or script or not. and once they did, you read it and brought it back the next day with a report and got paid. so for me, when a job opened up in book publishing, it was like this huge change in my life because you got a weekly

paycheck. you had a desk. you had a place to work. and i think that because that was such a huge change in my life, my relationship in the place i worked, simon & schuster, became an absurdly fixed one. i spent 48 years working at simon & schuster. and that's because it was, in some sense, home. >> host: when did you become editor-in-chief? >> guest: i can't remember. i was, certainly, it was for a long part of that 48 years. i think i became editor-in-chief maybe four or five years after i went to simon & schuster in 1958. >> host: when did you leave simon & schuster? what year? >> guest: i don't remember exactly what year. it would have been perhaps ten years ago, something like that. i was halfway tempted to try for 50 because it's a round number and seemed a serious episode in life. but my beloved wife margaret

felt -- and i felt too -- that eating out the last two years merely for the satisfaction of being able to say 50 as opposed to 48 really didn't make much sense. so i left really with no regrets and have never looked back. i have the greatest fondness for simon & schuster and for all those who work there, and good relationships with them too. but it became a moment when i no longer wanted to do it. >> host: what does an editor-in-chief do? >> guest: well, it's like being a company commander, which is to say that you do what all the other soldiers do, except that supposedly you do it better and with more experience. it's not a direct order job. you dovetail other editors what the buy, what not to buy. though you may try to influence them to do those things, but essentially, you are first among equals. >> host: what was it like to work with max schuster and dick simon? >> guest: it was fascinating.

first of all, max schuster was a deep eccentric. and secondly, because they went back to the very beginning of book publishing when they had been young people together going into the book business in an age when the book business did not, to be frank, have a lot of juice. and they were among the first to confront that. knopf came before them, and i believe dick worked for horace who was the alcoholic, uber-genius of book publishing in his age. and so they connected themselves to a whole world of book publishing that was utterly fascinating, and they were, as i say, in different ways hugely eccentrically interesting

people. >> host: how often is an editor also a writer? which you became? >> guest: well, most editors take a stab at writing a book. it's rather like eating out in restaurants and decided that you ought to be able to cook. i don't think very many editors have become full-time writers or written as many books as i have which i think now amount to 24 or 23. that, i think, is probably unique. most people retire from their book publishing careers before they take up a writing career. i did not. i put a toe in the water writing books, and to everybody's surprise -- above all, to my own -- the first of those books was a sensation, and the second of those books was a number one bestseller which is not to say that i would want to go back and read them again now. and that did have a marked

effect on my life both in producing much more money than i had made before in book publishing, but also in carving out for myself a kind of parallel universe; one side of it going towards book publishing and editing, and the other side of it going towards writing. and bring those two into focus was, if more, -- for many, many years, a balancing act. >> host: male chauvinism, your second book was "power: how to get it, how to use it." and in that book, "power," you write: all life is a game of power. the object of the game is simple enough, to know what you want and get it. >> guest: yes, i think that's true. i think that was true then, i think it's true now, and i think it's probably always true. by the way, in knowing what you want, there should be some moral basis to it.

if what you want is entirely immoral and wrong, then, of course, your life is going to pursue a very difficult can pattern. difficult pattern. but assuming that that is the case, yes, of course. what we want is not to have power for its own sake, but power to do the job we want to do as we think it should be done and to live the life we want to live as we have always wanted to live it. >> host: 1972, writing about male chauvinism. that was pretty cutting edge, wasn't it? >> guest: well, it was. i didn't think it would be. i owe to nan taliz, the fact that book was purchased, and we were all astonished at how trendy it came. that's largely due to clay felger who put a piece on it on the cover of new york magazine which was then the hot magazine in town, a hilarious picture of a woman taking dictation, and in

front of her seated at the desk is a pig in an absolutely beautifully-cut suit, shirt and tie. and it just clicked in the public's mind as something that they absolutely understood, and it worked in a way which astonished us all. >> host: michael korda, in your book "another life," first of all, where'd you get the title for that book? >> guest: well, i got the title by accident because i wanted to call it "sacred beasts." and then i thought, no, i can't really do that to these people. [laughter] even though it's true. and so i changed the title to "another life" because it was, for me, beginning to become another life and because it had been at the beginning another life than the one that was represented by being a korda growing up in shadow of film business, moving from los

angeles back to london and growing up not knowing what direction i wanted to go. it was this choice of another life that was book publishing and editing. >> host: and who were the sacred beasts? >> guest: well, jack and suzanne, irvin wallace, harold robbins, my friend, graham greene, ronald reagan, richard nixon, henry kissinger, the people that i published. some of them very sympathetic beasts, by the way. others not so sympathetic. >> host: a lot of your personal life, and tell me if i'm wrong about this, but reads like a nonfunction "mad men." >> guest: i'm not a huge watcher of "mad men," but i know what you mean. and, of course, that's true. of course, that dovetails with the whole thing geographically. and partly because any office

drama will resemble "mad men," of course. all office dramas resemble other office drama. >> host: lot of drinking, lot of smoking, extramarital affairs. >> guest: lot of drinking and lot of smoking, at any rate. but, yes. you know, it's not the advertising business. i don't remember in my time at simon & schuster anybody being a heavy drinker, certainly not drinking while working. i remember a level of drinking when i first came into publishing that was astonishing, but that was the age of two martini lunch. i have never done that myself, many of my elders in the book publishing business were that kind of steady habituated lunchtime drinker. everybody, of course, smokes except bob donnelly, and everybody had an overflowing ashtray, and nobody ever thought nick about it. it was, in essence, a very different world.

>> host: we have an e-mail from a viewer. his name is brian, and he asks: i enjoyed reading about richard schneider when i read "another life." very well drawn figure in the book. could you dredge up a few of your favorite memories of his steamroller tactics in his rapid rise through the ranks of simon & schuster? >> guest: well, he was extremely confrontational and aggressive. i must say he was never confrontational and aggressive with me. and could be very, very difficult. he was apt to say wherever anybody said they liked a particular manuscript very much and wanted to publish it, how would you sell it to the simon & schuster sales force? and if you couldn't answer that question, held say, then don't buy it. he made instant judgments half of time, half of the time he was wrong, but the other half he was

right, and 50/50 is a very good average for book publishing. >> host: what do you mean? >> guest: if you're right 50 percent of the time in book publishing, you're doing astonishingly well. >> host: how has book publishing changed since the late '50s? >> guest: well, now it's unrecognizable because it's become an electronic business. it's in the process of transforming itself from the book, that object of which we're all familiar, into a business that concentrates itself around the electronic purchase of a book in a non-paper and non-solid form, e eliminating, thereby, the bookstore, a familiar institution. so it's very hard for those who are outside it, even for those who are inside it, to keep track of what is happening. but i would say that behind all the technological changes, the book publishing business is still the same old business it's always been, which is that you have to find books that people want to read and that they will buy in large quantity.

>> host: is it insular? >> guest: no, i'd never say that book publishing was insular. i think book publishing is probably, of all industries -- if it can be called an industry -- the most open to other people's ideas, to radical eyes -- to radical ideas. book publishers have always been open to new ideas and to new ways of writing in a way, for example, that the movie business has mostly not. >> host: good afternoon and welcome to booktv on c-span2. this is our monthly "in depth" program. this month it's author, book publisher michael korda, and we're going to put the numbers up on the screen if you'd like to participate in our conversation. 202 is the area code, 585-3880 for those in the east and central time zones, 585-3881 if

you live in the mountain or pacific time zones. you can also ask a question, make a comment via social media. @booktv is our twitter handle, facebook.com/booktv, you can make a comment there as well, and finally, you can send an e-mail to booktv@c-span.org. mr. korda is the author of many books both nonfiction and function. and, of course, here on booktv we'll cons taut on the non-- concentrate on the nonfiction. just to give you an idea of some of the topics he has written about, here's a list of his nonfiction books including male chauvinism that we discussed a little bit, power: how to get it, how to use it. charmed lives came out in 1979. man to man: surviving prostate cancer, another life: a memoir of other people, came out in 1999. country matters: the pleasures and tribulations of moving from a big city to an old country

farm. ulysses s. grant: the unlikely hero, came out in '04. journey to a revolution about the hungarian revolution in '06. ike: an american hero in 2008, with wings like eagles, the untold story of the battle of britain, 2009. hero: the life and legend of lawrence of arabia, and clouds of glory, the life and legend of robert e. lee is his recent book. who was t.e. lawrence? >> guest: lawrence of arabia? t.e. lawrence was perhaps the only hero whose name anybody remembers of the second -- of the first world war. lawrence of arabia was bigger than life even before david lee put him on the screen in what was probably the greatest single epic motion picture ever made. and lawrence was an extraordinarily charismatic figure. i was taken by lawrence at a

very early age when i read my father's copy of "seven pillars of wisdom" and followed in some degree cans lawrence's -- degrees lawrence's path. not in all of them, of course. i loved motorcycles, i joined the royal air force when i did my military service. i felt that in some respect lawrence was my guide. that's the impulse under which i went from oxford to the hungarian revolution following winston churchill's famous remark that it is very pleasant to be shot at and survive it. [laughter] and i felt that was an experience that one should have at some point in one's life. much of that comes from a childhood misspent in reading lawrence or reading ab lawrence. about lawrence. >> host: and in that book, "the life and legend of lawrence of arabia," this book is about the creation of a legend, a mythic figure and about a man who became a hero not by accident or even by a single act of heroism,

but who made himself a hero by design and did it so successfully that he became the victim of his own fame. >> guest: yes. i think lawrence was probably the first modern victim of his own celebrity. that's become a familiar, familiar thing. that's the basis on which all gossip magazines and all trash television reality shows are based, is that people reach a level of fame that not only cuts them off from the rest of the world, but at the same time makes them illuminated even when they don't want to be. so lawrence became somebody who could not step out the door to pick up his bottle of milk without flash mobs going off in his shape. for an essentially shy person, it became more than he could bear. hence, he joined the royal air force under an assumed name, then the army, when he was found out, back to the royal air force

taking george bernard shaw's name very aptly because shaw was a friend and supporter and attempted, on the one hand, to escape from his fame which was undoable. he was fully the most famous -- for a period, the most famous person in the world. lowell thomas created a huge show called "with lawrence in arabia" which contained motion pictures and of photographs and lawrence's own writings and music and played to millions around english-speaking world. so the more famous lawrence became, the more he tried to avoid and escape that fame. and the more he tried to avoid and escape it, of course, the more curious the journallests were to find him -- journalists were to find him and dig him out. it's a difficult combination of factors in which to live. >> host: but you also say that he created his own fame. >> guest: he created it in the

sense that all heroes do. that's what achilles did, what ajax did and hector, robert e. lee. they know, even if it's unconsciously, what will build their fame. they know the image that will be useful for them in the extreme circumstances that hear rowism -- heroism calls for. it isn't necessarily that every aspect of it is thought out, and it's certainly not that every aspect is -- that's not at all the case. but the hero knows how, as it were, to make the camera focus on him. if you read about them, you realize that most people who write about these enormous battles in the american civil war place at the center of it the vision of lee on his horse traveling even though they may not have seen him. >> host: how do you pick your topics? we've got quite a variety of topics we're going to be talking

about. >> guest: i like to write about people who overcome their difficulties, succeed in a very large way and to somehow balance as best they can the tame and success -- the fame and success which they have won. the two things are very, very difficult. it's difficult to become enormously successful or enormously famous. it's difficult to balance that with some kind of a life. and i like to write about people who have gone from a relatively humble position to a position of enormous fame and success and had to cope with that difficulty. >> host: any of your books published by simon & schuster? >> guest: you know, simon & schuster was a great publisher of me during the days when i became a novelist and published queenny, a huge bestseller about my aunt, the actress, which was made into a seven-hour abc

