[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] there are. [inaudible conversations]

>> you're watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. >> rebecca frankel is the author of "war dogs." ms. frankel, what's on the cover of your book? >> so this is a handler and his dog, and they're doing a training exercise for a mission that they might have to do in afghanistan or iraq which does include a drop from a helicopter. >> what sparked you to write about war dogs? >> my job in foreign policy, we've been writing about the iraq war for as long as it's been going on and i really love dogs. so as i was looking at photos coming in off the wire, i saw this one photo that sort of stood out as different in afghanistan, and it was because

there were these marines and their bomb-sniffing dogs, and they were just hanging out, and everyone looked very happy. there's a very strong contrast to the unfortunate photos that are more gritty and more gory. so tom suggested that we partner in -- [inaudible] and i did that for about four years and it turned into a book. >> how many dogs are used in the military? what's the cost of training one? >> well, the costs vary. so -- and it varies beginning with how expensive the dog is. so the breeders that the military gets their dogs from are in europe. and the dogs are a little bit more expensive because they're pedigree, and their training is more intense, we can say that. but it can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 depending. and -- [inaudible] the time and energy that is invested in them after that. >> what's one thing that

surprised you about what they learn? >> um, there's a lot of things, actually, because i think i realized -- i mean we know you have a dog at home you kind of understand -- [inaudible] the communication between you and your dog is just there. they sort of understand what we say to them. but the intensity -- [inaudible] that they have on their handlers is multiplied in a lot of ways. their sense of smell is incredible. they have 20 million -- 200 million scent receptors in their noses, we only have 5 million scent receptors in our noses. their eye sight is better in the dark, so they're an incredible capability that we've incorporated over the years, but they also offer the companionship and the company. they do a lot. >> have we lost any of these specially-trained dogs in war? >> yes. the number actually is very hard to calculate. all the different branches in the military keep their own

records, so there isn't one large dog record of what happened to them. the air force actually keeps records, and they pool them from the the other branches, but that doesn't include the number of special forces dogs, and there were a lot of them that were used in iraq and probably still being used in afghanistan. but those don't come into play, so that number is of unknown quantity. but, yes, of course, they're doing a very dangerous job. they're out in front of their handlers the they're the ones closest to danger because they're there to detect ieds. >> "war dogs" is the name of the book, rebecca frankel is the author. >> a look now at the current best selling nonfiction books according to "the new york times":

>> up next --

>> that's a week at this -- that's a look at this week's list of best selling nonfiction according to "the new york times". [inaudible conversations] >> and on your screen now is a live picture from inside trinity united methodist church, home of the annual savannah book festival in georgia. and we will be back in just a few minutes with more live coverage. [inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some books that are being published this

week: >> look for these titles in bookstores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv.org. >> and now joining us on booktv from johns hopkins university is benjamin ginsburg, a professor of political science

here. his book is called "the worth of war." we'll show you the cover in just a minute. but, dr. ginsburg, you write in here that the unpleasant fact is that although war is terrible and brutal, we should not assume that all its consequences are abhorrent. what does that mean? >> guest: well, you know, this is a book that i wrote in response to a bumper sticker. you know the bumper sticker we all see "war is not the answer"? well, it depends on the question. and there are a lot of questions that unfortunately, have to be answered via war and violence. it's the nature of the world. war is a major force in building modern society. it has answered three of the main questions of politics; statehood, territoriality and power. every state that exists, including especially the united states of america, is the

product of war. and we don't like to remember in this. kids are taught about the american revolution in terms of philosophical issues. while they didn't exactly debate with the british, they fought. it was a very bloody revolution one of the bloodiest revolutions in history and it determined that there would be a united states of america. and i would say that virtually every state in the world was created by war. very few exceptions. territoriality. who controls what piece of territory, you know? every piece of territory on the face of the earth used to belong to somebody else. and it was taken there them by war. from them by war. we don't like to admit that. but as i recall the native americans didn't trade us north america. the white settlers seized it violentlyy. that's true of every place. and someday it will be taken

from us. that's the nature of history. and finally, power. power within any nation is often settled, most often settled by violence. not by the ballot box. voting peaceful participation, those come later. the broad contours of who holds power come about because of violence. take our recent history. an african-american was elected to the presidency. good enough. but the fact that african-americans are not slaves, that was resolved by violence. so for better or worse, our world is produced by war by violence and not by peaceful forms of political activity. we don't like it but it's true. >> some people out there listening are going to say well we've grown up. we should be more sophisticated than we were 400, 200, 100 years ago. >> willing well, i wish -- well i wish it was true. but unfortunately, not everyone is. and so long as not everyone is

peaceful and sophisticated, all others have to be prepared to fight. the one case that i can find historically of a nation of a group that was totally true to pacifist principles is the case of the maori of the chatham islands in new zealand. they were true pacifists. they would not fight for any reason. unfortunately, a neighboring tribe on another island knew they wouldn't fight, so they invaded the island and killed and ate them. pacifism is rare and not always the best thing. if we lived in a world of angels, we could be pacifists but we don't can. >> host: benjamin ginsburg, you write: war is terrible, but it has also been a major engine of human progress. >> guest: yeah, isn't that

ironic? when you consider various aspects of human progress, many of them are outgrowths of war. take technological progress. now, generally speaking basic science arises at place like hopkins. it arises in the minds of scientists and engineers. but transforming basic science into technology that we use, that usually is a result of war and military needs. so much of our technology stems from military applications. atomic energy, jets, microwaves, radar, metallurgy, chemistry. all of these are results of military investments over the years transforming laboratory ideas into technology. sometimes those get beaten into flow shares, and that's --

plowshares, and that's technological progress. so much of the modern world results from military ideas. take, for example, planning. the profession of planning is a military profession. armies planned. engineering. do you know that an engineer was someone who built weapons and fortifications? today we have civil engineers who distinguish themselves from their militaristic brethren. in fact, the joke in the engineering profession is that civil engineers build the targets, other engineers knock them down. the field of engineering is a military field. bureaucracy. bureaucracy, for better or worse, arose from military organization. our world is a world built by war. >> host: what did we learn from our civil war technologically? >> guest: well, from the civil war we learned a lot about supply logistics that are used

and the distribution of food and material throughout world today. we learned a lot about metallurgy. we learned a lot about chemistry, all of which was developed for military purposes but then became part of our civilian society our civilian economy. but i'll tell you, there's one thing that is the harshest but most important lesson of war. people say, you know war's crazy. it's irrational. but the truth is the opposite. war forces societies to think rationally because if you don't think rationally you'll disappear. this is the lesson of the great history of the pell to nice -- pell to news january war.

