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>> good morning. it is a sunny day in miami. i am the dean of the college at miami dade college ended is the pleasure to be with you today for the 2014 miami book fair international. the book fair is great for for the support of the night foundation, american airlines and many other generous supporters. we would like to acknowledge special people in the audience today. i see some of you here. thank you for your continued support. [applause] >> today's presentation features two speakers. we will reserve time for q&a. if you entry would have been given an index card. please be certain to jot your questions down on the card and pass them to the right on this side and on that side as well. we will be collecting them

throughout the program. at this time we invite you to silence your cellphones and enjoy the program. please join me in welcoming the mayor of miami beach, philip levine. [applause] >> thank you very much. good morning, everybody. welcome. a great, windy morning but they got it doesn't feel like rain. is a great day for a book fair. as we say if it sprinkles a little bit it is not really rain, it is liquid sunshine. i am the mayor of miami beach. let me get to the introduction. i am so honored to be here to introduce both these gentlemen who i grew up listening to. a lot of you did and they will be very exciting. first off is a john dean, legal counsel to president nixon in

watergate scandal and senate testimony led to nixon's's resignation. in 2006 he testified before the senate judiciary committee investigating george w. bush's war was wiretapped program. he is a new york times best selling author of blind ambitions, broken government, conservatives without conscience and worse than watergate. his latest book, the nixon defense, what he knew and when he knew it, he connects the dots between what we come to believe about watergate and what actually happened. in the nixon defense he draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of nixon and secret recorded information and more than one hundred 50,000 pages of documents in the national archives in the nixon library to provide the definitive a rented questions what did president nixon know and when did he know it and what will stand as the

most of forte of count of one of america's worst political scandals, "the nixon defense" shows how the disastrous mistakes of watergate could have been avoided and offers a cautionary tale for our own time. i have always been a fan of john dean because i remember they were always on tv and my parents let me stay home from school so from that point forward i thought he was one of the greatest guys in the world. also i will introduce eric peristein, the author of the new york times best seller, the rise of another, before the storm, barry goldwater and the unmaking of the american consensus. is essays and book reviews have been published in the new yorker, the new york times, washington post, the nation, the village voice among others. his latest book is the invisible bridge, the fall of nixon and the rise of reagan. in january 1973 richard nixon announced the end of the vietnam war and prepared for a

triumphant second term until televised watergate hearings hastened his downfall. the american economy slumped into a prolonged recession as americans began thinking about their nation has no more providential than any other country, pundits declared that from now on successful politicians would be the ones who honored the adjacent national mood. ronald reagan never got the message against the backdrop of melodramas for the arab oil embargo to patty hearst to the near bankruptcy of america's greatest city, the "the invisible bridge" asks what does it mean to believe in america. i am honored to bring out our first speaker, john dean. [applause] >> thank you.

thank you very much. i have got these new glasses in case i have to look at my notes. i typically don't. i found something good about getting old. i had cataract surgery and as i was about to head out to do it my doctor said i am glad for you. i said what in the world? just do it. i am now better than 20/20 vision. i got these glasses but started wearing them and a friend of mine said no one is going to recognize you. you used to wear those round kind of things. he was right. the first time i had a lot i went to lax. he sizes va and things he knows me, i have been through this before. he gets the courage and says didn't you used to be dick

cheney? [laughter] >> this morning we are going to talk about political histories. it marked like i had done eight of of them by most counts. some autobiographical, some are autobiographical and some of them are a little bit of both. it is because i happen to know so much about a period of history i wish i didn't know about as well as i did, that i ended again into watergate with the latest book. my editor said to me as we were approaching the 42 the anniversary of nixon's departure from office, he said isn't there any question you have at this late date you might want the answer to? i thought about it, i can't really figure out how somebody as seemingly intelligent and politically savvy as richard

nixon could make the kind of mistakes he made, let a bungled burglary desecrate his entire presidency. so i said probably the case will tell that tale. while i might have to transcribe a few, i don't thing many, historians by now have gotten through most of from. that was a mistake right away. as i started to go into the material i realized nobody had catalog or made an attempt to catalog what might be called the watergate conversations. the national archives, bless them, i have dedicated the new book to them given 40 years of work on those tapes, they have gone through so they could release the tapes and make them public, every single conversation. it is a godsend. they don't transcribe them that at least gets you into the

substance to release them because they withhold anything that is personal or national security, they listen to every conversation, get the people speaking in the conversation and the images of the conversation. when i started the new book that we are here to talk about, they hadn't digitize this yet, but i was able to manually go through all their subject logs and found a thousand watergate conversations. the next thing i looked to see is how many of those had been transcribed. this got a little depressing because there were not as many as i thought had been transcribed. the watergate special prosecutor did 80 conversations, 12 of which were really good because they were used in the big trial of former attorney-general john mitchell, white house chief of staff bob haldeman, former

assistant john ehrlichman. charge for the watergate cover-up. we listened to the conversations and tweaked them and they were good. the rest of the watergate prosecutor's conversations were not so good. the content was good, but then they would have the wrong person speaking so i called one of my friends who used to be it in the watergate prosecutor's office and said what happened? they said these were first drafts by fbi secretaries so if they didn't recognize the voice and often they didn't, it is not so good. i had to reduce those. stanley cutler, a historian who forced nixon to release the tapes much earlier than he wanted to release them all so did 320 watergate conversations. stanley did more than watergate. he did free watergate as well.

at least the watergate conversations, they are all basically partial transcript so i realized i would have to redo stanley's conversations. but that was 400 conversations, 80 by the prosecutors, 320 by cutler, there were 600 more conversations that the best i can tell nobody outside the national archives had ever listen to so i realized this was a huge assignment. i started a test to see how difficult it would be transcribing some of these myself particularly those where there were rough draft and preliminary transcripts. it is tough work. this is a pretty primitive system. i told my wife, maureen, with whom i am still married, that is a question i get everywhere i go, i told her god forbid, these are high heads, i would turn the

speakers up in my riding area, very loud, the men in families start losing in the 70s and god forbid the last voice i hear is richard nixon, but i can hear use this morning. i plowed through uzi's and quickly realized i was going to have to have some help so i got some graduate students, a friend of mine who teaches in california, actually he is a historian but teaches archival science as well, he started supplying some students who were hoping to be archivists one day and we got lucky or i got lucky because one of the first ones he found was a woman who had been of former legal secretary. older and other students and working on her master's at that

point and she is now probably just about completed her doctorate and we put braces on her daughter in this project and worked out really well for her and she ended up doing 500 of these conversations. it was impressive because these can be run from 5 minutes to eight hours. there is one conversation of nixon listening to tapes of my conversations as though it is a tape of him listening to tapes and it is, i said don't do my case. we will do those in a separate -- just did what he says around them and what have you. ..