television miniseries, and the fortune and all about nelson rockefeller and his death and several other novels including one about may runs monroe called "the immortals." and during that period i was published by various imprints of simon & schuster. i was very happy being published by them. i think it's probably a little uncomfortable to be published by your own house and have to deal with your own colleagues about your own book, so i was not totally unhappy when i left to go to harpercollins. >> host: from "clouds of glory," your most recent book, "the life and legend of robert e. lee," lee had demonstrated his skill at reconnaissance, his courage without which no military virtue has meaning and husband ability to keep his head -- his ability to keep his head when all about him they were losing theirs, to paraphrase kipling. all in all, he was the perfect

warrior. >> guest: yes. i actually thought of calling my biography the perfect warrior. and it's not a bad title. and yet i felt "clouds of glory," a phrase from the poem by wordsworth, so much better described him because there clings to lee, despite his defeat, despite our doubts today, to put it mildly, about the wisdom of forming the confederacy, despite the question of whether lee should have continued fighting after failing at gettysburg to destroy the army of the potomac that lee had, nevertheless, that magic quality of self-conviction, courage and ability to see exactly where he wanted to go and how to get there. he was the perfect warrior. he was good mannered, he was

gentle in manner, and yet he was implacable and aggressive and bold on the battlefield. altogether a very remarkable figure. >> host: this e-mail from john gibson in mobile, alabama: mr. korda, was general lee truly a great virginia gentleman? if grant, sherman and i dare say mcclellan, had never come on the scene and the southern blockade had failed, would the usa be as divided today as a nation? >> guest: had the blockade -- i wonder if he means by that had the con fed rahs i survived -- confederacy survived and we ended up as two nations, in what form -- >> host: i think that's part of it, and i think he's also asking if grant, sherman and mcclellan hadn't come on the scene, would the u.s. be a

divided -- would it be two nations today? >> guest: i am inclined not to think so. one of the things that makes lee attractive is that he was a very reluctant secessionist. in fact, he disliked the idea of secession, called it silly, called it anarchy. he often bemoaned that we were giving up a republic earned by our patriot fathers, one of whom, his own, was one of washington's favorite cavalry commanders and was pushed into secession slowly, very, very unenthusiastically and eventually arrived there because he had drawn what is now called in a famous phrase a line in the sand as early as 1858 or 1859 which was that he could not

agree to see the state of virginia, his home state, attacked by federal troops. and that if and when that happened, he would have to, as he put it, draw his sword. otherwise he would not. so when virginia was attacked, he with great reluctance joined the virginia militia as its head. and when virginia voted to join the confederacy -- though lee had very strong doubts about that -- he assumed the rank of a con fed rate general. confederate general. once he had done that, had made that progression, then he fought on during rately, he fought completely, he raced any doubt from his mind which is the very correct thing for a general to do and became the most famous of confederate generals and commanders. and, indeed can, i think became the symbol for the confederacy, certainly the symbol that people

admired then most and still do. >> host: what was his feelings about slavery? was he a supporter? and on the flip side, was ulysses s. grant an opponent of slavery? was slavery an issue with these two? >> guest: slavery's always an issue. [laughter] it cannot be erased from the civil war. i would say that to do the question separately, grant dislikes the idea of slavery although that was slightly altered by the fact that his wife, mrs. grant, came from a slave-owning family, had her own slaves and that grant's brief experience and fall your as a farm aer was sustained by -- farmer was sustained by the slaves his father-in-law gave him to do the actual work. in lee's case, lee grew up in the vast lee family, branches which extend through virginia, and slavery was as familiar to

him as anything else around him. he expressioned frequently and certainly very strongly in 1858 and 1895 a dislike for the institution of slavery which he thought evil in any country where it exists. that does not necessarily mean that lee would have met a litmus test for racial equality in our final. in our time. he thought that slavery was a weigh station towards a better future for blacks. he thought that though freeing them was a worthy ambition, that they were not at present suitable to vote or be citizens. so he was not by any means a paragon of racial equality. however, it has to be said for lee that, a, he would not have

fought for slavery. he disliked it. b, that he had the ability to see the slaves as people, not as objects or as potential wealth. he saw them, by and large, as people which which wasn't true of everybody. he stood up and would shake the hand of a black man who was leaving to pursue a career. he kneeled at the communion rail next to a black man, to the shock of the congregation of his church in richmond. he was that paradoxical of figures, a man who ended up fighting for something in which he did not completely believe. >> host: what makes for a good editor? >> guest: i think a good editor is somebody who not only knows what's wrong with a book and what could be done to fix it, but also knows when to leave things ahone.

alone. the only thing worse than a sloppy or unambitious editor who doesn't bring to the page any serious way to improve it is an editor who does too much. so it's a balance. you must do enough, but you really can't take on the job of authorship. you certainly must not change the author's idea, however abhorrent they may be to you. >> host: what was it like to work as richard nixon's editor? >> guest: he was very, very easy to work with. first of all, he wrote himself extremely well in longhand on yellow legal pads. and his prose, while it's not poetic, is nevertheless very solid and very readable. and he was open to advice,

suggestions. he was quite firm about what he didn't want to accept, but on the other hand he was always quite willing to listen. i found him a very, very interesting and likable man. he was the only one of my authors, the only person i've ever dealt with who always spoke of himself in the third person so that if you had dinner with him, he would say nixon will have another glass of wine. or if you suggested a change in a manuscript to him, he would think of it seriously, almost as if he were pantomiming thought with a kind of furrowed brow. he was a great actor in his way, and he'd say, nixon would not like that. and it was remarkable. you had to accept the fact that he thought of himself, he thought of nixon, essentially, as a separate creature

altogether and referred to nixon in the third person. even at home. even having lunch at his house, he would still say, nixon will have another cup of coffee as if it were a perfectly normal thing to say. >> host: ronald reagan. >> guest: charming man. he was a great pleasure to edit. he did not, i have to say, do much writing himself, although his letters and his diaries and his documents are very, very well written, indeed. the book that we published by him, his autobiography, "an american life," he regarded as something being done by others. he went over it carefully or had other people go over it carefully. he was a pleasure to be around. he had a very good relationship with my wife margaret by phone because she is a great horse woman and lover of horses, and of course, so was he. and they both shared a great interest in pigs.

at one time we had a number of pigs on our farm in duchess county, and it turned out that ronald reagan had been very interested in pigs and never failed when going to state fairs like the iowa state fair to go and visit the pigs. and he sent us a live picture of him -- with the winning pig at the iowa state fair. >> host: you told us of a time when his autobiography was finished and he turned and waved and said, "i hear it's a good book, i'll have to read it sometime." >> guest: absolutely. unfortunately, it was true. [laughter] and he did eventually read it and like it. but he was not deeply connected. nixon was. nixon, nixon started out writing every book himself, a certain amount of editing went into it. a lot of other people's research. he was a lawyer. he would stack it up in front of him and then take a yellow legal

pad and then write. he took some pride in his work. ronald reagan, i think, was not essentially interested in that. but i remember visiting his office in california after he had ended his presidency, and he had this magnificent glass cabinet that stretched forever containing every single saddle that he had been presented with during his gubernatorial, his acting and his presidential career. this wonderful row of western and english saddles, all beautifully -- [inaudible] and he was so proud. he took one down and showed each one and described what it was and where it had come from and who had presented it to him. it was quite, quite extraordinary. i describe, i think, in the book the fact that when you visited his office, what you got was a

photograph of yourself with the president. which is par for the course, i suppose, which he signed because it was a polaroid camera. it could be signed and put in a frame for you. and when he did that, i realized -- because i grew up in the movie business -- that there was a mark on the floor of his office on this beautiful carpet. there were two pieces of duct tape crossed so that you and he would step to the right place together for the picture to be taken. and i thought to myself, that's extraordinary. the man has been governor of california, the man has twice been president of the united states, and he is still a movie actor. he knows where to hit his mark. >> host: did that book sell? >> guest: ronald reagan's? >> host: yes. >> guest: it was disappointing. it did not sell as many as we hoped. to this day, it's actually rather difficult for me to say why, because i thought it was pretty good. [laughter]

but these things do happen. political books are very risky. you can pay a lot of money for them, and mostly they do go for a lot of money, and you cannot gauge the success of the book by the popularity necessarily of the author. some of them work, some of them don't. it's maybe the riskiest kind of book to publish. generals are much easier. >> host: simon & schuster just this past year published hillary clinton's second book, and all reports are that it is not selling very well either. if you had been editor-in-chief, would you have advocated for that book? >> guest: the hypothetical is always difficult to answer. probably, but probably for the wrong reasons. i mean, i was absolutely charmed by meeting ronald reagan and absolutely charmed when i published jimmy carter's book, "a government as good as its people," and i'm sure i would have been absolutely charmed by hillary clinton who's a woman that i hugely admire.

so the answer is, yes, probably, but for the wrong reasons. that's often the case with political books. >> host: joan crawford. >> guest: ah, you couldn't go wrong with joan crawford. i published joan crawford's book. i had a great time with her. i used to go to her apartment so we could edit it. she, too, wrote in longhand very carefully and knew what she wanted to say, and she maintained that firm control over everything that was always a part of her career, and i remember that although by that time she had been reduced to quite a large but not impressive apartment in new york city, this was after her husband had died and she had lost her temporary control of the pepsi cola corporation. and she took me in one day to show me what she called her closet. in fact, if there were three or four bedrooms in this apartment, they were completely covered in

clothes. each dress in a plastic, zippered bag with a note on it in her hand of the place and the date where she had worn it and the matching pair of shoes underneath it. hundreds of them. and going back to i don't know how far. and it was just amazing. i mean, it was one of those sights where you say to yourself this can't -- i cannot really be seeing this, but i was. >> host: will durant. who was will durant? >> guest: will durant was a philosophy student and teacher who set out to write books that attracted the attention of the co-founder of simon & schuster. because max not only loved philosophy, but also yearned to publish large tomes on philosophy and history. and will durability satisfied

that -- durant satisfied that over years by writing the story of civilization which i think reached possibly ten very substantial volumes, big volumes over there behind you that might be the same size. i became the editor, i think, of the last two or three. >> host: what was it like working with him? and did they sellsome. >> guest: oh, in those days they sold terrifically. they were in the book of the month club, that determined what would happen to a major nonfiction book, and will durant was, as max schuster liked to say, the mainstay, the foundation of the book of the month club. the book of the month club was founded upon people getting every volume of the story of the civilization. so, yes, they sold large, large quantityings. i'm not sure anybody necessarily reads them today. >> host: michael korda, when you were editing ronald reagan, you were also kurtty kelly's -- cutty kelly's editor. did that create problems? >> guest: it created a brief spat because kitty kelley did a

book about nancy reagan which was published at the same time we were publishing ronald reagan. and the reagans felt about kitty kelley as one might feel about a hand grenade with a pin removed. but when it was explained to the president that we had a contract for kitty kelley's book and, therefore, would have to publish it and that it was just as it was in the movie studios, a contract is something you have to respect, he totally understood and forgave. i'm not sure that mrs. reagan did, but he did. >> host: want to read one more quote from one of your books and then we'll get into phone calls and some of the e-mails that we're getting. but this is from 2006, "journey to a revolution: a personal memoir and history of the hungarian revolution of 1956." when things get bad enough, men will give a gold watch for a