the athenians wanted to establish a naval base on melos. the athenians said look we're not going to bother you. we want to establish a naval base. the melians said if you try to stay, we will fight. the athenians said well, our army is ten times as large as yours, you have no chance. the melians said our cause is just so surely the gods will take up our cause and you will be defeated. the athenians said, well, of course, we believe in the gods too. we're second to none in our belief. but we've learned that the gods tend to favor the larger army. [laughter] the melians fought and were destroyed. the lesson here is that war is a stern teacher. and what it teaches is that you've got to think straight. you can't be superstitious or

silly because, generally speaking you'll be destroyed if you don't think rationally. societies that enter wars with silly ideas suffer. why did the nazis lose the second world war? they should have won. well, one reason they won was that they were nazis. hitler couldn't adjust his thinking to reality. he regarded the russians as one dimension, subhumans who would be brushed away by the -- [inaudible] but on the other hand his armies were going to depend on russian and ukrainian peasants for their supplies. well murdering those peasants wasn't a good way to get their cooperation. the germans lost because of logistical problems. they couldn't adjust their thinking to reality. the russians, on the other hand did. stalin was crazy too. but in the face of the threat of destruction, stalin brooded by

himself for two or three weeks and came out thinking straight. turned the army over to him said now we have to be serious. so war teaches societies to be rational. and is, you know if you read -- i always call him the fortune cookie general, sun su, because of his wise sayings. that's sun su's major lesson be rational. think straight. don't be, you know, don't believe in illusions. and that's what societies learn from war. that's the ultimate lesson of warfare. >> host: professor ginsburg people listening to this their heads might be exploding saying that you -- [laughter] are promoting war. >> guest: i don't promote war. i think war is terrible. however, war is a state of awe fairs in which we -- affairs in which we find ourselves often. and we have to understand it. we can't simply say it's bad, i don't want anything to do with

it. it is horrible but for that very reason we have to understand it, and we have to learn from it, and we can't delude ourselves. i know some viewers will be thinking well, what about nonviolent peaceful forms of reis the us dance -- resistance? and, you know, the answer is there is no such thing. there is no such thing as nonviolation. nonviolence is a form of disruption. it's lightweight violence, and it only works if you're facing foes who are constrained in their use of violence. or it works best if you can use your enemy's violence against them. take, for example, dr. martin luther king who was a tremendous practitioner of civil disobedience, but he understood it for what it was. he learned from gandhi he learned from samuel adams that civil disobedience is a mechanism of goading your opponents into being violent. and once they become violent

you can call on your friends to be even more violent against them. so dr. king knew that he could goad sheriff jim clark into behaving violently and stupidly and then the fbi would descend on them. if you don't have friends then you have tiananmen square where nonviolence simply results in your death. so we always want to delude ourselves that war is not the answer. it would be good if that was true but, unfortunately, it is. very often the key answer, the only answer. president obama, i think, when he came into office thought war was not the answer. we were going to have peace. peace was going to reign throughout earth. now he seems to be launching drone strikes at everyone. war teaches you, you have to be rational. you can't delude yourself into thinking that if i'm peaceful oh, everyone will love me, and they will be peaceful too. it's not like that. now, there's a very interesting book written by a psychologist

at harvard steven b pinker called the better angels of our character. and pinker tries to show that there's been a decline in violence over the past millennia. now, his statistical analysis is a little odd because you have to leave out world wars i and ii to make the numbers work. [laughter] we won't chastise him for that. what's interesting is his implicit solution to the problem of war. now, in thely of philosophy -- the history of philosophy there are two names associated with ideas about ending war. there's cont and there's hobbs. conte proposed the idea of the democratic peace. he noticed that democracies usually didn't go to war against one another. so he said if every cup was a democracy -- country was a democracy, there would be no more war.

that sounds good. problem is, a lot of them don't want to be democracies. as i recall, iraq didn't want to be a democracy, we had to go to war against it. so democratizing everyone would cause enormous conflict. hobbs put forward a different idea. he said that if there was one state with a sovereign leviathan, then war would be stamped out. but the problem is that he would have substituted tyranny for war. and as we look around the world, a lot of people seem to prefer violence to tyranny. so the hobbs solution doesn't seem to quite work unless you're willing to succumb to tyranny. so in his view violence diminishes the more pulley that some author -- fully that some authoritative regime is able to

secure peace in a territory. well it's true in a way. what happens then is that violence is kind of internalized. when we have less crime in the society at large we often have more crime in prisons. we, you know, we move the locus of criminal activity. so, you know, violence war, these are with us. we are not angels. we have to learn p -- learn to control, and we have to learn what they really do. we have to learn what they mean. >> host: professor ginsburg could an alternative title for your book, "the worth of war," be "real politic"? >> guest: yes, the way the germans say it -- [speaking german] yes. it is a work applying, you know the ideas of political realism to another sphere. but my publisher liked the alliteration, with the "worth of war," what can i do? authors just write the words.

yes, it's an essay in political realism, that's exactly correct. >> host: talked about the civil war, what have we learned, what progress have we made from the iraq and afghanistan wars? >> guest: well, i don't know that we made any progress in engineering. but we have learned from the past several decades of wars in the middle east, wars in southeast asia a number of lessons have emerged from this. one is to think flexibly and rationally. but another lesson that we learned -- and this is perhaps, not such a good lesson -- governments learned if they want to be free to go to war, they have to factor the citizenry out of the equation. what the government learned from vietnam was that so long as you depend upon citizen soldiers and citizen bill payers, citizens get fed up with the casualties.

so starting as you, i'm sure you know with richard nixon, we created an all-volunteer army the purpose being to create a military force that could be used flexibly, without citizens getting in the way. and i think that, that is what's happened over the past several decades. notice that our armies in the middle east were armies of professional soldiers recruited very heavily from the south and southwest and from military families. as a result there wasn't much domestic, you know, conflict about the war. people -- [inaudible] was a bad idea, but no one was up in arms over it. "the new york times" would publish its faces of the fallen, but if you and i looked at that list, we seldom saw any face we recognized because this was a professional army not drawn from the chattering classes. so that's what the government learned.

