tv Book Discussion on Timeless CSPAN August 10, 2015 11:21pm-12:02am EDT
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seems like there's some selective sentencing and also it is appointed by the precedent in any comments that you have would be fantastic. >> anyone that thinks that there is no selective or political in the country come you have to be really naïve. that's what i think. and that is the reality. i want to make this clear i've worked with some of the best united states attorneys in this country. i've worked with some of the best prosecutors and grand one of the most substantial investigations in new york history prosecuted through state and federal organizations and worked with some of the best
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people i've known in law enforcement. but keep in mind persecutors of the performance evaluation is based on their conviction rate. the performance evaluation is based on the positive press for the office. for anybody to think that there's there is not a selective prosecution, i just think that you are really naïve. on the sentencing issue i don't have a problem with people that are involved in white-collar crimes that we punished them by making them pay restitution and pay fines, double their fines,
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do whatever. i don't have a problem with that. i don't think everybody has to go to prison to pay for the mistakes. it's like you get a parking violation. i'm not saying the same thing for the white-collar criminals but i can assure you there are many white-collar criminals that were convicted for things they didn't even know that they did wrong. there was no criminal intent. that we but we put them in prison. i just think that it's wrong. your message seems to be getting some bipartisan support of the presidential candidate level candidates you have candidates from ted cruz to hillary clinton
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if you think that this should be more at the national level and how do you think that this issue should be on the national agenda? for the last year and a half and right up until the time i created this coalition, i had just about every member of the house and senate judiciary with the staff and counsel pushing this issue. i strongly belief that in 2016 presidential election the criminal justice reform has to be one of the top five domestic issues on the next president's plate area as it stands today is unsustainable financially. we looked at and have seen state governments in the country that are really aggressively engaged
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in the criminal justice reform doing tremendous work. the law and order n. texas if they can get involved in the kernel justice reform "-end-quotes on prisons, create alternatives that are in incarceration and do the things that they are doing they are doing than any of her state in the country can do it. most importantly, the federal government has to follow suit. in a state governments everyone will buy it a budget. i had a 1 billion-dollar budget. if i run out of money, where does it go? i have to live in my budget. the federal system just puts more money. that's a problem. so we really have the judiciary.
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i want to go to new hampshire and talk to the groups. i think it is extremely important that they know how important this issue is so they can create the debate so when the candidates show up we should be asking what are you going to do about this? they know the issues and i think for the audience if i may i would point out a couple things you can comment on. one of the reporters commented on the selective prosecution and my point would be to discuss the abuse of discretion of the persecution.
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there were individuals you heard being discussed. there were other individuals that don't have the headline in and the name recognition that you know personally suffered greatly at with many were considering it i don't know if you discussed it before. number two regarding the constitutional rights when you are being tried in the criminal case if you could share the criminal speech and how that was courtesy of. >> i don't want to get into the whole case doesn't want you to read the book. i was brought up on charges with new york city charges there was a new york state investigation that lasted for 18 months a
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really thorough grand jury investigation and at the conclusion. there were the ethics violations one they didn't put something on the conflict of interest report and there was an ethics violation and number two. they went before the state judge and they said there was no quid pro quo between me and the contractor. the contractors were contracted to do things and i had to pay 220,000-dollar claim for a quarter of a million dollars.
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i paid the fine. i was told it was over. the investigation is over. that's what i was told by my attorney. and i was told by the prosecutor that lasted for several weeks until i woke up one morning that the federal government initiated the investigation around the department and the tax had already been paid and the apartment renovations have been dealt with in bronx. i went through a nine-month, 12 month grand jury investigation for only. and they brought charges for the same thing that might already have been solved.
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tuesday banking and policy experts to talk about the credit and debit card transactions in the us. we'll be live again with in the u.s. with protect my data starting here on c-span2. >> with it senates in its august break will see book tv on c-span2 starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern and at the end of the summer will look for to book tv special programs. saturday september 5 will be
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live with the nations capital for the 15th annual book festival bowl followed on sunday by alive in-depth program with former second lady and senior fellow of the american enterprise institute, dick cheney. the sunday night on q&a institute for policy antiwar activist phyllis bennett on u.s. foreign policy since 911. recent negotiations with iran and the war and terror. who is isis and what other area origins and why they so violent? these are important questions that are addressed in the book. what's more important is something we can do about is what is the u.s. policy regarding isis, why isn't isn't it working? can we really gone to war against terrorism, are we doing the war wrong? or should there be a war against
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terrorism at all? >> sunday night night at eight eastern and pacific. >> coming up tonight on c-span two, book tv and primetime features biographies in my mars, first lucinda franks on her books timeless love, morgan thal and me. and the "vietnam rough riders", after that pamela newkirk on the life of auto bango, later, former new york city bernard character on his memoir from jailer to jailed. >> next lucinda franks discusses his her memoir timeless love, morgan thal and me. it tells the story of her life with former manhattan district attorney margaret rogan found.