loaf of bread and women their virtue. war and revolution teach you the relativity of values pretty quickly. >> guest: i think that's true, don't you? there's nothing like the ec tricepty of hard -- extremity of hardship and danger to bring out just how far people will go. to survive. and when bullets are flying overhead, a gold watch doesn't seem like a big thing to give away in return for some kind of safety. the same can be said for extreme inflation. when extreme inflation hits, it suddenly takes $100,000, then a million dollars and a billion dollars and then a trillion dollars overnight to buy a loaf of bread, then a gold watch suddenly becomes an extremely important thing. it keeps you alive. it's real as opposed to paper money. so i think that's so. i think that we go through life

skating along until we confront something that is on a huge historical scale and that we are plunged into or go into of our own volition as i did in terms of the hungarian revolution, and then realize that the scale of values is quite different from the one that we ordinarily pursue. >> host: are you a trained historian? >> guest: no. i'm not trained at all. i i did study with great admiration a little bit under roper when i was at ox toford who i admired -- oxford who i admired enormously. i think he's superb and a hugely readable historical document, exactly the way history should be read. that's a book like garrett battingly's the armada that combines, i think, scholarship and storytelling in a way that i

always wanted to do. i found my way towards it slowly by writing first self-help books and novels. but when i started to do the grant biography, i said to myself, well, this is what i've always been aiming for, it's always been what's at the back of my mind. and i'm just going to somehow do it. i don't claim to any special training or, indeed, any special skill. at doing it. but, and i think the biggest project that i've done is probably "clouds of glory," the robert e. lee biography because i could deal with grant. it was a relatively small book, and i could deal with english things for the sort of background of knowledge. but i came to lee as somebody who was not born in america and was not by any stretch of the imagination a southerner or a confederate sympathizer. and so i had to confront a vast amount of material and somehow make it come out all the same, as a story. i think when you write a big

biography like lee or like lawrence, you always have to say to yourself however much material you found, however much new material if there is anything you found, how do i fit this into a story that people will read from page to page in not a kind of telephone book of facts, but a living story. >> host: well, car men gonzales e-mails in to you from glendale, california, and you spoke to this first question a little bit. can you ask mr. korda if general lee ever had any doubts about the cause of the civil war. his second question, were there any letters or diary entries that made him think war wasn't the best option for resolution? >> guest: well, let me answer the second question first, if i may. robert e. lee was a west pointer, spent 36 years in the united states army. his father had been a very successful general, not so successful after the revolutionary war, but a very successful general. and robert e. lee was a

professional soldier. war did not seem horrifying to lee. it was what he did. he fought in the mexican-american war, he had his doubts, as grant did, about whether that war was a good idea, though their doubts were very different impulses. but i don't think that lee rode out onto a battlefield and found himself ree pelled by what he -- repelled by what he saw. that's not to say that he was bloodthirsty and not to say that he was, that he liked war for its own sake. but a professional soldier who is, as we say in english, put off by or war is a contradiction in terms. that's what -- we expect professional soldiers to want to fight wars, and it's also how they get promoted. as for his doubts about secession, yes, lee never gave up those doubts about secession. he disliked politics together

whether they were confederate or union politics. he had been pushed into secession with the utmost reluctance, and yet once he was there, he could not forgo his professionalism. he had chosen to commit himself to the course of virginia when virginia joined the confederacy. then he was committed to the confederacy, and he would fight to the end. i think it's very interesting that when he surrendered, first of all just before he verpd ed, one of his generals said why not disperse the army? let it take its weapons with them, and each man will go behind a bush or a tree and will fight the union troops all the way to their homes. and lee would not hear of it. he was determined to surrender his army intact, to surrender their weapons down to the last weapon except for the side arms

that officers were able to carry home with their horses. he was determined to make a professional, complete surrender. the idea of guerrilla warfare, as it does any professional army officer, horrified him. and he would not have the war stretched out to infinity by 100,000 jesse james behind each bush trying to shoot a soldier can. once he had surrendered, then that was it. the war was over. and he himself, which i thought was very moving, that under all circumstances whatever we thought that events might prove and he hoped would prove that god had in mind a restoration of the union. and he immediately put his shoulder to the wheel, as the phrase goes, to make that union possible by surrendering completely. when he got home, he was in the habit at first of cutting off

one of the buttons from his gray uniform coat to give to his daughter and her friends -- one of his daughters, and her friends. and then he was told, which was correct, that the federal governor of richmond had forbidden the wearing of confederate buttons. and so he stopped giving them away and moved them from his coat and replaced them with leather or horn buttons. he was determined to live up to the surrender and determined to reunite the two parts of the country after war. after the war. i think lee more than any other figure helped cement the two parts of country together in the four or five years he lived after surrendering the army of northern virginia. >> host: did he and ulysses grant have any relationship in those four to five years? >> guest: not a prior relationship. lee and grant had met during the mexican war, but grant was then an obscure captain, and lee was

already a national hero and a lieutenant colonel. quite famous and one of the great hero heroes of the mexican-american war. a war they both disliked, by the way. he came to grant late in his life. grant did not confront lee's army until gettysburg. and he came to a great respect for grant after the war when there was a move to have lee tried for treason. grant put an end to it immediately by writing that that contradicted the terms of lee's surrender at the courthouse and, therefore, it could not take place. and in 1868 when lee came to testify before congress, he actually met grant briefly and with great politeness and respect. so they were not close, but there is a huge respect.

to read the pages in which grant describes in his memoirs meeting with lee at ap maddox courthouse is to read one of the glories of american nonfiction writing. american writing, it seems to me, has two great stars, stellar objects. in fiction, moby dick. in nonfiction, its equivalent is general grant's memoirs. there was a time when there was no house north of the mason dixon line where there was not a bible and general grant's memoirs somewhere in the home. that book, to read grant's description of lee's surrender is to be overwhelmed by the dignity of both men and by the respect they had for each other and for each other's army. it's an enormously moving part of american literature. >> host: in "another life" you write that general grant was the

last president to write his own memoirs. >> guest: without any help. richard nixon wrote his, but he had large numbers of researchers and helpers in that sense. grant was dying when he -- and also bankrupt. he wrote his memoirs because mark twain invented the idea of paying grant for the book before it was written, something which publishers until that point had hardly ever done. and paying grant in modern terms a huge fortune. so grant, bankrupt and dying of throat cancer, sat down with pads of paper and a white linen scarf wrapped around his throat because of surgery on his throat and wrote without anybody's help, wrote this huge, enormous book, gathered the facts, remembered them. it is one of the epic,

courageous events in the history of literature. certainly of american literature. and he did it sitting on the porch of a borrowed house in his silk top hat while people came by to watch president grant sitting there writing and dying. >> host: in your book "the unlikely hero," grant had an extreme, almost phobic dislike of turning back and retracing his steps. if he set out for somewhere, he would get there somehow, that far the difficulties that lay in his way. this idiosin rah city would turn out to be one of the factors that made him a formidable general. >> guest: oh, very, very formidable idiosin rah city for a general. grant as a boy would not go back on his steps and always wanted a straight line towards where he wanted to go. as a general, he did much the same thing. the result is he took very, very

large casualties quite up. not always, but quite often. lee was a much more inventive general than grant. first of all, lee was always short of men, was always short of guns, was always short of ammunition. his men were short of shoes, short of blankets in the winter. he was short of anything. the confederacy could not supply it or replace it. lee made up for that by an enormous ingenuity and maneuvering. he was spectacular. he would advance to the flank, vanish for days, reappear to the side if the enemy were beside him or behind him. he was one of the great maneuvererrers in military history. he fought his battles where he wanted to fight them and when he wanted to fight them. and when he got all of those equations right, he won. when he didn't, he lost. but his speed of maneuver, the speed with which he moved,

stonewall jackson -- his brilliantly gifted corps commander -- marched his corps 54 miles in two days before the second manassas, 54 miles in two days in the middle of summer for men who were mostly barefoot and carrying their rifle, their bayonet, their ammunition and their powder. a huge distance. lee counted on that, he could move like lightning. the german generals when they evolved their technique, it was to lee and jackson that they looked. the germans knew more about the shenandoah valley than anybody does in this country. they studied it as if it were part of their own home. every single town, village, river, stream, hill they learned in german military staff school. it's quite extraordinary. lee was an enormous genius.

he had, as i described it in "clouds of glory," the serenity of genius. he relied on that genius. and by the large -- by and large, it served him very well indeed. ultimately, however, numbers tell, and grant's ability to use numbers, his determination to keep on going towards where he wanted to go, those wore lee down. he was forced to retreat again and again and again until finally he was outside richmond at which point war could only become a long and painful siege. >> host: you've been listening to our conversation for the past hour, michael korda is our guest, former editor-in-chief of simon & schuster. historian, writer, etc. lot to talk about, a lot of topics. i don't think you're going to be able to stump him. we've covered a lot of topics, and whatever you want to ask, it's your turn now. we're going to begin with david in the hope sound, florida.

david, good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon, peter. it's always a pleasure to say hello to you. and, mr. korda, i absolutely do admire you very much. i am somewhat familiar with your writing. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: years ago i read a book by ben hecht, "child of this century," his autobiography, in which he talked about, wrote about a conversation he had with your cung l, alexander. uncle, alexander. at the time that israel was coming into existence. and your uncle said to him -- and this is an accurate a quote that i can muster after all these years -- if the j everything ws in palestine -- jews in palestine act up, we will, we meaning the british, will exterminate them. that was a terrible thing to

say. and i've never forgotten it, and it's colored a lot -- every time i see his name on the credits in a movie, i get angry because of it. i'm just wondering what you have to say about it. >> guest: well, let me say, first of all, that i would not trust ben hecht's word about anything. so that quote is very unlikely for my uncle alex to have made. i will not say that as a naturalized british subject that he would necessarily have been in favor of israel, but he was both too sympathetic a person, too tactful a person and too cautious a person to have said anything like that about the jews in palestine. ..

for his funeral and mentioned that he had been searching for a half by and they said they had why on earth and he was a man of curious enthusiasm and as we all know, los angeles is the place where people develop very unfamiliar villages coals. it struck me as odd that he

would have wanted a half-life. i asked about it and finally came to the conclusion that the answer to the question of jesus learned they were originally called for jewish. also not an advantage. my mother's family was firmly english. so i had never -- my mother in fact, long after my father's dad, said today she liked the book very much, but she thought the whole description of my father being jewish was a greater demonstration because he would've surely told her he never did. so she went to her grave thinking my father was jewish. she just thought i was wrong. so i came to accept that

instantly explained a great deal about and that would've otherwise been inexplicable. not to say that anyone of them would've ever made an anti-fanatic for anti-zionist statement. quite far from it. i think the answer is we have to somehow place ourselves back in the spirit of the 20th in the 30s, were people coming from part of the hungarian empire and now has become in the 20s of fascist center of europe. people were already exotic, strangely accented and peculiar. there were for no reason to further complicate that. the jewish refugees quote, unquote. they were exotic enough to begin that.