if you can fight factor the citizens out, and the drones are, of course, the next step. because now nobody is fighting. it makes it too easy to go to war, i think is the problem. we don't like to see casualties but we don't want it to be too easy to go to war either. that's been one of the problems in the united states. you know it started to be too easy to use force. we're too ready to fight. you know, our country has fought more wars than any other country on the face of earth? we're a peaceful people. and one reason is it's gotten to be too easy. the president can launch a strike, he can send special operations forces, he can send drones. that's not a good thing so that's a lesson. it's unfortunate that we've learned that lesson. >> host: benjamin ginsburg first of all, you have a familiar name for those of us in the political world -- >> guest: i do. >> host: -- who follow politics. >> guest: my name is similar to

to -- [inaudible] who is a very nice fellow and i was once denounced at a meeting of the american political science association for my nefarious redistricting schemes, and i said, no, that's not me it's the other ben ginsburg. they said, sure. [laughter] >> host: i want to close with this quote from your book, "the worth of war." this discussion brings us to the main matter at hand america's burgeoning regime of domestic secrecy and surveillance beginning with the first world war. the u.s. has undertaken the construction of massive programs of secrecy and surveillance justified by wartime and national security concerns. these programs, however, have survived every war conflict and national security emergency and now seem focused on the general american public posing as we shall see, serious threats to popular freedom. it seems that beating swords

into plowshares can produce very dangerous implements. >> guest: that was very well put, i thought. yes, that's right. and i believe that this is a very serious issue that's facing us today. you know, the framers of the constitution -- the authors of the fourth amendment some of whom were framers, the authors of the fourth amendment which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, we see that as relating to evidence of crime you know? if you watch "law and order," the police are always wondering do we need a search warrant, can we pretend? so we associate the fourth amendment with ordinary criminal alaskas. but the framers did not -- actions. to the framers, the purpose of the fourth amendment was protection against royal troops entering a house and seizing

papers that could then be used as a basis for a charge of seditious libel. which was a very common charge that the crown used against its enemies. so the framers wrote the fourth amendment to guard against the intrusion and seizure of papers. not to guard against, you know, misuse of evidence in criminal cases. so this original meaning of the fourth amendment has been lost. and today we have a state of affairs in which we've reversed what should be true in a democracy. in a democracy citizens should know a lot about their rulers. and rulers shouldn't know that much about citizens, okay? citizens should know a lot in order to hold public if officials accountable for their actions. the ancient greeks understood this.

there was an annual audit even of priests and piece he'ses. but if -- priestesses. but we've reversed this. we have a system of secrecy and classification preventing citizens from knowing everything they should about their rulers. and periodically, you know the secrets will be let out. so we have wikileaks and the snowden revelations. i wonder how many people have actually looked at these revealed materials? i went through the wikileaks materials. there was nothing in there that could damage the united states in any way except to embarrass certain politicians. the wikileaks are filled with gossip. some cia agent will file a report affirming that prince charles is an idiot. well, okay he probably is. [laughter] that's what the wikileaks -- [inaudible] i don't think our security was damaged by the revelations. but on the other hand it's

easily possible for the government to spy on us as we have now discovered. and i would say that -- people say, oh, there are many safeguards. i have nothing to hide, so what do i care? but that's dangerous thinking. our government's history in this regard is not a good one. it goes back to the first world war with the black chamber which wrote telegrams and then, of course weed had j. edgar hoover and nixon. if the government has the capacity to read our mail, our e-mails, listen to our phone calls, the temptation to abuse that capacity is great. and, again if we were all angels and our public officials were angels -- [inaudible] but james madison no less an authority than james madison said if men were angels we wouldn't need government. it's because men are not angels that we have to have safeguards in place.

>> host: benjamin ginsburg is the author, he's a johns hopkins university political science professor. we've been talking to him about his most recent book he's written about 20 "the worth of war." you're watching booktv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is live today from savannah georgia, at their annual book festival. our live coverage will continue shortly.

[inaudible conversations] >> here's a look at some of the upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country: >> let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area, and we'll be happy to add them to our list. e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> so i didn't know that there

was such a thing as segregated buses, you know 20 years ago mostly because there weren't really. there wasn't really such a thing as segregated buses so i tell a story in the book about how in 1994 when my daughter who's now an officer in the army, but when she was a toddler, we accidentally found ourselves on a segregated bus. i didn't know it was segregated until i got onto the bus and she's sleeping on my shoulder, and, you know the guy in the front seat, this young guy, 20-something guy with a black hat and a beard and a white shirt, it was saturday night, you know he gets up for me, and he says, oh, sit down because there i was, a young mother with a baby on my shoulder. and as soon as he gets up the guy next to him, this older guy must have been like in his 60s, he had a white beard he looks at him, and he goes -- [laughter] like that. like no. so this poor kid, you know he's like 23 years old. he looks at me with the baby on

my shoulder, and he looks at the guy next to him and he looks at me, the guy, and he's in this bind. and finally he looks at me, and he goes, you know like what am i going to do? and he sits back down. and then i go all the way to the back and find a seat in the back. that was like, my first experience. i didn't know that existed. the truth is it wasn't official. i think back to that story and i think that it was sort of a moment of cultural transition meaning that the guys, the young man's sort of ambivalence represented a shift within his own culture. he sort of was in this place where he thought that it was okay for a woman, you know to sit there but the rules around him were changing. >> well, you know the experience we had -- >> yeah. >> -- was that the women some of the women when we sat in the front, came down from the back of the bus and sat down and asked us in hebrew what we were doing and why. >> right.