>> the break-in will occur or did occur on june 17th of 1972. looking at my watch to see if it's going -- i've got 25 minutes before the hook comes out, so i just want to be careful. [laughter] he tells haldeman on air force one to have nobody talk to him. in other words, this is sort of a willful ignorance. he really doesn't want to know what's going on. but for those of you who read the book, you'll see there's something -- and in writing the book, i don't do this. i don't give a lot of my interpretations. i give enough information for the reader to know things that i

know, but i hadn't gone through all these tapes, so i want readers to reach their own conclusion. but one of the interesting things that happens in the early weeks is while he's not getting a lot of information from haldeman who's his principal source, secondarily and later ehrlichman, his white house top domestic adviser and, thirdly, "the washington post" was supplying a lot of information at that point, but that's it. and as he goes through, he has questions from time to time. the thing that surprised me is when pressing haldeman and ehrlichman for information, he doesn't get answers. they have their own problems with what's happened. if you will -- how many here witnessed and followed watergate live during its -- well, we know how old you are. [laughter] a lot of you remember this. but the details will be a little

hazy at this point all these years later. the -- what -- as they feed the information in, haldeman and ehrlichman have their own problems. the break-in occurred on june 17th, second break-in occurred on june 17th of 1972 right in the middle of the '72 campaign. nixon is out of town. he returns from florida on the 20th. that's the first conversation that's recorded. it's the one where the 18-and-a-half minute gap will occur as well, and i understand there are passed out some sort of question be you want to have a question -- if you want to have a question today, we'll be happy to go through those. and anybody who hasn't filled that out yet who has a question and i don't get to it today, if it's a really intriguing question and i somehow miss, put

your e-mail on there, and i'll answer it. be happy to. because i won't get to -- maybe i won't get to all of them. anyway, haldeman and ehrlichman have their own problems. ehrlichman had been responsible for howard hunt who is, along with gordon liddy, had organized the watergate break-in. i guess most people remember liddy. i was asked yesterday what i thought of -- day before yesterday before i got on a plane to come down here, i was doing -- cnn is doing a documentary on the '70s like they did on the '60s. so that's in progress now. and for some reason they wanted to talk to me, and they talked to me for four hours about it. the -- and liddy came up. and i said, well, you know, liddy has kind of left the image

post-watergate of being someone who nixon had brought in, sort of a james bond character he brought in to the white house for special assignments, which is not true. even more importantly, it's not true that he's a james bond character. he's not quite up to the maxwell smart level character. [laughter] he is a huge bunkler. [laughter] -- bungler. but ehrlichman's problem is he brought hunt into the white house, and he had authorized earlier, long before watergate in the fall of 1971, a break-in into daniel else burg's psychiatrist's office. and this will actually drive the watergate cover up from the white house perspective. otherwise i think that haldeman would have gone in to the president and said, listen, mitchell is the head of the campaign, made a mistake. this is dangerous, we've got to cut him loose. but they couldn't do that because of this problem of what

hunt and liddy had done while they were at the white house. so there's a lot of animosity also that comes through between mitchell who thinks that ehrlichman has given him this problem and sent it over to the re-election committee, and then on the other side on ehrlichman's behalf, letting liddy break into the watergate. he knows that that had to come from the highest level of the re-election committee. and while mitchell isn't confessing at this point, he certainly -- everyone knows this wouldn't have happened without his, his blessing. anyway, so these two men have trouble, so they don't really tell the president much of anything. in fact, he won't learn about the ellsberg break-in until march -- remember, the arrests occur on june 17th of '72. nixon will not learn about the ellsberg break-in until march

17th of '73 when it comes up in a conversation with me. i won't see the president for eight months. the first eight months, what's ironic -- and these are the tapes that nobody had ever listened to or really gone through closely -- everything that was key to the cover-up, every single thing from payne, the watergate defendants -- paying the watergate defendants to the perjury of jeb magruder, the number two man at the re-election committee to make the first phase of the cover-up work and those are just two highlights -- everything necessary mitchell, excuse me, nixon had been told about and had been approved. so it's not that he is unaware or out of the loop, so to speak, of the cover-up. he has blessed everything, and haldeman has taken his cues from the president and authorized a lot of these activities.

so the tapes themselves, to me, there's not a page i would write in the book i didn't want learn something -- i didn't learn something i didn't know before. small things, bug -- big things. i didn't know that nixon had literally sub borned -- suborned perjury of magruder, i didn't know nixon had sold an ambassadorship to raise money for the watergate defendants. all these things come through. and i also as a result of going through all this came to a very clear conclusion of why nixon's presidency went down. and there's only one person to blame. while the staff did not serve him well, you know, for example, a personal example. as soon as liddy confessed to me about what had happened, i go to ehrlichman, one of my two

superiors, and tell him, you know, john, we need a criminal lawyer in here. i am not a criminal lawyer. i happen to realize today in that presidency it was essential the white house counsel be a highly experienced criminal lawyer. [laughter] but that wasn't the case. and he just dismissed that with a wave of a hand. and that, you know, we would start making mistakes right from the beginning. i don't think that anybody planned to get involved in an obstruction of justice, but slowly, step by step, we crossed that line. and it's quite evident to me, you know, how that happens. a lot of it is ignorance and doing things for political motives that -- motive doesn't count when you're breaking the criminal law. that might be something to consider in sentencing, but certainly not -- it's something we should have been aware of. in fact, richard nixon really never hires an able criminal

lawyer until he's resigned. that's when he first gets one that really knows what the score is. i know that from talking to watergate prosecutors, and i said did you ever feel there was anybody there who was anywhere close to your peer in dealing with these issues, and they said, no, nobody. they said we just were dumbfounded that they didn't get a good lawyer in there. so in looking at the trajectory of the tapes and watching nixon's day-by-day behavior, i came to just a very realistic conclusion that richard nixon is just not as smart as i thought he was. he is clearly, his conversations about foreign policy, he's articulate, he knows the world, he's got clear thoughts, and he's brilliant in many regards. when he starts talking about domestic policy, there's very

little he's good on. he bumbles, he stumbles, he's hesitant. the only exception to that, oddly enough, is finance. he's very good on the budget. he's got very strong feelings on spending. but his, most of his conversations are halting, they're -- he is, he is stuttering, he is sputtering, and they're difficult. acoustically the oval office is pretty good. his telephone calls can be almost close to broadcast quality. his eob, exconservative office building -- executive office building office is terrible because the microphones are in the desk. they drilled holes in the desk. his oval office, which was woodrow wilson's desk, they put some holes right there in the sides and the front. i happened to always be sitting over a microphone when my voice was recorded.

[laughter] which, actually, i'm pleased with today, to have -- because i wasn't saying anything that didn't bother me. i was telling him exactly what the dire circumstances he was in. the eob office is terrible because nobody sat near the desk. so they're very difficult to transcribe, and what we did is found -- and i've talked to other people who have transcribed tapes now, and they all seem to stumble into this sooner or later, there's only one way to do this, and it's highly repetitive activity. you listen, and you listen again, you listen, you change machines. i went out and actually digitized all of the archives' tapes before the archives themselves had digitized them. you can manipulate that somewhat. you get distortions on the voices, but you can also pick up the words. so i got most of it. and my book is, of course, not a book of transcripts, but rather,

i drew a narrative and dialogue out of these tapes. i would end up with 21 volumes of three-inch notebooks that represent about 8,500 pages, roughly four million words of nixon on watergate. i told my editor i'm not sure which was more difficult, the transcription to make the tapes or digesting them back down to a readable document. nixon gets highly, highly repetitive late in the game. there are two phases to watergate. there is the cover-up, and then there is the cover-up of the cover-up. [laughter] and that's when nixon has jumped in with both feet. the taping system comes out during the start of the cover-up of the cover-up when al -- excuse me, when alex butterfield testifies, and al hague, who's

white house chief of staff, had no idea that there was a voice-activated system. he knew nixon had taped a few people, principally me, but he did not know he'd had a voice-activated system, and haig just can't believe the president of the united states let every word get recorded. so for this political history, as it happens, i had probably the most remarkable primary source any author could ever have. i was able to -- let me kind of wrap up my session on a couple stories about the tapes. i'm able to hear things. i couldn't listen because of the volume to every single conversation. i could immediately tell from my transcriber's work if he or she was having any trouble. if it was a difficult conversation. if it was a good one, i trusted