so without ever having made the point, they slid into the world being forced to confront that. that's understandable in terms your opinion 20s and 30s. none of them could have been fortunate to say. postcode area code is to a 25853880. if you would like to converse with michael korda. (202)585-3881. for those of you out west. linda in knoxville, tennessee. hi, linda. >> caller: hi, mr. korda, you are a horse person. i am a horse person. in 2003 published a book called worse people, scenes from the fatty mice. i have headed off my shelf and

it says i read it in january january 2005. the passion is, what do you see as a worse person is the future of worst-case, worse people, worse culture, including were worse people in the sentiment of zoning boards, environmentalists , like the character is controversy and even agricultural land preservation is. another example is the one it. >> guest: me say first while an answer to the question, because if you are harboring over my head like an angel. i shouldn't do that. if my wife margaret was relieved the horse person. i'm a fairly vacant life enthusiast. but margaret pulled me into the horse world unto the scale of which we reached. whatever i know about horses i

learned by being around her. secondly, let me say you are combining a number of different doctors. a lot of people who love horses don't think the kerry sources in central park are a good idea because there's weather, freezing rain, accidents, heavy traffic. i don't feel one way or the other of myself. i like it peter nehr, but as an animal lover, i am not entirely sure that it's a good idea for the animals. in the part of the country where i live, there is no antiwar sentiment that i know of. but that is receded and there's no anti-worse feeling that i know of. we keep a number of forces and our property and nobody suffered jack to do it. i would agree with you that it's

a difficult thing to do. i have to say food is much richer if we hadn't kept horses. but on the other hand, we would be much poorer for it. my wife and i have always been a tractor to horses that we were attracted to each other because we surveyed together early in the morning in central park at horses have become a part of my life and i'm enormously sympathetic to horses as long as they are well kept and provided for and looked after. i don't think i would want to push them out by the way, but i was they make sure that they were treated well. >> host: you just made history. you're the first to talk about the hungarian revolution, robert e. lee and horses. you were born in 1933. do you still write today? >> guest: if i'm not here at would've been on on a horse this morning. as a rule, four or five times a

week and i enjoy very much. eric daze in the winter when it's getting to be difficult to do. the circulation is not as good as it used to be. i am a fairly consistent writer. every day of the week. for it is a seven day week activity. postcode cj, pacific palisades, good afternoon to you. >> caller: yes, hello. hello, mr. korda. peter, what a wonderful interview. i enjoyed it so much. i've been a great admirer of yours. you've got a wonderful overview of our world. i want to ask you, given what he you spoke of earlier, the scale of values, what advice would you

give to a young man graduating from the university today in light of all the madness that looks like we will be rolling in decades to come. >> guest: let me say that madness has always ruled the world. there have been worries. when certain areas, certain nations has looks stable. england during the victorian era looks stable and solid stable. america after the civil war went to a long period, not without problems, but stability and reliability and is a world for depression in another world war and the cold war. it's never been in the history of the world a time where some part of it somewhere where there

were serious taking place for whatever reaching. the fact that they are taking place right here right now doesn't mean they are not taken place someplace else and not always been true. i would advise any young people, not that any young person is necessarily looking for my life, to keep an even keel about the scenes. there will never be, judging from past experience, at type when the world absolutely peaceful although it on its enormous circumference. they were always be trouble somewhere and there'll always be somewhat committed to do what they can about it. so that is a permanent fact of life. i also think that taking it on an even keel is what matters. when the worse comes along at a crisis really hits us, we will know it and figure out what to

do. >> host: michael was in fayette, alabama. you want the tv. >> caller: yes, ma'am -- yes, sir. we'll sir. real thrill to meet you. i understand you're the nephew for son of alexander korda. which you evidently your book is going to talk about much more about the last caller said. i eventually. i said two questions for you as briefly as possible. i loved your father and your all goes smoothly if your uncle was milton korda. i'm a big stickler and it burns me up about copyrights and loyalties for one's work not going to the original producers

or at least the error and heiress is pirated because i'm a professional artist in studio artist full time. >> host: michael, if he could, get to your questions and will get an answer. >> caller: partly because i am a big fan of warner brothers were. so many of the studios sold their copyrights to their road libraries, television, syndication company in the 50s and 60s. that isn't as tragic as folk artists and folk musicians as a composer with norway and south africa. >> guest: i understood the question. and so far as it applies to the potus, my uncle alex sold the copyrights when he wanted to sell them, sold into television. he regarded his films as children that would carry him,

which unfortunately did not think to speed. so deals were made then that it sends less supportive films of all sorts of various ownership, which are unfamiliar to him. certainly i don't get any money from any of them. that much i can assure you. but people make these rights and southend and you can't expect the children, the grandchildren necessarily to inherit when they've been sold. >> host: thomas and penn grove, california. go ahead with you? comment. >> caller: first of all, really enjoying the interview. i wanted mr. korda to tell us about graham greene, which is one of the people you mention. >> host: first of all tell us who graham greene is. >> guest: i hope i don't have to explain who graham greene once.

everyone should know who he is. one of the great novelists of the 20th century as well as an extraordinary figure in his own right. and with a vast body of work, both fiction and non-action, though chiefly nonfiction is that he is known for. i have known him ever since my childhood because he was a very close friend of my fathers and the uncle alex is. he wrote, uncle alex a film script called a scared man, which was later made into a motion picture directed by carl reid and became perhaps the most famous, the most successful and i think the most emblematic of european films about postwar europe. those who are old enough to remember it will feel their nurse jane gold by hearing the theme even today.

and graham is a man of extraordinary charm, it deep religious conviction, but that's the wrong word, a deeply divergent drive, a catholic who numbers the last was able to follow the adapted religion. an extraordinary figure. i don't have a great deal. i was very happy that in my publishing career i finally caved to be his editor as well as his friend. >> host: i think in another life you indicate that graham greene encourage you to go to hungary during the revolution. >> guest: yes, he felt adventure was always good for a young man. and that the machine gunfire over one's head was a forceful

way of getting more into combat reality. i think he was probably correct about that because if that doesn't make you think about reality, nothing will. and yes, he was the favor of my going. he was always in favor of the adventure, the unusual stepping out of the ordinary. he vowed to go to places like vietnam and cuba and he loved being on what he would call the father seems. and his life is on the edge of things. he was an enormous talent and the most lovable of them. >> host: from another life, writers are always outsiders and probably have to be since only outsiders see things clearly. the people who publish them or

make movies are produced plays out is richer and more powerful. however successful the writer is. >> guest: gas, sidney kingsley, the author of the page read among other things than detective story, very successful real estate prize-winning playwright who married my mother's cousin, who was the bible is shirley temple as a child star. every time it rains their brains. and he told me that in my first meeting. he had agreed to take me under his wing to advise them on a plate he was then writing about the hungarian revolution. so she was my first staff in paid work as a young man and i'm very grateful to him because without that i should probably have gone on grubbing in a

variety of other unseemly ways and never found myself into a book publishing. >> host: i was soon to discover you write, there's a tendency among the other shares, especially making speeches on public occasions, to set the writer of the publisher or part the same team. this of course this pious nonsense. >> guest: it is pious nonsense. even though the book publishing industry is sliding into euros for people's books have been sold for $8 or $9 as electronic books on the author's share of that is tiny and works to a few million copies of the work. there is still a pretense that the publisher and writer at the same business. i've never really thought that's entirely true. the writer is that his early business of writing. the publishers in the business of trying to make money out of

what they do. there's nothing wrong with that. it's a perfectly respectable profession, but it's not the same profession. postcode marries in rochester, minnesota. uri with michael korda. >> caller: thank you. please tell me about queen emeralds later life. thank you. >> guest: unashamedly an attempt to tell in the course of a novel or failure facts about the life whose birth name was queenie and about my uncle alex dissociated, which on a professional basis was a stroke of genius to turn her name and make her into a movie star. i wanted to tell that story. i have known her for years and i couldn't really tell it in a nonfiction way.

so i think it was the right decision because i needed to get inside moral. i believe i did because the first thing to be said is queenie was an enormous appealing figure. she's courageous, she's spunky, she's talented weird she is in her own way very loyal. i don't necessarily mean provide a clue loyal, but people who have helped her. she is loyal to those who help her run away to start them in a way that was rare for movie stars here. and she was also enormously gifted. s-sierra films today, she could be with the right director, just wonderful. and many of those films are terrific. i had a wonderful time. it was very difficult, much more than anticipated.

for a spot because never the novel. but that is different than those facing in front of a typewriter and actually trying to write fiction. i think i was fortunate because i did know murrell and several stories. i have that to fall back on. what would murrell have said and if the answer is no, of course we need to do or say it. so i'm very happy that you remember the book. i remember with great fondness. it is enormous fun to write. it was a very big success. it is made into a miniseries on abc with kirk douglas says palko alex about people and claire booth with the net as queens mother. so it was altogether an extraordinary occasions, one which has not been repeated, so i think of it as my most successful foray into the world of fiction. >> host: what was the process

like to you going from novel to many serious? >> guest: fortunately for me, i wasn't involved. nobody in the world asks the author of a novel that they should do when they're making a miniseries. i worked on it as an interesting process. not one unfamiliar to me because i've grown up as a child, and i knew better to say it was the same as the book from alcoholics would not write down what kirkpatrick was just a. it is interesting, like going to a foreign country, enjoying a, but never for a moment wanted to go back and revisit it. >> host: pottstown, pennsylvania. please go ahead. >> caller: thank you for this. it is really interesting. i have two brief questions that

are interrelated. one of them interested in the mechanics of your writing, how you write, typewriter or word processor. effectiveness in comparison of the screenwriter, novelist, and you have any -- how did you do do -- the people you've met, how did they seem different? i didn't know if you have any stories. thank you. >> guest: thank you. i've never this screenplay for television. i did write a film based on charm based on charmed life and found it very difficult to do. just a comment to my abilities as a screenwriter. but i don't think the writing is

separable. anyway that you write is good, whether you write screenplays, novels, poetry. it saw the same. it's all riding. there are different conventions. you cannot buy poetry and cannot write screenplays, but alternately, all writing this one and everybody who does it is linked into a sort of fraternity or sorority of people who have decided to do something which sounds easy, but it's not easy in front of a page and type one at the upper right hand side of it. >> host: georges and bureaucrats, washington. george, michael korda is our guest. >> caller: thank you. i have a question about things like eagles, which i very much enjoyed. in that you mentioned princess elizabeth, current queen served

in the anti-aircraft surveys. in researching that, i found very little details. i learned more about the surveys. >> guest: i can't find a lot about it. there are photographs in the uniform and there are plenty of photographs for standing next to an army vehicle, which she was typewriter. change the tires on. even some -- it wasn't anything at this time. at the place where the anti-aircraft guns were aimed, the mechanical equivalent of a computer and princess elizabeth was in charge of that and a part of that throughout the early

part of the war. i think you'd find if you pursue this hard enough that there's enough a lot about that insurgency in any biography of the queen. they will queen. there will be queen. there will be a pc shop to create detailed one. >> host: during the war, michael korda, were you physically? >> guest: during the first part of it, from september 1939 to about november of 1940. from november 9th 242 mike 1945 s. and canada, then russia and new york and then i came back to the united kingdom after the war. >> host: what do you remember about being in london? >> guest: i remember the sirens very well. i remember that my school, which i remember only vaguely was

actually bombed with one bomb. no one was hurt, but there was a big noise. i remember us all moving out of one and two a housing data because my father and the will alex besought issue for novel. they believed, as did everybody at the time that when war came he would begin with a german air raid that was flattened blend in and they had actually shown this as the beginning of this movie of the novel. we all move to the country in the days looking to the horizon, waiting to see london. of course we had no idea the first of all they were not prepared to do that but was not close enough to do that. even when they started to do it, wouldn't follow. but there is this apocalyptic vision, from which they had created effectively on film at

this rented house made tyer was forced to live in one house but disastrous consequences because there are people who liked their independence and my mother used to go to bed every night scene where is that such a theory. i don't have dramatic memories of the war except during from 39 to the end of 40. >> host: frankie melts into you, since you, sincere with his soul research, i wonder if there's any good history resources online for deselecting handle primary research has what it loved and? >> guest: with? gloved hand. i'm trying to think, i don't think i ever used gloved hands.

i am more at ease paper. that is not in any way a condemnation of it at all. i've come late to the computer and i think of myself as quite competent with it. but i am not totally as my son as, for example i found people today are. i would rather like to get a stack of paper and go through it particularly to the records of the war i like to have in front of me than go through it, mark it off. i am always afraid if it's on the computer screen that i was at a rival bill to give back again. if a piece of paper, i know it's there. >> host: carroll is in texas. hi, carol.