>> they themselves were wondering what's going on. the men some of them put up their hats and refused to they came on the bus and refuse to sit down next to us, is so they had to go to the back of the bus. >> it's not unusual for women to be gatekeepers of the patriarchy. it's the phyllis schlaflys of the world. a lot of places women take that role, we're going to preserve the gender order for lots of reasons. there are women for whom, you know, the gender the gender inequality that we have is sort of comfortable and safe and what's known to them. undoing all that could be, is, you know scary or threatening for whatever reason. >> yeah. >> so sometimes the women are even more vehement in, oh, no we can't make change. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> joining us now on booktv is the author of "republic of imagination." where did this come from? >> well it came from as soon as

i finished my from? >> it came from us as i finished my last last chapter on tehran i kept thinking of the ordeal of f book ordeal and that, in fact totalitarian societies could be mirroring the best and the worst in societies like ours. and as ray bradbury says, you know, you don't have to burn books to kill a culture just get people not to read them. and that's what i think was happening here. so i thought i wrote a book with a question, can a democracy survive without a democratic imagination? you can guess my answer to this. [laughter] >> well your subtitle is "america in three books." what are those three books? >> well actually, it is more than three books because i begin with "wizard of oz" which was the first book i heard about. so i got to the imaginary map of america for me was kansas.

and it is with james baldwin who i feel is the true progeny of mark twain. but it begins with mark twain's huckleberry finn goes into -- [inaudible] and then carson mccarter's "the heart is a lonely hunter," ending with -- [inaudible] >> how do you tie those books together, and how do they make america -- >> or money or success. but like huck finn deciding that it is better to go to hell but do the right thing. of thethe rest belong to the blackakes

hats, you know? we don't even watch the news channel that disagrees with us.

why the democracy is vital when you confront and challenge and accept that you should also be challenged. you should also be questioned. in huck finn come in each of these great american novels we have a democracy of voices where even the villain has a voice you know? and it goes understanding and not condemnation. i think ideology that is willing over america today is very dangerous to the health of our country. >> azar nafisi, how did reading lolita change your life? >> well, you know, it changed my life in the sense i rather always doubt and question myself. i never thought i would be successful and honest to god you should listen to let editors. i used to tell her this book is not going to sell more than 9000 copies, you know but the whole point about the success of that book is maybe understand the

readers are not stupid that we should not underestimate them at that they want to know and the only thing it gave me gave me the opportunity to connected people i wanted to be connected to. that is the most important thing and that his readers, you know? so that is my take on it. >> booktv on c-span2 and we've been talking with azar nafisi "the republic of imagination" is her most recent book. [inaudible conversations] book. >> and now beginning from savannah, this year's savannah book festival, donald miller talking about his latest book,

"supreme city." it's a look at prohibition-era manhattan. you're watching booktv on c-span2, live coverage of the savannah book festival. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon, and i just want you to know be you've been here before, this is the last time i'm going to remind you that it's happy valentine's day book lovers. my name is chris aiken and i'm delighted to welcome you to the eighth annual savannah book festival and to thank the 2015 presenting sponsors, georgia power and bob and jean faircloth. we are blessed once again to host such celebrated authors at trinity united methodist church a beautiful historic venue made possible by the generous city of the international paper -- generosity of the savannah morning news and the v.a. nana magazine. and we would also like to thank booktv for coming to the festival and filming live here

today. i'd like to also send some love -- it's valentine's day, after all -- to our literary members and individual donors who make saturday's free events possible. if you would like to shower the book festival in your affection, we welcome your donations and have provided yellow buckets at the door as you exit. before we get standarded, please -- started please make sure your cell phone is turned off and, please, no flash photography. and for the question and answer portion, we ask you to come down here and line up right in front of the month so you can speak through the mic, and the tv can hear you well. if you're planning to attend the closing address with ann and christopher rice tomorrow, the correct time for the presentation is 3:00 at the trustees theater. immediately following this presentation, donald miller will be signing festival-purchased copies of his book in telfair square. we are especially grateful to jerry and jan --

[inaudible] and preston and barbara russell for their generous support of this amp's author. afternoon's author. donald l. miller is one of the most respected authorities on u.s. history and world war ii. he has authored nine books. his recent publication "supreme city: how jazz age manhattan gave birth to modern america," hones in on five key moments that turned the 19 to 1920s manhattan into a commercial and cultural epicenter. he is a professor of history at lafayette college ands has hosted, co-produced or served as historical consultant for more than 30 tv documentaries. his pbs program earned a peabody award for excellence. close to savannah's heart is his best-selling book, "masters of the air: america's bomber boys who fought the air war against nazi germany." miller writes the riveting history of the american 8th air force, the mighty 8th during world war ii. he serves on the board of the

trustees for the national museum of the mighty 8th air force in savannah. ladies and gentlemen, donald miller. [applause] >> thank you. it's been a long time since i've been in church. [laughter] it's -- yeah. it's great to be back in savannah. just get a performance this morning at 9:00 i want to clear up a little misconception. by the way, i get to savannah a lot, and this is just a terrific terrific place. did a lot of my research for masters of the air at the 8th

air force museum. we've been interviewing veterans out there recently. tom hanks and steve spielberg bought the book, and we're making a ten-part hbo dramatic series on it, and we just finished the scripts an hour ago. [laughter] we have to present them to tom hanks this week. so everybody's a little nervous. [applause] so lest i be accused of false advertising, i noticed live on booktv, donald miller on jazz. well not quite. while i love jazz and duke elington is one of the major characters in my book i write about jazz-age new york. and jazz age, of course, is a term that was coined by -- name the decade -- coined by f. scott fitzgerald to capture the propulsive energy of the 1920s. and i take one part of the

'20s midtown manhattan. and although it's been 20-some days since book was published it kind of feels like 20-some years. because i've entered the new world. i'm writing another book and this is a civil war saga set in 1863 in vicksburg mississippi. and when you do that you go outside that world building the characters, the characters who in turn fashion that world, and you're in there with them.

you decide who gets into the world. you're noah. you decide who gets on the ark what animal. and then when you're finished, it's a sad thing actually, to finish a book. because you leave that all behind. and you can never really enter that world again in the same way you once entered it. as a builder of world, as a creator of the world. all you can do is enter, as the reader does, as a visitor. and that can be exciting but not for the author. i tend to kind of dump it when it's done. because you have to. you have to be totally immersed many your new world. and for the -- in your new world. and for the reader, it can be a very exciting experience because everything you see in this world is new hopefully, and hopefully exciting and has pull to it. but, sadly the writer can't enter that world in the same way. so i would, i could never go back and reread i i never have

one of my own works. but i hope today i can do justice to the book that i spent so long writing. it's not the book. this happens a lot in the writing community, it's not the book that a i set out to write. -- that i set out to write. originally big, grand idea. i was going to do new york end of world war i to the beginning of world war ii, boom and bust and do all five boroughs, all of new york city. but then, as so often happens in writing, not long into the research i was drawn to another topic. and a story, be you will -- if you will within the larger story. and that was the story of the sudden and rather spectacular emergence of midtown in the 1920s as the epicenter of new york city. now, you have to understand that for 300 years lower manhattan