it unless something was particularly important, i would tend to look at that. just to make sure that i heard what they heard. but i often heard things that they could not hear because of my -- not because of my great hearing, but because i knew the players. a wonderful example is an incident that occurs with mark feldt, who as we later knew as deep throat, bob woodward's principal source. in october of 1972, i had gone over to the criminal division at the department of justice to talk to henry peterson, the head of the department. and the person responsible day by day for watergate. and henry said, john, i haven't told the attorney general this, i haven't told the acting director of the fbi, pat gray,

because i'm worried they'll overreact to this. but you should know, i think the white house should understand that part of the reason this fbi investigation is being handled the way it is is that the number two man who's in charge of it, mark feldt, is leaking. i said how do you know that, henry? he said, well, i've known feldt for a long time. in fact, he's known by those of us who know him not to his face, but behind his back as the white rat. and i said, why's that? he said, well, he's prematurely gray, and he talks all the time to the papers. so i wasn't -- henry said i wasn't surprised to learn he was leaking. but i said the person, he told me the person i learned he was leaking from was the general counsel of a major publisher of this kind of information. i've narrowed it down to it's

either "time" magazine where actually feldt gave better material than he gave to woodward or to "the washington post." but the general counsel of one of those is the place henry got this. and he had given this person a commitment not to reveal his identity. so that was pretty good information. i took that information back to haldeman not knowing what he'd do with it, but i realized when i was listening to the tapes that he shared it with nixon. the, there was -- this is one where stanley cutler had done a partial transcript on it. and so i looked at henry -- at stanley's transcript and then was listening to the tape, and there's one point in the conversation where the president is reacting to what haldeman's tone is. you know what i would do with feldt, bob? and then cutler has an expletive

following that. so he just drops -- which is not a surprise. but i hear something totally different, and everybody who's listened to the tapes since they've heard what i say is there agrees. what he says, you know what i would do with feldt, bob? ambassadorship. this is exactly what he'll do with helms, the head of the cia. he'll appoint him an ambassador to move him out on a very friendly term so that he's still loyal and what have you. this never went anywhere. in fact, that's one of the interesting things on the tapes and in these conversations where nixon raises some really interesting things that haldeman never shares with anybody else. so the tapes were -- there is no question today in watergate that i really don't think i know the answer to or the answer isn't found in those tapes. it was a, it was a grinding exercise. one of the most difficult parts of the book was nixon gets

compulsively obsessive about the conversations and starts repeating himself where he'll make a little spin differently here or a little change there as he repeats these conversations, often with the same person, but with somebody else over and over and over again towards the end. and i wanted to give -- i couldn't burden the reader with that, but i wanted to give the reader a sense of how this man operated. so with those opening remarks, i'm going to turn it over to my friend rick perlstein whose works i enjoy. he and i have had the pleasure of doing programs before. he's -- it's always reassuring to see really good, young historians coming along and getting these stories right because too many of them never do the digging, the kind that rick does and get it wrong. so with that, rick, it's your turn. [applause] thank you.

>> thanks, john. it's one of the great joys of my life, an unexpected joy, to be able to call john dean a friend. i like to say that without this guy richard nixon would still be president. [laughter] also i want to say something about the hospitality of the miami book festival. it's been amazing. someone said that they treat us guys like rock stars, and i feel like i've been swaddled with all the comforts of home. everything except for my morning banana muffin. [laughter] if i had that, the day would be complete. john tells the story of many of the same years i write about here very much from the inside, the fly on the wall. and our books complement each other very nicely because i tell

the story of some of those same months from the outside. if you raised your hand when john asked you if you'd followed watergate, this book is about you. you guys are the subject of this book, not the fellas in that house on pennsylvania avenue. and basically, this is a book about how the american people absorbed and responded to the traumas -- and that's a word i use advisedly -- the traumas of the years of 1973 and 1974 and 1975. and rather than kind of explaining that extemporary, i will read a little from the book, set the table for what it's about, and i will very, very much look forward to the discussion we're having. and like john, i will be very glad to have e-mails, or if you

prefer, join my facebook clan at rick perlstein. i think i've got 800 more spots before they max me out. we have all kinds of lively conversations. so without further ado, this is a book about how ronald reagan came within a hair's breadth of winning the republican nomination for the presidency. but it is also about much more. in the years between 1973 and 1976, americans suffered more wounds to its ideal of itself than at just about any other time in its history; first in january of 1973 when richard nixon declared america's role in the vietnam war over after some eight years of fighting or maybe ten years of fighting or maybe four years of fighting, it depends on how you count it. thanks, brother. some 58,000 americans dead, 699 billion expended in american treasure.

this nixon called peace with honor. but that just obscured the fact that america had lost its first war. then almost immediately televised hearings on the complex of presidential abuses known as watergate which revealed the man entrusted with the white house as little better or possibly worse than common criminals. in what one senator called a national funeral that just goes on day after day after day. then in october came the arab oil embargo, and suddenly americans learned that the commodity that underpin their lifestyle was vulnerable to shortages. and the world's mightiest economy could be held hostage by some mysterious cabal of third world sheikhs. you know, reading about and studying the energy crisis, one of the most striking and shocking things was people didn't even really think of energy as a thing, you know? as something that had, was

subject to law of supply and demand. it was like the air and the water. and the real trauma of 1973 was, oh, my god, this entire new category of things to worry about that we couldn't even imagine worrying about before. now, this list omits some dozen of smaller traumas in between. one of my favorites lost to everyday historical memory was the near doubling of prices of meat in the spring of 1973 when the president's consumer adviser went on tv and informed viewers that liver, kidney, brains and heart can be made into gourmet meals. [laughter] with seasoning, imagination and more cooking time. [laughter] the letters were unprintable in response to the white house. [laughter] in the next few years, the traumas continued compounding. the end of a presidency

accompanied by fears richard nixon might seek to hold on to office by force of arms. inflation such as america had never known during peacetime, a recession that saw hundreds of blue collar workers idle during christmas time, crime greater, according to one observer, at any other time than the 15th century, and this is where the tonya -- patty herself goes up there -- hearst goes up there with her machine gun and seven-headed snakes. the central intelligence agency that accused the president of commanding squads of lawless assassins. with these traumas -- and this is where you guys come in -- emerge a new sort of american politics. a stark discourse of reckoning. what kind of nation were we, to suffer such humiliations so suddenly, so unceasingly, so unexpectedly? a few pages hence you'll read

these words from one expert: for this first time, americans have had at least a partial loss in the fundamental belief of ourselves. we've always believed we were the new men, the new people, the new society, the last best hope on earth, in lincoln's terms. for the first time, we've begun to doubt that. and that was only in february of 1973. by 1976 a presidential year such observations would become so routine that when the nation geared up for a massive celebration of its bicentennial, it was common for editorialists and columnists to question whether america deserved to have a birthday party and whether the party could come off without massive bloodshed given that there had been 89 bombings attributed to terrorism by the fbi in 1975. the liberals at the new republic reflected upon the occasion of

the most harrowing 1975 trauma, the military collapse of our ally, south vietnam, the nation on behalf of which we had expended those billions of dollars, thousands of lives that, quote: if the bicentennial helps us focus on the contrast between our idealism and our crimes, so much the better. now, the most ambitious politicians endeavored to speak to this new national mood. an entire class of them, dubbed the watergate babies, were swept into congress in 1975 pledging a thorough going reform of america's broken institutions. and nearly alone among ambitious politicians, ronald reagan took a different road. returning to the nation's attention toward the end of his second term as america's governor as pundits began speculating about which