>> caller: thank you for your program. i think he wants his book in the desert and been there, he is proud of his ability to blow up things, to his expertise with demolitions. he doesn't show any real remorse or in the antiwar sentiment. would you comment on how is this sentiment and mr. morris find its way into the portrayal of head and launch of arabia. the question is how do you square the realty lawrence with a projected on the screen.

his unaffected boyish pleasure and blowing things up and his lack of remorse by killing people was wanting to say these are among the things they do is a great warrior inquiry lawyers did not sit around talking about people they kill. he crept into his life later, but not strongly. they were haunted by many, many things. i don't see much evidence that was a huge concern at all. i think that found its way onto the screen because david lee, the screenwriter put it there, but i don't think lawrence would have accepted that at all. >> host: (202)585-3880 the

eastern central time zone. 585-3881 for the rest of you. we have an hour and a half left in our program. here are some of michael korda's books we have been discussing. "mal chauvinism." power cannot in 1975. charmed lives in 1879. man to man in 1997. another life: a memoir of other people in 1999. country matters within 2001. "ulysses s. grant" the unlikely hero, 2004. journey to a revolution, 2006 about the hungarian revolution. "ike" an american hero. "wings like eagles" 2009. "hero," the life and legend of lawrence of arabia, 2010. and finally, his most recent,

"clouds of glory" came out this year. what book are you working on currently? >> guest: well, i am edging towards -- first of all, i don't want to start soon. i think if i start another long biographical work, i would hope that was a mistake. so i want to write this time a somewhat shorter book. i book. i have to myself writing another book of 816 pages. not the length of "clouds of glory." i think that is outlandish for someone approaching 82. >> host: one of the things i like to do here when we have a "in depth" gascon is find out what books they are reading, book looks influence then. here is a look at michael korda's answers.

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>> host: and back live with michael korda on "in depth" as we continue to take your calls. tom wharton, new jersey. you are on the air. >> caller: yes, like to ask mr. korda about his experience working as chocolate masters at.

jacqueline suzanne. you publishers such about. just go yes, i wish i published the first. the second did area well. she was extort barry. an entire film, but said she great, was made about my relationship with jackie suzanne. we got along famously. it is ingrained in my mind if she was for any reason put on pulled she would get onto another line and the voice would come over and say i want the name of the girl who put me on hold. i want that girl fired. she was amazing. she could be very nice. she could be tremendously difficult. she has so far as i know the

only typewriter in the world that was painted pink. >> host: in capital letters. >> guest: in capital letters and revise. she was amazing. when we published jacklin suzanne, we did not manage to come to an agreement with the book after. that boat which i think was called once is not enough inspired snyder, the publisher to send her a single note that read once was enough for arrests . >> host: with hibernate as working with an offer like jacklin suzanne? >> guest: barry high

maintenance. they give you an insight into what was then the publicity machine for successful authors that you would not have had sitting at your desk editing poetry or series nonfiction books. those were the days of the columnists, getting onto them or griffin shows when all that mattered in this very useful to have the experience and see a close up. >> host: this is not typically a topic to talk about jacklin suzanne, but it's a book publishing topic you will tell a quick story here. the first night you met her or the first time you met her in new york on the utility stories. number one you ended up with her husband's blue cashmere jacket. and then you went to dinner with kind of a motley crew of people. jusco irving mansfield was so

proud of his shoes. they were made of some extraordinarily elegant and precious and unlikely but there that he passed them around the table for us to look at and admire computer wolves and took off his low for and passed it around the table. i thought what are we doing here? we still had not ordered dinner and were sitting at the dinner table, looking at your morford's shoe. i said how on earth did i fall into this particular part of the publishing? but it was fascinating to be there. >> host: which are profitable for simon & schuster? >> guest: hugely, hugely. we paid a fortune for her book and we made a fortune. you couldn't keep up with demands. they expected to have the full intention of a large publishing house directed at tiredly an jacklin suzanne and her book, which they had when bernie giese

was her publisher. the successful author by huge ratio. i think however much effort it will make for a book still has all of the other books to publish and jackie could never grapple with that we might be publishing somebody else but her is exceedingly hard for her to accept. >> host: who was swifty lazare works >> guest: swifty lazare was not her agent. the practically of analysis. swifty lazare was a force of nature veered under five-foot tall and having had a very successful career as a music agent, then a field agent, one of his authors and i can't remember which one it was famously said everybody in the world who counts for anything has to a chance. because irving lazar had no

compunction about simply grabbing an author who already had an aged and selling a book without even asking. he was a wonderful man. quite extraordinary. in some ways terrifying. always in his own sharply very kind to me and to margaret. but irving was a vanished breed. he would get up every morning, late, around noon, go have a swim in his pool in beverly hills and then sitting at his pool in beverly hills, he would start to call publishers all over new york city before they went to lunch or just after they got back from lunch. when you pick up the phone because yours have a private number you pick up, irving would

say this is irving lazar. what is cooking? if nothing was cooking he would give you the list of things, which are not exactly clients. he was trolling names. he said kirk douglas. he said interested he would say great. i can get you a million dollars or is the way he behaved. he did it with everybody. he was amazing person. >> host: who was then at surf and what was your relationship? >> guest: bennett cerf was the cofounder of random house and started by working with simon and went on to found random house by buying the paper back from a horse lover right, which was called the modern library and still is called the modern library at what not to an

enormous publishing success, had his own television show and appeared constantly as one of the judges on what is my line. which is unusual for a book publisher and was the biggest rival of simon & schuster. in those days, publishing the somewhat divided between random house and simon & schuster and the older firms, which have been at any rate mentally connected as it were to boston common, to cambridge more than new york in some respects and who are brought into the modern world of machine who were the first people to start to get up and sell books, celebrity books, trick books, gamebooks. they were very serious. they wanted to publish the best authors of the best books. but they understood you might have to publish commodities in

order to have it publishing and therefore they changed publishing huge. >> host: david in new york. you are on birth michael korda. >> caller: hi, guys. very interesting program i must say. i am your age, michael and i read your book "wings like eagles." i think i have it correct. my father had a company in new york. in 1838 and was a 5-year-old and the first radars that i learned many years later with the actual hardware that you wrote about in your fantastic book, "wings like eagles." i wanted to thank you for that and give you that strange tidbit of information.

>> guest: that is fascinating and i thank you for it. that is true that the invention, more import, the willingness to build radar in britain in the years between 1937 and 1940, that was the critical factor in winning the battle written. the construction of these towers that enabled the command to know how many are coming from which direction and output height so we did not have to keep aircraft in the air waiting to see the germans, but could send aircraft to when they knew exactly where to go while the crowd converts told them where to go to and at what hate to find the germans. that is the critical factor that

enabled the royal air force to win the battle of written an invention of radar was one of the great allied triumphs. >> host: michael korda's rules of power. number one, act impeccably. number two, never reveal all of yourself to the people. three, learn to use time. if it is a friend, not an enemy. for, learn to accept your mistakes. don't be a perfectionist about everything. and five, dogmeat waves. move smoothly without disturbing. >> guest: i think number five is very good. i must say i am not in that category. willingly goes back to read books that i've written it any time. i'm not ashamed of anything better for it, although there are a number of things i've written that i would just assume not have. i rather like that i think those would stand the test of time for

anybody who is ambitious in trying to get something done. >> host: jim and jacoby, washington. go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: i have read three of your books and enjoyed them very much. they are all different. power was sort of an analysis of contemporary culture. charmed life is a delightful memoir of your family and here was a straight biography of keep words. i am wondering what led you to go away from writing about what you experience them into biographies of other people. >> guest: that's an interesting question. i began writing what i knew and saw going on around me. "mal chauvinism" came on a day perception of radicalism that women were by a margin that. and in 1870s in subservient

positions and offices and in general in business and other areas under the rule of men who are now what we call chauvinists. i think i came to that because in my family, the women had of course been married, hungarian no chauvinists, a whole separate category. i'm also very powerful. film directors like the alcoholic in use to having their own way. and nevertheless my mother was a very successful actress in some

films and his hugely successful actress in her own life, but my uncle alex in later by other people. and that uncle alex's first wife had been a huge star in films before the invention in 1948, which put into her career. thwa career. there was no could appear inside. so there is this country reality of strong ambitious women who make a lot of money and in many ways got the wrong way when it came to their careers and what matters. so i was very struck when i finally ended up on my eet as i have been a simon & schuster

when i got my first real job as assistant editor to discover the depths to which women were submerged by simon & schuster. they're a couple of exceptions. with a wonderful, wonderful head of production, a really gutsy lady that had ran the financial side of simon & schuster in one setting the deed said he would increase the budget for this or for that matter and famously followed into the men's room and then to dover open and while he was standing there, explain to him how she absolutely had to have this money. and in those days, it was unthinkable. also the first woman to buy pantsuits a publishing office. in the might of thought that the

world was coming to an end. the fact that called board meetings, whether he should be allowed. and all of this was present in this little book world despite the fact that many of the most powerful people in the book business with them as they still are now. but that tradition of male chauvinism was fair and i wrote about it i thought to myself that's interesting. i had no idea that it was suddenly make me famous. and no expectations of the kind. >> host: in your book power come you men are in death of forcing women to become stereotypes. >> guest: i think that is still by and large true. that is true of all of the greatest of motion picture stars is that their careers have

suffered by men putting them into the stereotypical role in not giving them the chance of growing and changing and doing different things, for example, is meryl streep's career has been where she spent so many different things. even the best of movie producers at the time when i wrote male chauvinism, did not do that. >> host: jim barr, mercer island, washington. e-mail, what books sell best in america and white plates >> guest: i don't think that ever changes. in fiction, books with a strong story and a somewhat sympathetic

, bond girl, which has been number one forever in which i read, as i explained in the west with his reading, except for three and a half, four years have been writing nothing but letters supporters. slam coming back to reading fiction because margaret is said to me when she read gone girl, what a wonderful book, what a wonderful novel. now it is out there in glorious dead. i could pick up gone girl and read it. i told her, you are so right. i could not put this book down. there is an element of likability to the despite the fact that she is in fact vicious and conniving. that for me totally explained the books success. it is a question of her character and her personality driving the book. i think that's always true.

i think in nonfiction narrative kinds of books that succeed, one is the celebrity autobiography or memoirs. others fall flat on their face. it is like going to the tables in las vegas and picking a number and you win or you don't. the other however our nonfiction books that tell you how to improve some part of your life. that is a particularly american phenomenon and one which sells millions and millions in whatever format. doesn't matter where they buried e-books, and shame and its sister was virtually created as an ongoing entity by publishing and how to influence people by dale carnegie.

they read this book and it will change your life. that book, whatever it is. that is not to say what people want to say is how to influence people. but there will always be somebody who captures that need. >> host: you write that max shuster was writing a copy as far as selling. wonderful, wonderful. it's a somewhat abrasive personality. but he could spout flap copy and advertising copy like an endless

fountain without even thinking about it. tonight i walked all the explained to me acrobatics. the he had the strange ability to find in the book but one thing it was that would make somebody want to go to the stores and buy it. it's a mutual talent and not all that widespread. >> host: diana warned, e-mail, given the changes in the industry in the absence of transcends, what is the equivalent of getting a book today for unpublished writers like me? ..