dominated new york city almost was new york city to the world. then in the '20s there was this sudden eruption of midtown. and to give you a sense in 1919 there was not a single skyscraper north of 47th street. nine years later, half of new york's skyscrapers are in midtown. a new building goes up in midtown every 57 minutes in the '20s. so this is one of -- and i don't exaggerate -- i think one of the great city-building decades in all of history. and it's a process that is accompanied by -- and i deal with the building boom, i deal with the architecture, i deal with the people who built the buildings and i deal the with the workers who constructed the build, some of them mohawk indians -- and i deal with the cultural revolution that

accompanied it that created in a sense, helped to create modern america. for me, the '20s and for my students, i think the '20s are exciting because we start to recognize ourselves in the '20s. it's hard for me to envision having a conversation with jane adams who would be entrancing and wonderful and things like that, but i can see sitting and having a conversation with f. scott fitzgerald somewhere in a café here in savannah. he's a modern person. and the '20s is a modern decade. it's when we became, if you will recognizable. so it was an exciting period to deal with. and the book all books have a kind of a spine to them. you have of to have something to hold it together. some people call these things tropes. i never knew what that meant. but for me, it was the year 1927. and, of course, in that year david of sarnov founded nbc the

first national radio network and a guy named fred french built the first terrifically tall building. it still stands on fifth avenue north of 42nd street. 27, of course is the year of charles lindbergh's flight from new york to paris and his return and the parade they had for him in new york. four million people show up for this parade. it's a fantastic time. fitzgerald perhaps captured it best. he writes this: in that year, he says, the tempo of the city changed, it changed sharply. the parties were bigger, the morals were looser the liquor was cheaper. the jazz age raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money. man, i wish i could have written that. [laughter] so new york was in the vanguard

of transformations that would make the 20th century the american p century. you have you have the rise of commercial radio, you have the rise of tabloid journalism, you have the invention of television, you have the spread through radio and records of this pulsating urban music called jazz with armstrong and ellington. you have the emergence of spectator sports where 100, 120,000 people show up for a prize fight. 59,000 come to yankee stadium. it just had never happened before. and it's -- i try the tell this story through a series of biographies. and there are about three dozen major characters, and i have a cast of characters at the front of the book. most of them -- and i should say this too, one of the great challenges that every writer faces when you start to create these characters and incidents is connecting --

[inaudible] well that's a q&a and i'm going to leave a lot of time for the q&a. somebody throw a, fire a spitball at me, you know when you get tired of this. maybe we could talk about writing as a process, how you put together books. we have a lot of authors who could join the conversation. but my characters are the makers and shapers of this world that i've talked about. and most of them are from west of the hudson and east of the danube. they're outsiders. they're not native new yorkers. and ask about halfway through the book -- and this often happens with writers -- i kind of realized what i was writing. i red rah a -- read a passage from one of my favorite writers, e.b. white. and he wrote a classic called "here is new york."

and he writes this: it's the person who was born elsewhere and came to new york in quest for something that accounts for new york's high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment its dedication to the arts and its incomparable achievements. and that in a great quote there -- [inaudible] i think captures the zeitgeist in my book. he wrote that every american is eaten up with a long immediate to rise. and that is -- long need to rise. and that is what this book is about. i teach american history. so often in american history, all the kids learn in the classroom is about expectation. and, for example we'll read in my class on urban history upton sinclair's "the jungle," and that's a human meat grinder where the meat is cut up, and so are the humans. and books like that have to be written.

but what's missing from that book and missing from so many classrooms, i think, is, well, did anybody ever get out of this place? did anybody ever rise above these circumstances? yes, they did. they crawled out of that place. a lot of them. including people from my own family. i come from a family of railroad workers and coal miners in northeastern pennsylvania. my people called out. -- crawled out. but the point is how they made it is hugely hugely interesting and hugely important. it's thes process of how -- it's the process of how we became the country we are, okay? and so a lot of the book deals with people who are very successful, but it takes you from the time when they were hugely unsuccessful and shows you how they did it. both common people just trying to make it into the working class and get some recognition from dire poverty or people who rose rocket-like to the top in 10 or 15 years, people like

david sarnov. well, so my characters come into new york fresh. they plant their flags, and they try to to refashion this city's economy and its culture and it's like a hegalian dialectic. they change new york, new york changes them. as jack dempsey once said, the boxer, he came into new york about 126 pounds and got the hell beat out of him first time he fought in new york city and nobody recognized him nobody wrote about him. he said i finally figured out something about new york. you might want new york, but new york has to want you. steinbeck had the same experience before he wrote "grapes of wrath." he tried and tried and tried and he said it wasn't the city it was me. and until i was able to cope with its energy and had some iraq in addition of my -- some reck misof my own -- recognition of my own could i live in new

york in a settled way. and he did. so a lot of these characters in the book as i i said came from nothing. sarnov comes from a belarusian village that's so backwards it's medieval. he hadn't seen a ship or anything that moved that wasn't pulled by a horse until he was 11 years old and came to new york with his mother. one of the characters the tex ritter a big boxing promoter in the '20s. he's a saloon keeper from the canadian klondike, actually. he built modern madison square garden. and he taught boxing promoters a lasting lesson that every successful fight has to be built around a big story. i got into this book, and i like boxing, but i really liked writing about box. and, actually -- boxing. and, actually with i thought good writers liked boxing hemingway, mailer. guess who was the best?

be joyce carol oates. a fantastic book on boxing. and she does the great dempsey in that as well. and, of course, he's ricker's meal ticket. he's a hard hitter from the western mountain country, he turns boxing into a million dollar industry. $5 million gates at new york city and promoted -- the next million dollar gate is ali/frazier. babe ruth from the baltimore dock yards, he turns baseball from small ball bunt and hit and run things like that, into long ball. and like dempsey, he's a slugger. kind of strange, there's lou gehrig, born in new york, columbia lou there's gene tunney who beat t the great dempsey, a native new yorker from greenwich village, it was always the big hitters, the outsiders, the ruths and the dempseys who captured the crowds. others came in with a lot of money.