republican might succeed richard nixon, and then, thanks to john, which ones might succeed his replacement, gerald ford. reagan, whenever he was asked about watergate, insisted it said nothing important about america at all. asked about vietnam, he'd only say that the dishonor was that america had not expended enough violence. that, quote: the greatest immorality is to ask young men to fight or die for my country if it's not a cause we are willing to win. one of the quotes he liked to repeat in those years came from pope pius xii writing colliers magazine in 1945 back when the united states was on top of the world. the pope said, the american people have a genius for great and unselfish deeds. into the hands of america, god has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind. he would repeat that in almost

every speech. now, when ronald reagan began getting attention for talking this way in america's season of melancholy, washington cited him only to dismiss him. no one who called the watergate burglars not criminals at heart, as ronald reagan had in the spring of 1973, could be taken seriously as a political comer. but a central theme of my previous two books chronicling conservativism's ascent in american politics has been the myopia of pundits who so frequently fail to notice the very cultural ground shifting beneath their feet. in fact, at every turn of america's turn, there were always dissenting voices from the right. they said things like richard nixon just couldn't be a bad guy and that america just couldn't be surrendering its role as god's chosen nation. that's possible. at first such voices sounded

mainly in the intercity says. industriousness was being largely ignored. the conservative churches whose pews grew more crowded even as experts insisted that religious belief was in radical decline. i find a quote -- i found an ap article by the ap's religion editor that quoted a very distinguished professor of religion saying christians must accept being an indefinite minority for the time being. another bad prediction. but those voices were moving from are the margin to to the center. this was related to what ronald reagan was accomplishing politically. but things shifted independently of him as well. read one wire service headline about the bicentennial

celebration: nations hunger to feel good -- nation's hunger to feel good erupts in a fever of patriotism. the keynote of articles like this, which were common, was surprise. surprise that it wasn't that hard to unapologetically celebrate america after all. and this book is how that shift in american political and cultural sentiment began. it is also a sort of biography of ronald reagan. he had been a sullen little kid from a chaotic, alcoholic home whose mother's passion for saving fallen souls could never save her own husband. it also seemed to have kept her out of the house almost constantly. and by the time of ronald reagan's adolescence, the boy who told his friends to call him dutch had cultivated an extraordinary gift in the act of rescuing himself. the ability to radiate live optimism in the face of what

others called chaos. to reimagine the morass in front of him as a tableau of simple moral clarity. he did the same thing decades later as a politician. skillfully reframing situations that those of a more critical temper saw asker resolvable muddles like the vietnam war as chris lean black and white melodramas. this was the key to what made others feel so good about him, what made them so eager and willing to follow him, what made him a leader. but it was also simultaneously what made him such a controversial leader. others witnessing precisely this quality saw him as a phony and a hustler. in this book ronald reagan is not a uniter, he is fundamentally a divider. and understanding the precise

ways that opinion about him divided americans better helps us understand our political order of battle today. the pattern emerged extraordinarily early. in 1966 when reagan, the the host and former actor in b movies, shocked the political universe by winning the republican nomination for california governor. a young aspiring journalist began researching a profile of him that never got published because no one was much interested in ronald reagan. industriously, though, the journalist tracked down acquaintances who had attended college in central illinois with reagan or taught him there in the years between 1928 and 1932. i just learned that miami-dade is 170,000 students. eureka had about 2 or 300. the divergent recollections of reagan matched about how they would if you corralled a random sample of pretty

create-attuned -- politically attuned persons today. half remembered him a hero, and half judged him as precisely the opposite; shallow at best, a manipulative fraud at worst. so before reagan had served a single day in political office, a polarity of opinion was set, and it endured forever more. on one side those who saw him as a rescuer, a hero, a redeem kerr. on the other, those who saw him as a goat. realize a handwritten get well note he received after the 1981 assassination attempt against him. it referred to his first job as, of course, a youthful lifeguard. this was a handwritten note that he got in the oval office. i met you in the '20s in lowell park, illinois. you remember the good times we had in the '20s. you were 17 years old then and everyone called you dutch. please get well soon, we need you to save this country. remember all the lives you saved in lowell park.

the letter appears in a religious biography of reagan that argues that his coming into the world culminating with his single-handed defeat of the soviet empire was literally providential. the working out of god's plan. on the other side, those who found reagan a phony, a fraud, a toadie. the first time such an opinion shows up in the historical record is in his high school yearbook. he is depicted fishing a suicide out of the water who begs, don't rescue me, i want to die. reagan responds, well, you'll have to postpone that, i need a medal. [laughter] like the reagan worship, the reagan hate lives on. i wanted to share this manuscript with a friend of mine who grew up in california in the '60s and '70s. she told me i best not sent it, she couldn't think straight

ability ronald reagan for her -- about ronald reagan for her rage. her beef was simple: that all that turbulence in the '60s and '70s had given the nation a chance to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world, to grow up. for these citizens what reagan achieved foreclosed that imperative, that americans might learn to question leaders ruthlessly, throw aside the silly notion that american power was always innocent, think like grown-ups. they had been proposing a new definition of patriotism. one built on questioning authority and unsettling ossified norms. i think some of those guys are in the audience today. then along came ronald reagan encouraging citizens, in his estimation, to think like children waiting for a man on horseback to rescue them. and that this was a tragedy.

the division was present even among his own offspring. maureen, his eldest, who became a republican activist wrote of the time her father as governor missed one more in an important train of milestones in her life. she cast it in the most optimistic possible terms. i think dad always regretted times like these, at least a little bit, the way the tug and pull of his public life kept him from enjoying firsthand successes of his children. oh, he enjoyed them with us in spirit, and he was always there for us emotionally. at the other pole there was his other daughter, patty, who disagreed. patty, a rock and rolling liberal, wrote: i had been taught to keep secrets, to keep our image intact for the world under our family's definition of loyalty, the public should never see that under carefully-preserved surface was a group of people who knew how

to inflict wounds and then convincingly say those wounds never existed. this gets to my favorite ronald reagan story. it's in patti davis' memoir. she writes very, very damning things about her mother, nancy reagan, and she was suffering horrible depression. she's one of two reagan's two children who apparently attempted or thought about attempting suicide. she was in college -- no, i think she was back in california at the time, maybe she was in college, and she wanted to go into therapy. but nancy and ronald thought that that was for people who were crazy or whatever it was, and so what she did was she got hold of a pound of marijuana, and she sold it. and that paid for her therapy. [laughter] while her dad was the governor. [laughter] and the future just say no first lady of california. none the wiser. she wrote of how her mother,

nancy, beat her, was addicted to pills and used the house's state of the art intercom system installed by general electric as a tool for orwellian surveillance. now, maureen described that same intercom system as a providential gift. [laughter] it broadcast the sound of little ron, the youngest, crashing to the floor in the nursery allowing them to save his life. now it gets to the political party. call maureen's version a denial, call patty a cynic, always seeing things in a negative light, and god knows conservatives are always accusing liberals of doing that. optimism, pessimism, america the innocent, america the compromised, these have become two of the polarities that structure the very left-right order of battle in american

political life as much as the debate over the role of government, led by barry goldwater, and the cultural war between mutually recriminating cultural sophisticates on the one hand and the plain or silent majority on the other that i labeled in my previous book nixon land. note well that reagan's side in this plait call battle of -- political battle of assets which is carried far above the minutiae of electoral tallies has prevailed. listen to liz cheney in 2009 speaking for the republican multitudes: i believe unequivocally, unapologetically that america is the best nation that ever existed in history, and clearly it exists today. and here is mitt romney accepting the republican nomination in 2012 speaking of the day he watched neil armstrong land on the moon: like all americans, all americans, we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the world. i think there were some people