>> guest: my feeling is that the internet will lead not necessarily to self-publishing. there will be quite a lot of that, and it will be interesting to see. but it affords a forum with its various internet sites that allows a writer to get their work realize, a chapter of it, by many, many people.

and my experience with book publishers is they're now very much attuned to that, and they go to the internet to look for what's interesting on the internet. it isn't coming in a package from federal express or the post office, it's coming on screen from the internet. >> host: the first thing i found on my desk, you write, when i came to work officially on august 11, 1958, was a cast bronze plaque bearing the words, quote, "give the reader a break." [laughter] >> guest: by richard l. simon. i have one on my desk at home. this is vital to keep in mind. you must always ask yourself about anything you've written, is it clear to the reader? when you're in the publishing business, particularly as an editor but also as a book designer, as anybody involved in books must be, you must ask yourself, does it help the

reader? give the reader a break. so you want some space between the lines even if it's more expensive, otherwise it's tiresome to read. you want a recent in depth in a nonfiction book. you need the chapter to have a beginning, a middle and an end and to fit into sequence chronologically. you want all of these things. so whatever your satisfied with what you've done, whether you're a writer or an editor and are looking at it spread out, ask yourself have i given the reader a break? that's what we're here for. >> host: each though the time had -- even though the time had not arrived when dick simon and i were to get together over a drink in the office to lure senior editorial talent from other houses, vice president and associate publisher, chairman emeritus of the editorial board, senior editor and corporate vice president, nobody with their

heads screwed on tight could possibly believe that an editor's title held anyone genuine significance. >> guest: i think that is always true. i have held every publishing title it is possible to hold, and i am now, i believe, editor-in-chief emeritus of simon & schuster, if you can accept the presence of so dazzling an object in this studio. [laughter] but the truth of the matter is an editor is judged on one thing and one thing only, and that is the books that he or she brings in and how successful they are. now, if to lure them you have to pay for money, fine. if you have to invent a title to make them feel important and part of management, that's fine too. but nobody pays any attention to that. an editor is judges by his or her authors.

>> host: like most people, dick snyder, the publisher, credited me with machiavellian deviousness fueled by fierce ambition. >> guest: well, he did, yes. and there's probably an element of me that that's true of, but nothing like to the degree which he thought. i have always found in book publishing that the most interesting thing about it is reading people's books and liking them. machiavellian ambition is not uncommon in book publishing, but i think that that is a factor that is also the less there is at stake, the more people want to have a big part of it so that even though book publishing

isn't essentially a corporate business a lot of titles that mean something, i was on a corporate charter of general motors, of course, a failed company, mercedes benz a successful one, nevertheless, pima neuroand want those things -- maneuver and want those things expect will raise them in the hierarchy. the truth of the matter is there's a cleavage, a difference in book publishing between people whose career rests on what they do -- ie editors -- and people whose careers run on running a business, publishing. it's possible to move between these two things. it's possible to share some of those things, but they're quite different way of looking at the same industry. >> host: joseph in pittsburgh, pennsylvania, thanks for holding. you're on with michael korda. >> caller: yeah. hi, michael. >> guest: hi. >> caller: i was wondering why

general grant changed his given name, hiram simpson grant, to ewe ulysses simpson grant? why did he change his name? >> guest: well, he didn't, with all due respect. mrs. grant disliked the name hiram and wouldn't hear of it. and when her husband came home and said that the boy would be hiram grant, she chose the name ulysses. actually, she had a kind of raffle, put names into a bowl, and her mother picked out the name ulysses, and he became ulysses s. grant because it was felt that he should have a middle initial. it's supposed that as for simpson in her family, but there's no guarantee of that. in any case, his father continued to refer to him as hiram, and his mother always referred to him as ulysses or

lys. and when he enlisted into west point, he was put down as ulysses s. grant which was embarrassing for him because his transcript which was a big deal -- his trunk had the initials h.u.g., hiram ulysses grant. and he very firmly moved to say that his correct name was ulysses s. grant and get away from the embarrassing notion of hug for a young west point cadet. >> host: casey's in new york city. hi, casey. >> caller: hi. michael, thank you so much for your work, and you have such a, an expansive intellect and wonderful mind, and you are a fantastic recontour. and it's so important to have you and people like you as the head of publishing houses, because you select the books that make it out to society. so thank you so much for your

work. >> guest: that's very kind of you to say. thank you. >> caller: my question for you is what you think of the publishing industry going forward and whether you think it is on a decline for nonfiction books. and some say that what you did was wonderful in selecting important books, but now publishers are really selecting authors who already have a presence primarily in social media and so that sort of thing. and in order to get your book published, you have to have 50,000 followers on twitter as opposed to whether or not you are a wonderful writer and a wonderful, you have a wonderful book idea. thank you very much, michael. >> guest: thank you. i think there have always been these two strains in book publishing. one strain is the rush for books by celebrities, and that has always existed in the 1920s and even before then, in the 19th century. and the other is the strain to find good and important books, which is more difficult because you have to read them. more time consuming.

i don't think book plushing has changed -- publishing has changed much in any respect. i always like to make the point that books were originally written with sticks on clay tablets that were then dried in the sun and sold in a basket with x number of clay tablets. then papyrus was invented, and the scroll came about, and people began to read books with a scroll as they still do, a torah in a sin -- synagogue. and i'm sure there were people who said this is not as good as the clay tablet. the book just isn't as easy to read and isn't as much none on rolls as it was on clay tablets. and in the same way people say today, well, reading an e-book is not the same as reading a real book. but it's only a technological factor. the book is the same book. i was trying to think of a book

which has had every one of those technical innovations over the many, my eleven ya, and that's probably -- millennia, and that's probably hamarabi. so it's the same book. however you read it, it's the same book. and that will always be true. >> host: our next call comes from duane in quincy, california. duane? good afternoon. >> caller: hi, mr. korda. i was stationed in munich in 19 1956 with an airborne infantry regiment. we were out on the airport for three days on alert to go into budapest. i was wondering whether in any of your research you ever found out how serious eisenhower was about sending us in. thank you. >> guest: well, i know you didn't get there, that part i know.

[laughter] yes, i think people were -- up to a point, and eisenhower was certainly up to a point -- serious about the hungarians. but i think, and i make my point in my biofig about eisenhower, ike was very realistic. he would not confront the soviet union in a situation in which they would be expected to use nuclear weapons. he simply would not do this, and i think he was right. i think an american division crossing the iron curtain to come to the aid of the hungarian revolutionaries would have started a nuclear war. ike wasn't about to let that happen. and i think the hungarians did not expect that to happen, quite frankly. but i would have been very happy to see you guys arriving in budapest. >> host: from your book, "ike: an american hero," ike did not preside over an inert world of ge refrigerator commercials featuring ronald reagan. he presided over a country going

through seismic change as it accepted at last what it had refused to accept in 1919: global power with all the associated dangers, temptations and risks. american isolationism, for all practical purposes, had ceased to exist. ike himself had done as much as any man to kill can kill it when he landed in the north africa in 1942 and in normandy in 1944. >> guest: i think that's absolutely true. i am an enormous admirer of ike as a president. i am an enormous admirer of him as a general. where i think he got a rotten deal historically, because his critics came out with book after book, general montgomery, general bradley, everybody came out with books putting ike's role down. in fact, ike was an amazingly

successful general and a resourceful one. and operated on a scale which is hardly each imaginable to -- even imaginable to us today. on the eve of d-day, he had two million men and women under his command, i believe over 11,000 ships and 10,000 bombing aircraft all under his command without any need or call for him to pick up the phone b and ask washington in the form of general marshall or president roosevelt what he should do. he was supreme commander. when he postponed the invasion for two days because of bad weather, he did not call washington. he simply did it. when he decided to go, he decided to go. he made up his own mind. he didn't consult churchill, he didn't consult fdr, he didn't consult george marshall. and that ability is what makes him a great man.

it is extraordinary, the degree to which ike coming as he did from this relatively humble mennonite background in abilene, from the beginning of his career took on big decisions, made them the right way and put into action what he wanted to put into action, the way he wanted it to happen. he was a hugely successful president. i know he was overshadowed in the end by the brilliance and the youth and the energy of john kennedy. but i think that eisenhower's place as one of the great american presidents has securely been written about and has securely been earned by what he did. and his place as a general is second to none except possible to lee and grant in american history. >> host: and you have gotten to

know the eisenhower family through your work at simon and & schuster? >> guest: well, slightly. i know david eisenhower and met him through julie when i was nixon's editor and publisher, and susan eisenhower has become a friend, and a very dear one with. and although -- dear one. and although i never set out to write a book that would please the eisenhower family, nor did it occur to me that they should in any way have a say as to what i wrote about ike, i think that in "ike" they found a book which portrayed ike honestly; dealt with his mistakes, but portrayed him as the great man that he was. >> host: and one more quote from your book on dwight eisenhower: the transformation in the way americans think about their own history has been accompanied by a perceived need to ignore and denigrate dead white males. and since eisenhower is dead,

was white and was indiewbtly a great man, his role as a general, supreme commander and president now seem less important to historians than the social issues of that period. >> guest: i think that's very true of american history today. i think american history today suffers from having been, in essence, shatter ored into tiny -- shattered into tiny, specialized areas of knowledge rather than giving anybody a broader sense of american history. and that there is a tendency to automatically underrate people like ike despite their importance, or to see that ike's career was like grant's, a jewel one that he was on the one hand a brilliant and successful general and supreme commander, and on the other hand, for two or years a very successful president. in addition to he was the first commander in chief of nato and the president of columbia university, though i think that

last one is one in which he had the least impact. he was a very capable man. >> host: jim is in vera vista -- sierra vista, california. you're on booktv. >> caller: hi, mr. korda, i'm enjoying your discussion very much. i recently read memoir of william tecumseh sherman, and i was amazed at his ability as an author, his ability to capture in one detail the essence of something. and i would like to hear your thoughts on sherman and why perhaps he's underrated by people that are interested in books today. >> guest: well, you know, i feel about that the way i feel about grant's memoirs, that people have stopped reading them, that they have been placed on the shelves as great american classics rather than being realize as a living part of our history. sherman, like most people in the

19th century, wrote extremely well. he was also very smart, and his march through georgia, cruel as it may have been, was a brilliant that brought to an end that war. sherman himself, and i've always liked that, used to say i stuck with grant when he was drunk, and he stuck with me when i was crazy. [laughter] and there's some truth to that. [laughter] but i agree with you, his memoirs are both readable and important. >> host: you list as one of your favorite books leo tolstoy's "war and peace." how would you suggest people to read that? i mean, what approach should they take? should they just open it and start going, or -- >> guest: well, yes. there's no other way to approach a book except open it and start going. i think, though, that you first need to put yourself in the mood of wanting to read something

that's hugely expansive and which end closes -- encloses not just an entire world, but an entire point of view about that world. so it is very important not to feel rushed. it is important to approach war and peace in a mood to receive it despite its length. i've never found its length a problem myself, and i have read it both in english and in russian. for me it simply sweeps me off my feet. i would agree that anna karenina is probably the more engaging book. but on the other hand, "war and peace," it is like a beethoven symphony. you can't do it in five minutes, you have to take the time, have the silence in which to hear it and appreciate it, and with "war

and peace" you have to take that time and not hurry it and let it work on you. if you do, it will come, and it won't seem that difficult. >> host: as an editor, what would you say to an author when the author would say, oh, it's all written, it's just up here. [laughter] >> guest: those are the famous words of almost every author who isn't going to write a book. no, up here is no good. we don't care whether the book is up there or not, and the truth of the matter is it's probably not up there. it isn't up there until it's down here. what counts is what you put on paper, not what you think. >> host: this is an e-mail from arlene. hello, mr. korda. i worked at simon & schuster, pocketbooks, oh so many years ago. i admired your management style and insight then and still do. your book on chauvinism and your comment on women being molded by their mentors has me curious. i remember an executive secretary to the publisher wielding more power than most