joejoe paterson from chicago, he's a breakaway. a one-time socialist, the rebel in the family. he comes to new york city in 1919, and he found the daily news on a shoe string. six years later it's the best-selling newspaper in the world, not just in new york city, and new yorkers are learning about sports and movie characters and everything else in a new way and reading it in a new way. and the tabloids, of course have never gotten away. and what i tried to do with these characters -- and this is important, i think, for the story -- knowing the future, knowing what's going the happen can be a tremendous liability for a writer of history. because then you slant your whole story toward that. if i write the story on the '20s knowing that the depression's on the horizon, the whole story becomes a prelude to the depression. but nobody in the '20s knew the depression was coming.

david mccullough sr. always reminds me that the most inaccurate phrase in the english language is "the foreseeable future." the future can't be foreseen, okay? so i think what good historians and good historians are good storytellers. they have to get behind the characters' eyes and see the world the way they did. in the '20s, it was blue skies forever. and that's the way it was seen by the characters. and so you take away so much of your story, so much of the contingency, so much of the excitement when you take away their decision making, when you take away -- unless you take it to spot where they're making the decision and there's this way to go and that way to go and it's a choice and a difficult choice, then you start to understand. then you achieve whatever your story tries to achieve; empathy not sympathy. empathy. so it seemed absolutely unimaginable to new yorkers that that in the midst of this boom and

with a mayor like stylish popular jimmy walker that this new york would crumble into depression and walker himself would be brought down and forced to resign by franklin roosevelt for charges of corruption. nobody could foresee that. nobody could see that. now, although great parts of my book are devoted to baseball boxing and proto hix i -- prohibition, i wanted to today talk about what i think is the central drama of the book, this building of sudden eruption of modern midtown. now, the story really gips -- and it is like a once upon a time thing -- it begins with completion of grand central terminal used to be grand central station. and that was finished in 1913. second largest project at the time next to panama canal. and that project was set in motion by a disaster a train crash. all of new york at that time on the east siderom 42nd street the only we could get across it was on the iron catwalks.

smoke, swirling so anything else and train tunnels that lead into that railyard. ge commuter train in 1913 came barreling through one of those tunnels and hit the train in front of it. led also a commuter train and the .. carnage was unbelievable. it caused the new york state legislature to mandate that the new york central which ran that railroad at the station, that they electrified, they are today, to electrified the trains. now, the engineer who worked for the new york central, no one knows who he is, i just discovered him like many characters in the book, i just found out about him and i thought i knew new york. but he is the railroad's chief engineer. he goes even further than that. he takes this -- this place of

swirling smoke and ash and eliminates it, and he builds a roof over his electrified trains and on the roof there's nothing, from 42nd street to 56th street. looked like a parking lot. and what he does is he sells the land and the air rights -- that's a new thing at the time to developers -- and within seven years, eight years after that you have modern park avenue. almost exactly the way it looks today. straight as a sunbeam as ella fitzgerald said in a wonderful piece she wrote. zelda has gatsby coming out of grand central and then down park avenue in a wonderful wonderful piece, that her husband stole and put under his name but we know she wrote it.

so -- with revenue plucked from the air he builds on the whole area an old railroad station an spire new city called terminal city. all the aover to the east river. a number of residents -- this is how things work together and how they connect. a number of the new residents on park avenue and what they're building on park avenue are highrise apartments skyscrapers. people had never in the history of the world lived that high before. the residents of the old park after knew were vanderbilts. it was called vanderbilt alley, and from 42nd street central park each side of the street was lined with terrifically large and ugly vanderbilt mansions, and most of them are just empty of any life. the widows survive. the millionaires are dead. their children are gone, and not enough irish made maids in the city to staff them.

so they sell to tremendously aggressive young jewish realer toes from the ghetto on the east side. the minute the realtors buy the buildings and mansions, including the largest one in the world, they tear them down and build modern fifth avenue. bergdahl, saks fifth avenue from herald square, and adam gimble turns it into a great merchandize march, and you have the transformation in mid-town. another vanderbilt, ann vanderbilt, moves to the river, place called sutton place. one of the mose exclusive places in new york city. and she generality tried it. she and her sexual partner, ann morgan, they move in and turn the place around, and women are such a big part of my book. the queens of upper fifth avenue where heleny rubenstein and -- although they had shops blocks

from each other, they hate one another. the other one reuben stein, and even though they're -- the salons are so close arguably they never talked to each other the buyer time they're in new york city, but they're great stories. arden is a canadian farmer's daughter. started in new york has a hairdresser. reubenstein, the daughter of a polish kerosene dealer. both of them 15 years later are not million areas. they're billionaires. now, before the 1920s, only fast women wore powder and paint, makeup. now, with the movies, you have to come in with the closeups, clara bell and have to put on eye shadow, girls start to wear and it it becomes like smoking badge of independence. and the beauty business becomes huge. in fact americans in 1927 spent more on beauty products than they did on electricity.

that's how big the business is. so, it's a different world. and there's -- this is one of the fun things about writing a book like that. you get to explore and find these new worlds that you thought weren't there and existed. i was walking through sutton place, and i stumbled upon -- i can't believe i'd never been there -- tudor city, which is only a five-mint walk from grand central terminal along the east river. build by a guy named fred french, build the first skyscraper on fifth avenue. a self-contained community for me middle class in the heart of mid-town manhattan, and a good look at affordable living living in manhattan at a golf course, and i had never heard of fred french. i had read the novel "underworld" and the to characters, a mother and tower, walk into the lobby of the fred french building. you couldn't do that today. david mccullough worked in the

fred french building. and the mother says to the daughter, who in the world is fred french? so i got in the car and went to new york and i found the building. and the lobby is spectacular, and the building is a classic art deco building. it had beautiful setbacks. and fred french turned out to be an absolutely entransing character. he looked like a babbot. he is -- americans are buying stocks in the 20s, buying stocks in his construction company, and after he builds the skyscraper, he goes and walks regularly in new york city and discovers this identity lated spot at the end of 42nd street and says i'm goal to build an affordable place nor middle class in opposition to park avenue. and he does it.