in 1969 who might have gone to bed thinking differently. but in that formulation, they're not really americans, after all. this is from a couple years ago. a google search for mitt romney and greatest nation in the history of the earth just yielded me 114,000 hits. such utterances are always supposedly apologizing for america, remember that one, apologizing for america. obama's going abroad to apologize for america. if only, here was san antonio mayor julian castro's address at the democratic convention in 2012: ours is a nation like no other -- like no other -- no matter who you come from or who you are, the path is always forward. the first lady, michelle obama, spoke of her campaign journeys: every day they make me proud, every day they remind me how blessed we are to live in the

greatest nation on earth. then her husband, accepting the nomination, we keep our eyes fixed on a distant horizon knowing that providence is with us and that we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth. now, this is interesting. here's samantha power, the harvard scholar, scholar of genocides at her confirmation hearings early in 2013 questioned about a magazine article she published a decade earlier in which she wrote that american foreign policy needed, quote: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the united states. that's the kind of stuff people were really thinking about in the '70s. senator marco rubio -- you guys might know that cat, republican of florida -- demanded to know what crimes she was referring to. she would respond only: america

is the greatest country in the world, and we have nothing to apologize for. this is a book about how such rhetoric came into being and how such hubris comes now to define us. in certain ways we live in some of the darkest times in our history. global warming threatens to engulf us. political polarization threatens to paralyze us. the economy nearly collapsed because of the failure of the banking regulatory regime. competition from china threatens to overwhelm us. social mobility is at its lowest point in generations. to name only a few versions of the national apocalypse that yet may come. but at the same time, somehow something like an official cult of optimism -- the greatest nation in the history of the earth -- saturates the land.

how did it happen? this is one of the questions the invisible bridge poses. here is another. what does it mean to believe in america, to wave a flag or to struggle towards a more searching alternative to the flag wavers? during the years covered in these pages, americans debated this question with an intensity unmatched before or since. even if they didn't always know that this was what they were doing, i hope this volume might become a spur to renewing that debate in these years at a time that cries for reckoning once more, in a nation that is ever so -- that has ever so adored its own innocence and so dearly wishes to see itself as an exception to history. thank you. [applause]

>> wow, that was great. stick around, we've got some great questions. i mean, these are really fascinating questions. >> before you go with your questions, can i ask rick a question? >> absolutely, mr. dean. >> i get one too. >> go ahead. you start your questions to each other. >> right. i'm very curious if rick has discovered from his research if the current polarization of this country politically begins with richard nixon or ronald reagan, or does it start earlier or later? >> i'm going to date it to the constitutional convention. [laughter] [applause] >> it's one of the ways we so dearly wish to see ourselves exception to history, as a society at peace with itself. we have a tendency of announcing such things right before conflicts begin.

i write about it in all my books. but just quickly, i mean -- >> i might debate that with you, but i won't today. >> we wouldn't have a republic were it not for a compromise between the slave states of the south and the mercantilist states of the north which was, papers over this gash, this wound within the body, the national body over slavery, over race, and it's sufficiently traumatic that when it finally comes to a fore in the 1860s, of course, hundreds of thousands of americans slaughter each other. ..

but the idea that america was an exception, europe was the place they settled politics, the third world, in effect right before that in my first book before the storm had quotes from a pundits, i think it was walter led and saying america is more united than at any time in history. if we could write into the script how we understood america the we do have these profound divisions and are not going to just go away with a wave of the hand, there is no right america, there's no blue america we would have a better time of it when the trauma has finally come.

on this anniversary, one of the famous when he testifies for the urban committee in 1973, with nerdy glasses on his eyes, 75% learn about american television sets that were tuned in and one of the things that was so fascinating and traumatizing to the nation was the portrait of the culture of the white house the pick did, how thin skinned nixon was, how obsessed they were with protesters, one part of that was nixon's obsession with the fair hair and boy, a kennedy. you can tell your experiences of how nixon thought about john f. kennedy. >> that little bit of testimony wasn't the focus of my testimony where i explain the atmosphere at the nixon white house. i later read in the nixon memoirs where he felt that was the most devastating part of the

testimony. we could never recover from that because it happened to be true and fairly damning. nixon's preoccupation with the kennedys is the aftermath of the 1960 contest he had where he and jack kennedy had run for the presidency. they personally had a friendly relationship, they had been in the senate at the same time, arrive at the senate at the same time and their words certain mutual regard. it wasn't jack kennedy as much as bobby and teddy kennedy that troubled him. he was quite convinced that he was going to see in his reelection that teddy kennedy stepped forward. he always read people like mcgovern when they were defined

for the nomination as stalking horse that might well just step aside if kennedy came into play so he never lets up. until almost the of bitter end in his fascination, no holds barred, ongoing investigation of teddy kennedy and after chappaquiddick he realized the prospects of teddy running were certainly minimal but he did everything he could to get information about chappaquiddick which happened before i got to the white house, was regaled with some of the things that had been done as belts and braces that he would be ready. >> a few questions to mr eric peristein, compare how conservative reagan was compared to nixon.

>> reagan was around now, the moderate republican out of the republican party for being too liberal. this question is of little sharp rise think actually. i would be interested to know if john agrees, politicians can only be according to the context given to them. they don't take policies of the shelf. if you go to the nixon library or a museum exhibit they set up, he was a great supporter of the environment, he founded the hearts and flowers and clean air and water act, that passed the house from 410-5, it doesn't show much of what he believes in his heart. the question was how conservative was he really? the best piece of evidence was the budget he pripet for 1974 which seems a big deal at the time. newsweek's cause -- called a the

most important political document since the new deal and it was a reagan budget that sought to defund all the agencies of the war on poverty and the great society and at that point he appointed activist howard phillips to the head of the economic opportunity commission which was the agencies that administered the war on poverty and his job was to do, in the reagan administration, dismantle the agencies they have been hired to ostensibly run. in his memoir, he says after my reelection which of course he won for the united states, to continue my mandate for the new majority which was the majority of what became reagan democrats, southerners and all the rest. and in his march to the right by

this guy. >> do you agree? >> i do. he was more conservative than reagan. >> he didn't have the heart for equality that reagan did. >> things like epa, he would tell, on the tapes he would talk to somebody like ehrlichman who would be active in these moderate if not progressive domestic policies where he had no interest in them, just don't get me in trouble politically and do what you want to. he has no interest in these. >> he calls domestic politics the outhouses in peoria. he is politically cynical, he supported what became known as affirmative action in the philadelphia plan and the reason he supported it is he thought it would be great to get democratic

unions and democratic african-americans, he could rip apart and destroy the democratic party which was his goal quite explicitly. >> this question is for john dean. why were the what a great offices of the democratic national committee broken into? was it merely a fishing expedition or was there something specific being sought? >> that is one of the things if i went through the tapes, there is an appendix in the book where -- everytime i found something in the tapes where they talk about their knowledge of why the break-in occurred i put a footnote for the appendix and collected them all in the appendix which doesn't explain all i know about why they went in but everything they do is pretty clear they understood it was a fishing expedition to get financial information on larry o'brien. if you go beyond what i have done to all of this sworn

testimony from the cuban americans who wear the burglars from howard hunt who gave them their orders, if you go through the entirety of what happened contemporaneously you will find that is what they were doing. they were on a fishing expedition ended becomes quite clear. because it was so bundle, a lot of people think there must have been something more going on. the conspiracy theories that developed over the fact that it was so bumbles, there are holes and unexplained factors that they create facts, don't really exist. the bundling was human error plain and simple and not part of some other conspiracy. >> this one is great for eric peristein. how did reagan give voice to sentiments that were in the past been too extreme to be taken