men in the building at that time. also in your book "power: the description of a company having to move to another location to insure the removal of an executive who insisted on paying visits even after his retirement," struck a significant memory with me. i love this interview and thank me. i just ordered three more of your books. >> guest: this is already good news, arlene, and i thank you. yes, i think that what she writes is absolutely true. there was a period in time when the, "great man's" assistant or secretary had enormous power, but it was a borrowed power. you couldn't get through to the great man himself, but you could perhaps get through to her in the knowledge that she might perhaps take that case or that proposal or whatever it was to the great man. this was what television was like when i used to read scripts

at cbs when i first came to this country. which, as i said, was like to shape up a long shoreman, hoping they would pass something to you because you got paid by piece. [laughter] and the notion of going to see one of the upper level executives at cbs was unthinkable. if you were lucky, you got to have a cup of coffee with the great man's assistant in the hope that she might say a word about you to the great man. yeah, of course that's a form of power, but it's a form of power which rests, nevertheless, on the assumption that the real power is behind the closed door in the office and not at the desk that's outside it. women have changed that so enormously that it's unrecognizable at point. and at this point many of the great and important publishing figures of decision who direct big publishing houses, and for

that better, are women. and not a few of them have managed their assistants or their secretaries. that's less true of the movie business where for reasons which have to do partly with stardom and female stardom in particular, the big studios tend still to be to run by men. there are exceptions, i know. but nevertheless, that still remains true. but it's a vanishing phenomenon. it will go. i don't think gender has anything to do with business at all. >> host: mary therese is calling from corpus christi, texas. >> caller: yes. as an aspiring writer, michael, i've found your responses to be both inspiring and fascinating, and i have a couple of questions that are very similar. one, what would be your words of wisdom to aspiring nonfiction

writers like myself who are considering writing autobiographies? and, number two, in your opinion, what are the biggest challenges facing a writer in the process of writing an autobiography, perhaps including, you know, any pitfalls you might want to avoid. >> guest: well, autobiography is a different part. i'm glad you asked that question. i have done it fitfully by writing about my family, first, in "charmed lives" and a little bit about myself in book publishing in "another life." and i think that the first thing you have to do is to find a way of telling your story that is she sequential, beginning with the middle -- beginning with the beginning, going to the middle and getting to the end of the book and telling a story.

making your life into something that reads like a story even though it's true. and that's difficult, and some people can do can it, and some people can't. the second is that i think you have to force yourself to a certain kind of objective impartiality about your own life. an autobiography is always difficult to read when somebody is trying to rewrite in the history of their own lives and come out looking better than they did in the actual fact. you have to be able to put down the times you were wrong, the times when you were sad, the times when things fell to pieces. and write about it with a certain objectivity. very few people can write an autobiography that is a kind of self-yea-saying book. some books do sometimes work, but it's rare. >> host: you write about the

first time you ever approved the use of the f-word in a book. harold robbins. [laughter] >> guest: yes. well, we couldn't say no to harold robbins because he was our number one consistent best-selling fiction writer for many, many years. so what harold wanted, harold got. and when harold finally got tired of having the f-word eliminated from his books and insisted on keeping it in, everybody expected that the sky would fall. and, of course, it did not. first of all, because harold's readers had always been able to put the f-word in where he meant it to be without having to say it on the paper, and secondly, because by that time nobody cared whether the f-word was in a book or not. and i think this is true of a lot that has to do with book publishing, is that people build up this resistance to things, to the use of words, to the use of phrases. when i first came into book

publishing, 'em ram london's -- ephraim london's defense of any number of books that were considered unpublishable was a famous legal issue which was taken, i believe, all the way to the supreme court. but within ten years of that great victory, books were being published that would make lady chatterly's lover read like a sunday school tract. so we're always, whenever we find that there's something in our way that can't be done, we nearly always find that when you do it, it's all right. and i don't think anything should be -- people will always say, i remember being told about any number of books where you can't, it's in bad taste. it isn't the publisher's job to

decide what's in bad taste. it's the publisher's job to figure out what will sell and what people want to read. not to inflict upon the public his or her own judgments of what bad taste is. it's not about that. >> host: max schuster did not publish albert spear's autobiography. >> guest: no, he did not. but, on the other hand -- well, this will sound like a contradiction. it isn't. the -- i remember telling him what a great historical document this was and how compulsively, yet malevolently readable it was. and max took me very seriously, and he read this long, long book. to be honest, he read sections that i selected for him, but i carefully made sure that some of them included the things that would most offend people in a book about hitler and nazi germany. and what max said was, it's a

masterpiece, it's a great, great and important book. he said, i do not want my name on the same book as albert sphere's. now, that's different, and that i understand. it's wrong if all publishers say we will not publish any book that uses the f-word. that's not what the book publishing world is about. it's not for an individual publisher to say i don't want to publish this book. i'm uncomfortable. i'm not saying random house shouldn't push it, i'm not saying strauss shouldn't publish it, i don't want to publish it. perfectly legitimate. >> host: max in indiana, please go ahead with your question for michael korda. a few minutes left in our program today. >> caller: yes. mr. korda, as a war historian that you are, i have a question about the current wars that

we're involved with. in your work as a writer and researcher, what is your opinion of the evidence that engineers and architects for 9/11 truth has presented about 9/11? it appears that 9/11 was a false-led, inside job. and i'll hang up and listen to your answer. >> guest: i'm not in a position to comment on that. it doesn't feel like an inside job or look like an inside job to me. i think it was an act of terror and very carefully planned and carried out. and i've not read anything that would convince me otherwise. >> host: frank in arlington, virginia. hi, frank. >> caller: yes, mr. korda, i'm very glad you mentioned president eisenhower and talked about him. i believe he helped to lay the groundwork for the modern, high-tech world we live in by investing a tremendous amount in science and technology.

the creation of the first satellite and the defense advanced research products agency, darpa, and other endeavors that really moved along a lot of our, you know, progress in science and technology. >> guest: i think you're right about that. i think that ike -- while he was not a scientist -- was extraordinarily aware of the effect of technology on life and on war. in those terms, it was ike whose enthusiasm for the autobahns in germany caused him to produce our highways which changed the face of the united states. and ike certainly was the most thoughtful person in the world about the atom you can bomb -- atomic bomb. henry kissinger has often pointed out that when he

published his book on the atom you can bomb and foreign policy, he went down -- atomic bomb and foreign policy, he went down to ike to talk to him about it and was absolutely stunned by ike's intelligence, his grasp of the subject, his understanding of the subject. i think ike was a very, very smart guy, smart enough that he could afford sometimes to appear not so smart. which is the ultimate smartness. >> host: thomas, santa barbara, california. e-mail: i'm an admirer of u.s. grant and am troubled that his presidency is usually rated among the worst. how would you assess his presidency? >> guest: i make it clear in my biography of ulysses s. grant that i think grant was a pretty good president. he had his limitations, as every president does. but he managed to sew the country together. he failed in terms of civil rights. he tried, but failed. he was a disaster in terms of economic policy. but there was an economic

collapse coming anyway, and whoever had been president it might have taken place. but i think grant's presidency holds up as one of the more important presidencies of the united states. he certainly kept us from entering another war, and that was the most important thing for the future of america at that time. >> host: and a follow-up from vince of shelby township, michigan. you mentioned today that grant's autobiography is one of the greatest pieces of american nonfiction writing. does mark twain deserve most of that credit since he edited the book? >> guest: no. mark twain went over the book. he published the book. he found a means of publishing the book that was unique. he created the book club in order to publish grant by sending salesmen around from door to door with pictures of the various leather bindings you could have on grant's memoirs when they were finally published. it was an enormous and imaginative project which changed the face of american book publishing, as i say,

invented the book club. he did not, however, change significantly any word that a grant wrote. and grant wrote what he wanted to do. to my knowledge, mark twain never claimed to have had edited grant in that, in that sense. >> host: michael korda, is there an author that you simply would not work with again? because of your experience as his or her editor? >> guest: well, i don't think i'm going to be called to make that decision can unless something truly miraculous should happen. at my age, i'm not planning to make a comeback as editor-in-chief of a major publishing company, even if anybody wanted me to. no. but an author i would not publish, there are authors i would hesitate to publish that would make me uncomfortable. jack abbott, for example. for those of your readers who are too young to have heard of him, he was somebody who had been sent the prison for an ec

tended period of time -- extended period of time and on his release wrote a very interesting book called "belly of the beast" about his life in prison and his former life in crime. and a group of american publishers and authors, including norman mailer, labored to get this book published. and in the middle of their laboring to get this book published, which it was successfully, he killed a waiter in a restaurant. i had the feeling then that jack abbott would be a risky person to publish. maybe because i'm more cautious than other people. so, yes, there are people at who i would draw the line, but how and where you draw it is difficult to say. i think any publisher, like anybody else, has to be able to say that's going to be too much trouble, that's going to be too big a risk or, no, i just don't want to involve myself with that

perp. >> host: son of sam laws, good idea? when it comes to publishing? >> guest: i don't think it's a terrible idea. i'm opposed to them because it seems to me a somewhat roundabout restraint on freedom of speech. but in point of fact, if the crime is bad enough and the criminal or defendant can sell the story of the book, yeah, i don't think that it's wrong that the victim could get a share of the profits. >> host: who is robert moses, and what was your relationship when you published him? >> guest: well, we published him. i only met him once or twice in my life because i did a book that he wrote about the new york governor -- >> host: al smith. >> guest: al smith. he wrote a little book about al -- very, very good book which for the first time made me see that al smith was more than the perp who disliked -- person who

disliked franklin roosevelt and thought he should have run as president instead of fdr. it was a very good little book. he was not only the most powerful person in new york at that time, but he also was one who run roughshod over everybody in his path, including me. so i would, i would have been reluctant to do another book, however short, with him. much as i think he was a great man. and i thought that robert caro's biography of him, "the power broker," is one of the great nonfiction books of our time. it is a wonderful, wonderful book. in its own way, as every bit as good as his multivolume biography of lyndon johnson, and i wait for each volume of that. >> host: next call comes from robert in smyrna, georgia. hi, robert. >> caller: hi. how are you all today? >> guest: hi. >> caller: i was listening to

your answer to the lady that called about writing an autobiography. i'm interested because friends and family who know my story say, yes, you definitely need to put this down. i'm nobody. i'm not famous, so i just want to get an answer based on that. do you have friends or family or someone that you know that are not famous that you have recommended that they write their autobiography, and how did that work out? >> host: robert, before we get an answer, what is it about you or your story that people in your circle think you should write? >> caller: well, my wife had a disease which i won't mention, i don't want to, i don't want to take away from people who have that disease. it led to trials actual in the

court, problems with work history and the politics of losing a job because of insurance, and then tragedy at the end. but, you know, it's kind of a shocking tragedy. i don't know, maybe they think it would help -- >> host: robert, let's hear from mr. korda. >> guest: let me say that as a truism, i agree with what every book publisher's always said which is everybody has a book this them. whether you can get that book out on paper in a way that will interest anybody else except your mother is a question that will only be answered when you've done it. so if you have a story, if there's something in your high which you think is worth writing about, i am all for people trying to do it. i am tentative on the notion that their hope should be built up that ever one of these books will be -- every one of these books should be published, but i

am all for trying. but it has to go on paper, and you have to be able to make it interesting to other people. >> host: did robert capture your attention with his description of his story? >> guest: well, it's a very sad story, and probably a very good one. but can he make it a good one on paper? that, i can't answer. only he can. >> host: michael, denver. good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon. mr. korda can, big -- mr. korda, a big fan of yours over the years. i'm wondering, i'm just finishing up sally beetle smith's biography of william bailey. i'd like to know more about what you thought about him and also kenny -- [inaudible] the late richard holbrooke's wife who has written about the hungarian revolution for all the obvious reasons. your family's mentioned quite a bit in some of her books. so those are the two people. >> guest: well, i don't believe