he is 2007 the titanic figures of the 1920s one of the wonder men of new york city. there's a lot of these kind of people in new york city. just go to the cluster of building around 42 until street put up in the 1920s, you can start with the chrysler building, for example. now, everybody knows what a chrysler is, okay? would of my editors didn't know there was a person walter chrysler. walter chrysler came from the kansas plains. his father was a locomotive engineer and he was an oil boy, oiling machines in a rail shop when he was 11 years old. and went to college. got a job with general motors, thought the new age, the auto age, and in 1928, after he introduces the first car in his name the chrysler 6 he decides he is going to build the tallest building in the world and announces it in the new york

newspaper. everyes watching him. buys a plot where the chrysler building is today. the same day he makes that announcement, group of hustlers speculators, from downtown start to build the building called 40 wall. and that is now trump building, and 40 wall, and its people -- 40 wall people announce they're going to build the tallest building in the world. so the sky race for two years in new york city between chrysler and 40 wall. and in 1929, just before the crash, all the new york newspapers named the winner 4 , wall. the building is finished and taller then the chrysler building. the chrysler wasn't going to be beaten. he is unstoppable. he builds in the cone of the building at the top inside the building, inside the tower, he has his engineers build something -- a long steel needle called the vertex, 147 feet long. and then one day -- nobody knows

exactly what day it was -- historians tell you they do. they're wrong. no knows. >> he raises the thing into the sky and at 10,064 feet the chrysler building is suddenly the tallest building -- the tallest structure -- you have to figure in the eiffel tower. he wanted to beat that. it's the tallest structure in the world. he wins the race but loses 11 months later when the empire state building goes up. so, this is -- these are the kind of stories -- that's what i'm interest. ow 77 story building. the thinks he is the top of the world and is bested by somebody. that's kind of new york city. and it's -- i think that building -- what i try to do in the book is i try to talk about the people behind the building who put it up. there is the tower, and it is hot jazz in stone and steel. it's a near perfect i think, representation of what i think of mid-town manhattan it's

speed, style, romantic excess. lit up at night. the architect, william van allen. nobody knows who he is. he built it with the -- the trim with new material that is steel that doesn't rust and in inside he had the artist build -- you can see this -- the lobby is all fixed up recently made over -- he built this wonderful mural to the workers. not the architects but the workers who put up the structure. it's new york's commanding testimony to those blue collar workers who put up its art deco towers. now, right across the street from the chrysler building is a building -- again i had never paid any attention to, the shannon building which at the time was the third largest building in new york. you walk in there and i had the same feeling. who iser win shannon. well it's still standing a 66

story tower. it's not lit up like it used to be. people from new jersey described it as like an island floating in the sky in the 1920s. and chanon was in broadway. he sold hole cities theater, and he came out of nowhere and he is -- 1919, he is the son of a ukrainian family from brooklyn who went back to the home country, tried to make it here, and then came back to the united states. he is jobless, veteran, broke. ten years later is a multimillionaire builder. times describes him as a master of the mid-town skyline and is being touted with fred french as one of the wonder men of new york estimate when you go in the lobby, right there is a c. city of opportunity, and he describes the building is autobiographical. mumford used to say explore cities and you can read them like you can read the pages of a

book by reading their architecture. every stone has a tongue. every tongue tells a story. buildings are the concentrated expressions of a civilization. and they can be told in scene almost autobiographical, and he is using chanon how to make it in new york city. so buildings do have lives, and so by 1930, -- now we go to the culture revolution -- by 1930 new yorkers are calling 42nd 42nd street the valley of giants. the daily news building, the chrysler, the lincoln building things like that. and it's a new new york. all been just -- railroad yard and some boarding houses, a schaffer brewery and a piano factory. so it's a whole new world.

and -- when you go tall in cities -- this is new york's problem today -- it's going very, very tall, and they don't have the transportation system to support the population massing that's going to result when this recent skyscraper revolution has reached the climax. it's just not going to happen. but new york in the 10920s built big everywhere and started building to move people. they built a sixth avenue subway, just like the third of any subway. they built the gw bridge. two months after the gw bridge they break ground on the gw bridge the holland tunnel is finished. that's the first vehicular tunnel of that length in the entire world. who knows who clifford holland is? i have no idea who he was. one day i asked a guy in a toll booth. he says, hey, jack look behind the booth. there's a bust of him. i said who the hell is going to

see that? that's clifford holland. a young engineer out of harvard, came down, had an idea. people now how to build penn station is an example. but nobody knew how to clean the gasses, the carbon monoxide gasses out of tunnels. so most of the engineers at the time said just drive big fans drive the bad air out. and holland says spouse you have a fire. you'll have a holocaust with the opinion blowing like that. so he says we have to tame the wind. if you're in new york today, there's four buildings one in the river, one out of the river, and one in the river on the jersey side one out of the river, inconspicuous looking. they look like venetian blinds. you open the blind, in comes the wind. it's a wind factory, then the winds speed it up. with gigantic dynamos and then the wind is tamed.

it's taken down underground shot into the tunnel right at hub cap level. the only place to feel it. and then bad air is sucked out of the building, and the air is changed in the tunnel every 90 seconds. and that's how every vehicular tunnel in the world is built today. and that's how the lincoln tunnel is built, et cetera, et cetera, and at the same time -- this is an era of herculean engineering achievement. the brooklyn bridge, and the gw. the first bridge to cross right at washington's crossing when he was escaping the british, to cross the river. and a guy i'd hardly known about built it. when you pull away from it what really captures you is the thinness of the deck, and ammann, swiss immigrant, didn't know if it could handle the loads it would be subjected to-especially at commuter time. but it did, and it's one of the

most beautiful bridges in the world. he was interviewed at the end of his life. he built every major bridge in new york after that culminating in the verranzano bridge, the last bridge built in new york city. he would pass the bridge and bow his head every time he passed it. and while all the construction is going on it's like it reminded me of building a medieval cathedral, which were urban spectacles which people came to see in new york when you're throwing up the frame of a skyscraper where the birds don't fly. this apt-like looking men are working on the steel frames, and people would come -- urban theater. people would come with binoculars to watch them. sky boys they called them. and a lot of the sky boys were mohawk indians who came from a reservation of the st. lawrence river on the other side of the

canadian border, and they commuted and lived in brooklyn. they came here on the subway, and they threw up those things. and a lot of people in the paper are claiming the mohawks are genetically coded to handle height. that's just racist. it's a dangerous occupation but it's a learned experience, and there's -- don't forget, see the pictures. a lot of times when i do my talks in new york we can't do this in the chapel but you should see the images of these guys. working without safety harnesses, without hard hats. they're working up there without boards, so if a flaming rivet falls to the ground it can put a hole in a person's head. highly dangerous work. ironworkers suffered one violent death only average for a every 33 hours on the job and one guy said to me we don't die, we are killed.