seriously? quashing unions, demonizing the poor, demonizing the social programs begun by fdr and continued through the great society? >> excellent question. it is very central to the core of why he was able to succeed politically where someone like barry goldwater wasn't able to succeed. one thing i did in my research was i went to california and miss and to radio broadcasts that he made after he was governor. that was his profession. teammate at three minute radio broadcast every day i call homilies. one of the things he is so good at is what i call the liturgy of absolution. he tells people who think poor people get too much money, black folks may be are at the federal trough, he was the first person i could find to describe black

voters as the living on the democrats's plantation, 1968. people who are concerned about crime. people who are concerned about union power. he is so good at metaphorically looking them in the eye or literally looking them in the eye and saying you are not a bad person. and then you have to associate in the book how he does it, to say, he will say, i was an fdr democrat and i understand what this was about in these were all the main ends, these are good people sometimes, bad people. they just don't understand how to achieve the opposite of what they intend. it turns out, he is good at quoting surveys, identify the survey and can't check one way or the other but there was the

survey of black people in washington d.c. and if they want, 70% of the once cover crime, laws, etc. etc. so they are going to tell you that you are a racist. they will say law and order is a code word for racism but this proves that maybe they are the racists. he was so good at that and so good that enveloped in his audience into feeling good about themselves for doing things that a previous generation were seen as politically beyond the pale. >> i will make a two part question for john dean, we will end up in a couple minutes. what are your thoughts about the campaign intelligence gathering that is in the campaigns and money spent on the ads and what do you think you will be doing today? >> we start with part 1 and go to part 2.

>> be president. >> i didn't hear -- >> the first car was campaign intelligence gathering that occurs in the campaign and all the money spent on ads. >> doesn't seem comparable. it clearly goes on, but it is not the same sort of rough-and-tumble, at least it has not surfaced on any broad basis serving out of the white house or at the presidential level where they are planning secretaries, wiretapping or trying to deliberately manipulate a campaign where you get the candidate you want to run against rather than the one who might surface out of the primary system. it is paid little different. that is one of the aftermaths of watergate and one of lessons of watergate the people want the system to work fairly and not unfairly. i don't see it. i have never seen anything

comparable to watergate in the years since. as far as the question what what i be doing without watergate? i would still be married to oh. that is the best part of it. and i had never planned to make a career out of government. i tried to resign from the white house in september of 71 which was long before watergate. i had been on of vacation and had some attractive job offers, related to my being associated having good terms with the administration and when i raise, i disclaimed to the chief of staff and my deputy who would later become reagan's council and the bush's council, quite capable of handling this job so these opportunities us something i would like to pursue, and he said you can't leave. you owe it to us to say. if you bv will be persona non

grata and basically blowing away the jobs. isis affected years later he wished he had let me go. but i stayed. so i have actually pretty much done post watergate what i set out to do and have a lot of fun. i returned to writing after a successful career in business which was basically working in mergers and acquisitions, had a lot of fun, gone back to school and studied accounting, almost sad for the cpa but decided i don't want to do that. but i had skills and knowledge and a couple partners and found there is something important where you are lucky if you find the right wife or the right business partners and i was blessed by both. i had great business carnies and we have a lot of fun and did very well that what we did and i retired at 60 and returned to

something i always wanted to do and i am now on my eighth book in retirement so i have done what i wanted. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> john dean, eric peristein, on behalf of this wonderful audience thank you for a great conversation. [applause] >> [inaudible conversations] >> this is booktv's live coverage of the miami book fair held at miami dade college, "latino america: how america's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation" -- john dean and eric peristein. later john dean will be joining us for a call in, if any

questions come up during his talk feel free to participate in that call in. in a few minutes, walter isaacson will talk book "the innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution". at 11 will be our guest on our in-depth program in february so you have three hours to talk to him as well. we are on the street in when the miami. joining us now is gary segura, professor at stanford and co-author co-author america: how america's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation". how do you define latino. >> largely they define themselves. the government definition is anyone who identifies as a descendant of immigrants or an immigrant mom of spanish-speaking nation.

these include portuguese speakers. the basis on which we will the book we asked people if they think of themselves that way, latino or hispanic. largely this is the u.s. population, let american nations. >> host: you said survey. what the mean by that? >> guest: the book is based on the work we have done at the survey firm, a polling and research firm, merely for political purposes and also for personal and advocacy work and we have interviewed 80,000 people over the last seven years who see themselves as latino and literally hundreds of different of questions about their views of government, politics, society, life in the united states, their families, their health, any topics you can imagine. >> host: what percentage of the u.s. population is latino? >> guest: as of the u.s. census in 2010 it was up 7%, those population numbers change quickly but the 2020 census it should be creeping up in the 20%

range. >> host: translate that into numbers. >> guest: there are about 55 million latinos in the united states. >> how many citizens, how many are here illegally? >> there are 11 million undocumented persons in the united states. 60% of them are hispanic, maybe 5.54 so. the rest of the population are either be goal immigrants or naturalized citizens, native-born citizens. the distribution depends on the age group. if you look at the adult population, 50% of adults are citizens of the united states. the first 40% are native birch, 20% are not. the remainder, most are legal residents. among young people it is 93% native birth. almost every young person and the age of 18 is a u.s. citizen. not everybody that 93% so that

is a really interesting political -- it means most people turn 18 are all entering the eligible electors read. not your naturalization or crossing the border ernie els but turning 18. >> host: 17%, going into the 20% of the u.s. population. what about voting population? what percentage are latino? >> guest: in the 2014 election about 8%. in the 2012 election about 10%. the reason for that fluctuation is working class people and people of color of all racial and ethnic groups turn out less in the midterm elections. it is a lower turnout, turnout in the 2014 election was the lowest in recent history. for a variety of reasons. the first is the level of democratic turnout was low. turned out by politics. the interest in government in

the country is unhappiness at the center because the politics in washington. going back to 2012 it was 10 percentage if you look at our history there was a% in 2008 or 9% in 2008, 10% in 2012, 11% in 2016. those numbers lag the population numbers and variety of reasons. and that group, the age distribution, u.s. citizens on the age of 18 eligible as well. >> host: where the shoes latinos in america look at, focus on, percentage of republican and democratic? >> guest: there is a variety of issues that are important to latinos, prior to the

immigration debate the interest of latinos most often told us about when we talk about the most important issue facing the country from their perspective is always in education, jobs, health care and public safety. the speaker in california, the american agenda. every one wants quality health care, everyone wants -- those of the aegis latinos must identify. until we get to immigration, it is a really big issue, the last four or five years have been fluctuating at 1 and two depending on the political environment of the times, had a big impact. >> host: democrats, republicans. >> in terms of party legislation the numbers are going to be lower because there are great

works and showing form of registration. >> host: we may turn out to vote. historically for the last 30 years, two thirds, one third, democrats or republican, the last election, democrats percentage from a few notes up 70% in the presidential election because of the immigration debate. >> host: legal latino immigrants, do they tend to be more republican than guest workers or undocumented? >> guest: foreign-born latinos and citizen populations in the elected and are likely to be democrat with another latinos. the first is in miami. and was politically active.