i ever met william s. paley. he appears in the unfinished novel that truman capote was writing, "unanswered prayers," in a most unfortunate light, but i have no idea whether that's absolutely true or is something that truman ca capote invented. she included my uncle alex and did him great justice, i thought. wonderful book. and she and i were both together awarded the order of merit of the republic of hung agy at the embassy in new york. so i think of her as a comrade in arms. >> host: michael korda, the next call is sam in houston. sam? >> caller: yes. >> host: hi. >> caller: yeah, hi. mr. korda, i'm very much enjoying the interview. and my question refers to a

statement you made maybe half an hour ago that had to do with publishing industry has not really changed that much. and wouldn't you agree the burden that's been placed on the author now for self-promotion and doing -- i'm talking about the newly-published author with the expectation that most of the marketing to come from the author as opposed to perhaps in the past when there was more marketing, and i realize there was more money also at that time. but this is a significant change, is it not? and the follow up to that is what then would be the advantage to go with the publisher as opposed to self-publishing if your going to do most of the work anyway -- >> guest: well, there may be none in the future, that's perfectly possible, that people

will self-publish themselves on the internet, and then if their book is successful enough on the internet, that it will pass into form as a written book or as an e-book published by minute. may i say that the most -- by somebody. may i say that the most successful nonfiction authors and even some of the most successful fiction authors have always tended to be very, very clever self-promoters. so that's not something necessarily new in book publishing. i mean, jackie suzanne is someone example of somebody who was a demon self-promoter and, from right out of the box. there wasn't anything a publisher could do for jackie that she and her husband irving couldn't do for themselves just as well. they simply needed the backing and preferred for somebody else to pay the bills. but self-promotion has always been a factor in book publishing and, i guess, always will. >> host: and j.b. is in toledo. hi, j.b..

j.b.? toledo, ohio? we are going to move forward then. >> guest: no? >> host: we're going to move east to william in harper, west virginia. hi, william. >> caller: hello. >> host: please go ahead, sir. >> caller: yes, sir. [audio difficulty] >> host: william, i'm going to put you back on hold. we're having -- not sure why we're having a little bit of problem hearing you. i don't know if you need to move around a little bit on your cell phone and see if that helps a little bit, but we will try again in just a second. this is from fu won, and her e-mail or his e-mail: mr. korda had to have his prostate removed. this resulted in a number of physical problems that he had to teal with. she read or he read your book "man to man." how are you affected by that situation, and was it tough to write about such a personal,

intimate thing? >> guest: yes, i think it's very tough to write about that kind of personal thing, and i think that i wouldn't have done it if i didn't feel at the time that it was important to be as open about that as i possibly could. i think that the radical surgery which i underwent in 1994, if my memory serves me correctly, is no longer the treatment of choice for people who have prostate cancer and, therefore, to the extent that we are reaching any large number of people in that situation, i urge them to consider more innovative forms of therapy than that. i, i'm still here. i mean, 1994 is a long time ago, and i'm still sitting around. [laughter] so you can have prostate cancer and survive for a long time. does it take a toll? yes, of course, it does as any

heavy surgery does. but then you have to live with that and balance the fact that you're still alive with the fact that you've had a very serious and life-changing piece of surgery. >> host: what do you miss most about going to simon & schuster every day? >> guest: i miss walking past the skating rink in rockefeller center. [laughter] i worked for 48 years in rockefeller center and deeply as i admire simon & schuster, i've no wish to come back because it's a different place full of different people, and at some point when you leave, when you take your stuff with you and get out, you ought not to go back. but i miss that daily movement among large numbers of people in this extraordinary place that rockefeller center is. i, there's a grandiosity to it that i find inspiring, and i remember loving it in the days when nbc was really there and you could meet in the coffee shop, gene shalit, all those people as part of your daily

life. i thought that was terrific. >> host: and jonathan karp today has your old job. >> guest: yes, he does, and is doing it very well, indeed. >> host: william in harper, west virginia. william, we're going to try you again. >> caller: okay, sir. >> host: yeah, william, i'm sorry. you've got to -- try again, just very quickly say what you want to say. [audio difficulty] >> host: we're going to have to leave it, william, i'm sorry, that's just not a good connection. mike in montana. mike, good afternoon. >> caller: hello. hello, michael. >> guest: hi. >> caller: it's a treat to listen to you. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: yeah, can you hear me? >> host: go ahead. >> caller: i'm wondering about poker. i know nixon was a great poker player. how about grant and lee? did they play poker, and were they any good, do you know? or did they play chess or something? [laughter] >> guest: let me see, i never participated in a nixon poker

game, but i've heard he was very good. ike was certainly terrific. lee was a born-again christian, and cards were as abhorrent to him as alcohol and back. and tobacco. so i don't know that his card-playing abilities were ever called for. grant certainly has no reputation as a card player. that's perhaps because his chief reputation is for drinking too much, and it's hard to play a card game you're corruption drunk. [laughter] but i don't know if any record that shows grant as a poker player. lee certainly not. >> host: joanie, by e-mail, wants to know: what do you think of barack obama as a writer? >> guest: i've not read one of his books, so i can't comment. >> host: as a president? >> guest: as a president, i'm no expert on that summit, but i do not -- on that subject, but i do

not think he is shown in foreign policy where it matters the steely determination to impose what america wants done in the way, let us say, that dwight d. eisenhower did. and i think that's unfortunate. i am a firm believer that if the united states is going to be a great power, that one of the obligations that comes with that is to use that power wisely and with determination where it has to be used. grant and lee always agreed upon one thing which was that american military force must be used precisely and in great force. and that it must overwhelm the opponent and overwhelm the opponent quickly when it is used

and not be spread out in what montgomery always dismissed as penny packets. and when you go to a place hike afghanistan and -- like afghanistan and you scatter a battalion here, a group of men there, even though we fancy they will be in touch, the fact of the matter is you are committing the most elementary mistake in military history which is to scatter your forces in penny packets across the lines rather than concentrating them for a thrust that will make a big difference. >> host: all right. >> guest: on this lee, grant and dwight d. eisenhower would have agreed. >> host: somebody's going to buy one of your books, which one should they buy? >> guest: "clouds of glory," because it's the latest, and i find robert e. lee a fascinating and difficult and very important

figure. so i think the answer would have to be "clouds of glory." it was terrific to do it. i do not think i ever want to write a long biography of a civil war general again, nor that my wife margaret would let me if i started. [laughter] but i am very happy to have had this one opportunity to write about him and particularly to write about somebody whom i so admire. i think one of the keys to enjoy the writing of biography is to pick people whom you admire. it's hard for me to imagine writing a long, interesting biography of adolf hitler. even though it has been done and i've read several, i could not spend three or four years inside the mind of adolf hitler. i don't want to, i couldn't do it. spending three or four years inside the mind of robert event lee is fascinating. >> host: the rise and fall of the third reich. a simon & schuster title. >> guest: huge successful came

in to joe barnes who was a former new york herald tribune in those days, war correspondent. very nice day. savaged during the mccarthy years and, again, typical of book plushing, dick simon gave him a job when nobody else would. and joe got shire's book. shire's himself had been savaged during the mccarthy years and was unemployable. it was originally called hitler's nightmare empire, and the subtitle was the rise and fall of the third reich. and it had a red jacket in which the title was spelled out in barbed wire. and it was put down for something like a 3500-copy first printing, and nobody had read it. and i remember reading it in galley and showing it to my mentor who was then bob gottlieb, who later became

editor of the new yorker and editor of -- [inaudible] and a are stunning, successful publishing figure. and saying, bob, i know it's not your kind of thing, but you have to read this book because it really is much better than anybody here thinks. and he read it, and he came back, and he said, you're right. we're going to approach it in a whole different way. and he and nina borden, our advertising director, came up with putting the subtitle, "the rise and fall of the third reich," as the title of the book. and doing a black jacket with a swastika on it. nobody at that time had ever put a swastika on the cover of a book, let alone a book published by simon & schuster. and there was such a fuss. well, you can imagine what a fuss there was about that, and how much fear, dislike, disgust had to be overcome. but they did it.

and the book went on to have a first printing of something like 100,000 copies to become probably one of the three or four most successful books in the history of simon simon & sc. still in print, still read. millions of copies sold in one form or another, still being sold in one form or another. but it is a perfect example of what book publishing is. a, it takes courage. it took courage to hire joe barnes in those days. b, it took courage to let shire, who'd also been fired, write this enormous book. box after box after box, page after page after page. c, it took courage to look at that and say, no, throw away the barbed wire, throw away that title, put the subtitle as the title of the book and put a swastika right where everybody will see it. bookstores all over america phoned up to say or told you are to rep -- told our reps, you

can't do this. i can't put a book with a swastika on it in the dead center of the window of my bookstore. i can't do it. and we told the reps, make them do it, and they did. so you can't be a book publisher and pussy foot around. you have to have the courage to do what you think you should. >> host: is there a book that you push for and you just kind of shudder now today that you wished you hadn't? [laughter] >> guest: a book about the fourth -- [inaudible] in south america is one, although i was very fond of a huge nonfiction bestseller. and the big hook in the book was that he had found somebody who had actually seen martin borman in paraguay, i think it was, and had a photograph of him coming out of a building and going to

sit down in a café. and we published that book. we published that book on the day somebody phoned from par bay to say -- paraguay to say that isn't martin borman, that's a schoolteacher who's related to me. [laughter] so much as i like -- [laughter] i remember that as one of the sadder incidents. we had probably 250,000 copies of this long book, detailed nonfiction book about nazis in south america. most of which, by the way, was 100% true. and it had the wonderful bit in it about there being a miss nazi south america beauty contest every year which was true, as it turned out. but the one thing we had that was wrong was this photograph of martin borman, and it wasn't him. so it just shows, you make that kind of mistake, there's nothing to be done about it except close your eyes, hold your silence for a moment or two and then get on

with the next book. >> host: miss nazi south america. [laughter] >> guest: miss nazi south america. >> host: mark in california, we have about 30 seconds left. >> caller: yes. i'd like to say i know a lot of people don't think there's much value in books that are read by the author, but when i heard colin powell and senator obama's books, i just thought they were the best way anybody could really even take that book in. the question i have for you, by the way, is like washington, ike was a spymaster. do you think ike would know how to deal with somebody like piewten who is working right out of the soviet playbook? a lot of people think putin is reacting to the containment we're trying to put on him, but i'd like to see what his opinion would be. >> guest: i think ike could deal with him. he dealt with kruschev, with stalin, he could certainly deal with putin. and i would say, yes, he was certainly a man who was a spimaster and -- spymaster and

knew how to use spies. >> host: books on tape or audio books? >> guest: i'm all for it. i've only recorded one of them myself. i can't remember which of my books it was, i think it was probably "country matters," a book dear to my heart and my wife, margaret's. but i've found it for somebody who's not an actor difficult and the hardest money i've ever made. i remember saying to my agent, you know, this has been interesting, but i never want to do this again. [laughter] recording, stopping, correcting one's voice, i don't want to -- but i don't see, the way people get a book doesn't matter. if they listen to it, fine. if they read it, terrific. if they read it on their computer screams, good. if they read it on paper, also good. however you intake a book, it's the book that matters. >> host: michael corps -- michael korda's most recent book, "clouds of glory."

for the last three hours he has been our guest on booktv on c-span2. thanks for being with us. >> guest: been my great pleasure. thank you. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> next, tom mcmillan, vice president of communications for the pittsburgh penguins' hockey team. he provides a detailed account of what happened to united airlines flight 93 that crashed in she shanksville, pennsylvanin 9/11. he spoke at barnes & noble in cranberry, pennsylvania. >> thank you, super, for a great presentation. ..