a lot of these guys were at the site of the world trade center building another building when those two planes went into the trade center and i interviewed them after that and that was of course, something never, ever to be forgotten. but the -- despite the danger, these guys almost -- how die say it -- almost embraced the danger because they come from a culture, the mohawk culture, where the women are in charge and the women run the village. they're the big decisionmakers mohawk wives todays forbidden to touch heir husband's work belts or tools. they're symbols of sexuality. and especially the bolt belt which sits right over the man's crop. so it's a way of enhancing their sense of self-esteem, and another ironworker told me, we're makers of new york we're

building the mountains of new york city, and so they are. so i try to slip down in the book and take on these kind of people as well, people who are struggling at the bottom. dock workers in the greatest harbor in new york city, horribly exploited italian and jewish girls working the garment industry, which is moving uptown, close to the fashion center, fifth avenue and on, what is renamed seventh avenue, fashion avenue. and i take you to the last part of new york, second to last part of new york i'll deal with here, and that's hell's kitchen. it's been general -- gentrified. when i was doing prohibition issue thought who are the big gangs in the biggest gangster in new york was bill dui. -- bill dwyer. he was not in the encyclopedia.

and neither is any madden who ran new york in those years and big bill dwyer is a former chelsea longshoreman. he joins up with a guy named frank costello, later a big mafia figure, and they join up with an irishman from london named owny madden used to me called openy the killer. prohibition gives these little guys small-time hoods, an opportunity to form what became a multimillion dollar syndicate with ocean-going vessels and airplanes to scout for coast guard patrols. they had an arsenal of lawyers, paid off the new york police, paid off the u.s. coast guard in washington dc ask they were into the government of new york city through a ganymede jimmy hines, a big honcho. and historians run away from

crime. they don't like to deal with it. criminals don't write letters. there's no documents or manuscripts. it's hard to construct it. but i went down to the new york archives one day and asked ted cobb, the director. i said do you have a lucky luciano paper. he says nobody ever asked for them. we got them. i came the next day, went to my desk and i thought they delivered a washer and a drier, and the first thing i found was a lamp with a cord on it-an evidence cord, with an evidence label on it, somebody got strangled with it. in there also, in addition to revolvers, are testimony after testimony after testimony, confessions 0 mobsters. you know the idea of not squealing on your brothers? bullshit. doesn't happen. these guys told everything. and new york had fabulous crime reporters who were interest these guys. people like walter winchell who

knew everything they were doing. so great reporters, great documentation, you can talk to them. also interviewed some sons of gangsters, ernie madden becomes one of the major characters in my book. the best written section of the book. but lastly, only two blocks from the garment center three blocks from hell's kitchen, is times square. now, that was always the great white way but 42nd street below times square or what used to be called long acres square, the area north of that is developed in the 1920s, and it's not the great white way because it's technicolor, and the signs the advertising signs, move. you see beer bottles and officers pea -- rivers of

peanuts, it was called a conspiracy against the night. some writers say you could see the faces of human beings clearly across the street at midnight. so this is a whole new broadway and guess what? legitimate theater is where it is today because of what happened in the '20s. all the pig movie theaters come in silent movies start making it big and they're building huge theaters. roxie built a theater somebody jokingly said the largest theater since the fall of rome. 5,500 people. five stories high. you can run 16, 17 shows a day in there. double features and things like that. a legitimate theater can't compete with that. so the movies drive all of the small theaters, legitimate theaters to where they are to the side streets of man hat d manhattan, and the premiere becomes a new york city event. they make them the hollywood but

to make them go they have to make them in new york city. this guy, rockefeller is a fantastically interesting character. he comes into new york fresh. he is the son of a jewish peddler from minnesota. he joins the marine corps, fights in china, comes back and starts selling magazines in the pennsylvania coal regions around strand ton. falls in love with the owner's daughter of a hot dog stand. the owner tells him okay, he stuck around for a while, a minor league baseball player in scranton. stuck around for a while and the owner said you want to marry my daughter you have to work in the bar for a year help notices there's an empty room in the back. that's the community, slavic and italian miners, i can see my family in there raising hell. in the back room they would have parties but thaw true the place up. so roxie decides -- he walks in

the snow gets a coup of reels of film buys a projector, gets the seats drops the sheet gets the seats from a local funeral home -- that's a problem because if there's a viewing no movie. and he is showing these films. he is a presenter. long story but five years later, he is the biggest movie guy in new york city because they could never get enough people in these theaters with -- didn't make enough good silent films to fill the theater. so they had the prologues and he would do a prologue. a orchestra ballet dancers you name it. animals on stage. and the prologue became more important than the movie. as lowle says we don't sell tickets to movies, we sell tickets to theaters and that was roxie, then roxie -- during the pro log they give him the microphone and the starts to

interpret what is going on e. people love roxy. goodnight america, that kind of thing. roxy has the first variety show on radio. four years later 1926, he found nbc puts roxy's radio show, his friday show on the air and it's the most popular show in radio history up to that point. so again strugglers making it like this. and, finally there's a guide named florence ziegfeld. ziegfeld starts out as a carny hustler in chicago. his father was great classical musician but he ran away with the wild bill wild west show. so he runs an act they had a sort of the strongest man in the world have been chicago society would come in and feel his muscles for a time, sort of the beginning. he had a dog show in chicago, dancing dykes of denmark.

these ducks would start dancing like this on the stage and the society for the prevention of coated animals came in and shut him down. they found what they were dancing on was this heated piece of metal. but, of course, he he comes in it creates the follies. they are a sensation. everybody went to them. famous critic couldn't stay away from the follies. and then in 1927 this master of light entertainment running the follies for like 13 years up until then, hits it big with a plain nobody expected to come out of his mind. showboat changed american theater as much as bill haley was a great rival of sarnoff change to radio. .. have

a mixed cast. half white and half black. and it's the first play ever to deal seriously with a racial issue. in this case misogyny. and it was a sensation, and we all know "hold man river." and it changed his career. that year 1927-1928 -- that's how seasons run in the theater world, and he had five big hits on broadway five big hits, and he transformed american theater as a result of this. but he also, like so many characters, fred french so many characters died broke. because it's the old sense of the greek term, your greatest strength is sometimes your greatest weakness. he was a gambler. he was a gambler. he gambled on