and the other group would be third generation, highly assimilated latinos. and more republican until the immigration debates the top 87 and ran back to the democratic identity. i want to make a point about cubans in miami. and cuban american politics, and the latino population. >> host: dynamic's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation. why do you call them the most dynamic? >> guest: they are dynamic in a variety of ways. first of all they are on the move. if you go back two censuss ago,

a substantial percentage in the southwest. if you look today latinos are the largest minority, the plurality in california, the plurality in texas, latino voters made at difference in georgia, they needed difference in kansas. there's a growing latino population in iowa and arkansas, the population is really on the move. the second thing is they are politically dynamic. we look at two thirds to two quarters of the bills democrats are getting now among latinos, it is not a particularly interesting -- we don't have to go back very far, just to 2004 when george w. bush running for reelection, and 40% republicans through elections, that is a movement we don't get in any other racial or ethnic population in the united states and it is a really interesting

one. >> the other word is transformed. >> i think the presence of latinos in the political structure has the opportunity to change the political dynamic in a variety of locations. if you look at the southern states like georgia, latinos are moving in, what has long been a black/white racial paradigm in politics and in society is a multiracial paradigm, changing correlation, and african american politicians are taking immigration reform, to make the politics work in the state of georgia, you look in places like texas, the opportunity to become a democratic state if the latino population was engaged and registered and motivated and that hasn't happened yet.

people have a secret data on march 18th, 2017. it doesn't work like that but i always like to answer the majority of texas going on tonight and it is probably the case the majority of texans and latino populations, a policy outcome they are not getting. it is just not happening. >> host: 32% of the 2010 or 2018 election, the electorate in texas was latino. give us your assessment of the president's recent executive order on immigration, politically i know from a little earlier to make that judgment to a medium assessment. >> my initial reaction was it is a very big policy wind and the big political win. in either instance is it ideal.

immigration advocates would like a piece of legislation that they can be certain would extend beyond the life of this administration. that was not going to happen. 515 days and counting in the senate bill and refused to bring it up. most advocates in the house of representatives including republicans will tell you there's a majority in the house to talk about the senate bill which is what brings to the floor. in that sense, the president acting the political wind for democrats is huge. it is huge because latinos coalesce behind democrats more enthusiastically than they have so far. turnout was down a little bit, a little disappointed. this will be a big political bone when they see obama at the top of the ticket in 2015. >> host: do you understand the frustrations some people feel with all of a sudden allowing an executive order with regard to

immigration instead of going through the congress? >> i do and i don't. some of the frustration is manufactured because they are being told the president is acting unconstitutionally, the president is breaking the law which was nonsense. if that was the case ronald reagan broke the law and george herbert walker bush broke the law. in terms of the frustrfrustrati there should be frustration in the house of representatives, they offered a bill of their own and the president said yesterday in a large rally, pass the bill. the republicans have it within their ability to pass it. the other reason i reject the frustration, we have to remember what it is undocumented immigrants do in the united states. they fixed the problem, they roof houses, they do the ugly, nasty, painful, unpleasant job but very few americans have tried to apply.

anytime one of our listeners today eat a strawberry or piece of chicken, their life has been subsidized by the labor of those undocumented workers. if you really want to deal with the frustration, we need to have an environment where we are not exploiting those people. >> host: gary segura is the co-author co-author of this book america: how america's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation". thank you for your time. booktv is live at thought miami book fair, the seventeenth year in a row we have come down here and given full coverage over the week and will be broadcast from chapman hall at miami dade university. these are nonfiction authors we cover coming up in just a minute, walter isaacson will talk about his recent book "the

innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution". you can see the room filling up and he will be in there in minutes. walter isaacson will be our guest on c-span2 in february for our in-depth program the first sunday in february, we will have three hours with him to talk about this book and to take your calls as well. on our in-depth program, arthur brooks, president of the american enterprise institute is our guest in december. that is the first sunday of every month. noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern time. the full schedule for everything we are covering this weekend in miami is available at booktv.org. we have walter isaacson coming up in a minute. you have the opportunity to talk with john dean, in nixon's

defense. you saw him a little earlier live at after that, television producer norman lear, even this i get to experience, he will do a call in so you will talk with him. he is the founder of people for the american way as well. lots going on. cornell west will be out here all little later. a couple of the guards who were in benghazi on september 11th, 2012, will be here as well. lots going on here in miami. now let's go up, you can see one of our camera guys on those green. we will go live in chapman hall, walter isaacson will stars in a minute. [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> this is booktv's live coverage of the miami book fair, chapman hall is on your screen, walter isaacson is not in the room just yet, they're still filling the room up, latecomers

are still coming in. once that room gets filled up we will be live with walter isaacson. we are just down the escalator on the streets of miami dade college and the c-span bus is parked out here. we are handing out book bags and giving tours of the bus. you can see the wind storm, that is a bus driver, rachel nickerson handing out bags so if you are in the miami area today or tomorrow, pick up the c-span bag, c-span's bag after walter isaacson's john dean will do a call in to us. because of the wind we are going to move all our cameras on to the c-span bus and to our call ins from in there. a typical miami day, a little over the top, thunderstorms

coming out but the wind is atrocious. it is of hurricane force winds so we will move to the bus and make sure it is easier. you will hear a little better with the audience. this is booktv's live coverage of the miami book fair. if you are leaving the tv and still wants to listen, you can listen to our coverage today on our c-span radio apps. you can download that android or apple fun, just go to your search engine, your apps engine and type in c-span radio and listen, it is free of course, when you get in there, just cap on c-span2 and you will be able to do that anywhere in the nation. walter isaacson is now in the room as you can see. we will go back to chapman hall and wait for mr. isaacson.

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>> good morning. >> good morning. >> good morning. saturday in miami, welcome to the 2014 miami book fair international. i am the dean of the honors college at miami dade college, it is a pleasure to be with you today. the book fair is grateful for the support of the night foundation, american airlines and many other generous supporters. we would like to acknowledge friends of the book fair and i see so many of you today, thank you for your continued support. at the end of today's session we will have time for questions and answers. the author will also be autographing books to the right side of the elevator near where you were standing on line. nestle at this time my but like

you to silence yourself phones. it is my pleasure to introduce the founder of square and launch code, a new nonprofit in miami who will introduce our guest author. [applause] >> thank you. they gave me a script and they just gave me permission to deviate from it. that is what i am going to do. i first met walter isaacson a month ago washington d.c. and he gave me a copy of his new book and i was excited because i love coming come from trips with something for my wife and i got home and i was like i have got a copy of walter's new book. i knew she was a big fan. now we have two copies. she has gone out and bought it that afternoon. it was a spectacular book and if you haven't read walter

isaacson, it is a joy to read him because he connects us with the devices that connect our lives. these days every one of view is carrying something that has dozens and dozens of independent technological streams that merged together to give us activity that we just assumed today. walter is the best person i know at explaining the connections that lead to the things that change our lives. in his new book "the innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution" walters drinks together not just the hero stories but the stories that you wouldn't here because these things are not made by individuals. walter does of phenomenal job explaining how the team work involved and the history is exciting and reverting. i will go back to my script for one thing i could not say better.

i will quote salon.com and say if anyone in america understands genius, it is walter isaacson. [applause] >> notice he didn't say i was a genius, i have just written about a few people who are. it is great to be back here at the miami book festival, something i love for many years and tom healey has taken over. i particularly want to thank the president of miami dade community college, because they are doing in their own different ways something that is important for the digital revolution which is make it inclusive, make it part of this revolution and you may know something called launch code in st. louis will come to miami and soon will be all over the world but what it is is a very easy time.

in six weeks you can learn coating and be part of the revolution. this is the greatest community college in america and thank you for hosting it. [applause] >> i have been working on this book, the innovators, off and on. it began when i ran digital media for time magazine back in the days before we knew what digital media was before we could get on the internet and before there were web browser is in the early 1990s. when web browsers and the idea of putting a magazine on the internet came along we started to do it and i got called in by my boss who asked me as simple question which is who owns the internet? that is the clueless question. then he says who built it? who runs it? who is in charge of it?

i realize besides being a clueless question, i did not know the answer to that question and i started gathering -- i started to meet all these people, people i never heard of, like ben franklin george washington, people like bob conn who did the internet protocols and who created interactive computing. bill gates, larry page, the people we all know as leaders of this revolution and i was lucky enough to meet these people and started gathering strings, collecting stories about them. i would say to them gordon more, when you founded in tel, and southern florida is a place filled with storytellers and it is great to be a journalist u.s. the simplest of all questions.

we gathered aside as you may know when steve jobs called, i had done a biography of benjamin franklin, why don't of benjamin franklin, why don't you do me next, my first reaction, when i was told i was fighting off cancer it would be a great chance to be part of being up close, a revolutionary, and we biographer's know that we destroyed history little bit, we make it seem there is the visionary, steve jobs or bill gates and einstein, in a garage and they have a light bulb moment and innovation occurs. one thing about studying steve jobs, he was a visionary, headed

dent in the universe by his creative position. but did a collaborative free, and those of you who know about it, everybody i talk to said he drove me crazy but wouldn't have given up a chance to have worked for him. he drove me to do things i didn't know i would be able to do. at the end of my time with steve when he was stepping down from apple and was sick i asked him acquistion which was what products are you most proud of? i thought he would say the original macintosh or the ipod or iphone, you were to listening. he was always a bit tough. he said those are hard products to create but what is hard is to create a team that indoors and continues to create great product, the product i'm most proud of is apple and that is when i realized as jim said in his introduction this is not just about lone geniuss but how

to form creative teams and that is what all this do in our lives, we realize we bounce around with people, some might be a visionary, some person might be good at execution and vision without execution is hallucinations so you need to put these people together. steve jobs and steve was neck and a lot of engineers and create apple. that was the first lesson i learned from steve jobs was when i had my first long walk with him, and that he was a humanities kid as he put it growing up. he loved literature, novels. also an electronics geek, i felt that this strange. i was one of those kids, got radius and made ham radios, john thomas, knew how to make circuits and use a soldering iron and not messed things up

too much but i was a few manatees' kid and he said i learned that the people who stand at the intersection of the arts and sciences are going to be the place where creativity occurs. that is what we're learning in our education today, and those of us in the humanities and arts, want to be sure we understand the technology so we don't see a that grounds to the engineers. we have a framework for the book and my daughter who is in what everett is when you are applying to college, was applying to college and being the type of parents my wife and i are felt we were supposed to be involved in this process, and say what you read in your entrance as a about? are we supposed to edit it? being the type of daughter she was she was having none of that. one day she came down and set i have done it, remind me again, a

lovelace cobb robert byron's daughter was the first computer programmer. she was a good frame for the book i was trying to write. that is where the book begins, lord byron's daughter, in the early 1800s, she was growing up with a political streak. her father was a great romantic coin. those of you who know anything about lord byron, lady byron thought he was too much of a romantic poet, he wandered off never to be seen again. he was mainly in mathematics, as if understanding mathematics was an antidote to being a poetic or romantic. it didn't quite work because what's a lovelace does is

combines poetry with mathematics. recalls it poetics science. she stands at that intersection i mentioned it steve jobs talked about and as soon as i read that i remembered the intersection that was on the slides that steve jobs used to show every product launch. on the screen behind him when the product launch was over, there would just be a street signs that said liberal arts technology and he would say that is where we stand, that intersection. hy was reading about her. because she wandered around industrial revolution in flint in the 1830s and she saw the mechanical looms, using punch cards to do beautiful patterns, mechanized loomis. lord byron was the money. i mean that literally. is only speech was defending the followers of ned led, who is smashing mechanical looms on the theory that technology was

putting creative work -- creative people out of work. they thought technology would put people out of work, they were wrong then, they are wrong now when they think that. if you look at the punch cards, you have a french name charles babbage who was making the calculator machine, numerical calculate using punch cards and she came up with a concept that is basically the heart of what the computer revolution is all about which is with the punch cards or any type of programming you can make a numerical machine do anything that can be noted in symbols, words, music, art, patterns, so she came up and showed and published a scientific paper which in that period was not usual for a woman to the publishing in scientific journals, she publishes a paper that describes how this would work and even publishes step by

step and the first computer programming, to a particular task that she had undertaken, it is a program, it has recursive loupes and embedded things. something of kosher at miami dade. and a computer programmer. there are so many women that had been somewhat written out of history. i leap forward 100 years to the 1930s when real computers come into existence. it is like the industrial revolution because two things happen. not just the steam engine and mechanical processes, the industrial revolution, not just a steam engine or mechanical process.

it is combining the two, combining a steam engine with mechanical processors you get an industrial revolution. what happened for the digital revolution was a combination of computers with that network. personal computer and the internets eventually. to me it was a true revolution and i realized i had been writing about revolutions in the past. i wrote about the scientific revolution. we know about the american revolution and i did benjamin franklin because i felt you should know about that revolution, if you understand the values of america, where we're coming from and where we are going it helps to know how founder's got us started. and there was nobody who tried to tie it all together. and here are the heroes in that revolution. and the writing of the history of the generation.

and other people wrote the history of vietnam or world war ii or depression generations because the history of our generation, the revolution of the generation was not political or military, it was the digital revolution. so i leaped to the 1930s, having set it up with a lovely stand you get to an amazing character you are going to learn a lot more about next week because i wanted to take him out of the shadows of history, alan turing. i worked to take him out but benedict, batch is playing him in the movie so we will do a thousand times better than i will be able to do it is a really cool movie called the imitation game. what alan turing did was threefold. and the general purpose computer, and the complicated math problem.

won't burden you with the problem, and whether it is approvable or not in math and he wants to figure out. and the concept of the machine and computer any logical -- the logical computing machine and universal. uses it to solve the mass problem except for a few athletes here is not the more important part. the more important part was this concept of a universal or total loss of will computing machine that could do anything, then he goes to england secretly, trying to break the german wartime, and there he works very much a loner, long distance runner. when he sent off to boarding school, gone to in the and foreign service and left alone, he rides his bicycle for two

days to go to boarding school. at boarding school rediscovers that he is gay, has across on a boy who dies of tuberculosis. by the time alan turing gets there he is quite a letter and feels like the outsider but he learns as i was saying at the beginning it is all about collaboration and team work. you have to have people do these things. the german wartime code which they had done more than anything else to help us win world war ii. finally coming out of it because he wrestled with this question of homosexuality, free will, are we program, we are who we are because we are like machines that are preprogrammed or do we have free will, he wrestles with what he calls ladylove place's objection because 8 of place at the end of her paper says machines can do everything and anything had a caveat. the one thing they in are not able to do is have imagination.

they won't be able to originate fox. machines will never think. machines are different from humans. alan tearing says how would we know that? how can we test that? alan turing is wrestling with this notion are we fundamentally different from machines? so alan turing comes up with what he calls the imitation game which is the name of the movie. we now call it detering test but it is a way to decide whether or not a machine is thinking. you take a machine and put it in a different room with a human, send in questions and after a while if you can't tell the difference between the answers coming back from one side and the answer coming back from the other side you can't tell which is the machine and which is the cumin, he says there is no reason to believe a machine isn't thinking. if you're in the philosophy department you can argue about consciousness and whether or not that is a good test but it has

become the defining test of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the digital age and it sets of two strand of the digital revolution. people like ada lovelace the believe the difference was to connect humanities and sciences that the imagination and creativity of us humans connected to the processing power of machines with each augment each other and that partnership, symbiosis' as she called it would always be stronger than machines alone. ..