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>> now it is my great pleasure to introduce our speaker lucinda franks. she is the author of timeless love at morgan power me. a memoir of her unconditional love from robert morgenthaler who we are so honored to have here today. >> her other book includes waiting out a war, the exile of private john pagano, wild apples and my father secret war which is another memoir. a former separator but the new york times, she has written for the new yorker, the new york times magazine, she won a pulitzer prize prize on her life and death of diana alton, a graduate of arnold bossert college, she lives in new york city with
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robert and morgan paul. >> lucinda. >> thank you rob, and thank you everyone for coming out on this rainy afternoon. it is such an honor to be here and to walk in the footsteps of the greatest presidents the nation has ever known. i spent many wonderful hours with robert clark on earthing different letters between the roosevelts and the rogan falls, and so there is a time when i thought this was my second home. i was brought up in a republican enclave called wesley massachusetts. there was not a democrat insight
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, the john birch society had headquarters there and eleanor roosevelt was suspect to the population of wealth fully and considered secretly dangerous. i was a little bit of a renegade and eleanor roosevelt became my hero. by the time i was 10, i was was reading every book i could find on her in the privacy of my closet. in the department of 1 degree of separation i fell in love with the man eleanor roosevelt considered like her son. while i was reading stories about eleanor, robert m morgenthau was being read to buy eleanor roosevelt herself. bob loved eleanor, or
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mrs. roosevelt as he still calls her today. he thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met and she was to be his surrogate mother for the rest of her life. i want to tell you a little bit about the premise of my book, timeless. it's a love story that explores how an unlikely relationship like ours has endured for more than three decades. when i met the new york district attorney, morgenthaler he was an icon of the establishment dedicated to upholding the law. i was a radical hippie determined to destroy it. moreover, he was almost 30 years older than me. we were totally different.
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that we should come together with almost an oxymoron. but the book is a story of how we realized that sometimes people behind their façades, are hauntingly alike. timeless is revealing our illusions and our highs in our lows, how we developed strategies for reinventing our marriage when it floundered, but one of my favorite parts of writing timeless was the revelations i found out about the close connection between the roosevelts and my husband's parents the henry morgenthaler's, they both lived in dutchess county, frankly and eleanor of course lived here in springwood, and hyde park, and
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the morgenthaler's live not too far down the highway in fish company. franklin and eleanor spent their young adult, franklin and henry spent their young adult years together becoming fast friends and political allies. when fdr first became governor of new york he appointed henry who farmed 300 acres of apple orchard which are still in existence today. he appointed him as chief agricultural counselor and then the conservation commissioner of the state. after fdr fdr became president, henry became his secretary of the treasury. now this isn't widely known but henry junior was perhaps f dr's closest advisor.
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really intimate advisor. he he helped developed a new deal with fdr and he re- arms the country,, ordered the rearmament of the country in preparation of world war ii. the two men loved hatching novel ideas. when war broke out in europe, they wanted to help england but they wanted to do it behind the back of congress, which was dead set against u.s. involvement in world war ii. so, they assembled many warplanes and tanks, brought them up to the northern new york city and rolled them over onto canadian soil, then they flew them to england.
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they were technically obeying the u.s. neutrality act of the congress of america, but only technically. after america entered the war at least one secret meeting was held between churchill and roosevelt at the morgenthaler farm. the two powerful men drank, laughed, talked bravely, all of which was captured in a home will be taken by henry. one amusing scene in the movie depicts my husband, bright faced young and interest whites, making mint juleps. he served a mint julep to churchill who, with his protruding belly, was sitting back like an oyster on the half shell. when he took one taste of a poor
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bobs mint juleps, he grimaced grimaced and went back to his glass of whiskey. as i mentioned eleanor roosevelt and my husband had a very close relationship. when bob was a small boy he had a series of mastoid infections and back in those toys there was no penicillin, there is no cure for mastoid infections and many people died from them. during one terrible bout of infection his parents were away on a round the world trip, eleanor eleanor roosevelt took it upon herself to visit him every single day to soothe him, reassured him when he had a gas
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mask were a mask that gave him laughing gas over his face, in which point he was screaming because he was draining his ear and they were trying to put them out. eleanor eleanor held his hand and talk quietly to him, when she bought him a komodo that she got from japan he worked constantly, even what it was too small. later, eleanor roosevelt showed her amazing humility to bob. bob was in amherst at that point, he warred with the rebellious group of people who are trying to oust the president, he asked his friend
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eleanor roosevelt to comment talk to the students. who mostly, in in those days were american firsters, eleanor was going to make a speech that would change the college, which she did. did. however, when bob picked her up in his car she said quote old bobby, i am so nervous, i am i am just so nervous about speaking on quote and bob thought if the first lady of the united states is nervous about speaking then i can be nervous too. the two families that would attend the chador's birthday parties and fdr was in the habit of writing witty poems to eleanor morgenthaler, he knew that eleanor was a superior strategist, a realpolitik and kept henry the visionary, on the straight and narrow. that's one of fdr's poems to
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eleanor, quote eleanor i want to know what makes henry argue so, don't you get a chance at home to make his opinions known? on quote what i found fascinating and what a lot of people don't know, is how intimate the relationship was between eleanor roosevelt and eleanor morgenthaler. eleanor was one of the bright lights it to mrs. roosevelt's friends, they were quite similar nature. both were independent but they functioned as powers behind her husband. they were women of their time who counseled and positioned their men, but did so with an iron fist in a velvet plug. although mrs. roosevelt towered over mrs. morgenthaler eleanor
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was 6 feet tall, and eleanor morgenthaler was 5-foot four, the two look like twins. they were similar dresses, matching hats and they rode horseback together. their connection was so deep that in pictures they wanted their horses to look-alike, so the body of mrs. roosevelt's horse was trans posed on the horse beneath eleanor rogan fall. so so when you see these pictures of them they both have these white streaks on the horses down their noses and they look exactly alike. when they all went off to washington after fdr took office as president in early 1933, eleanor morgenthaler was the only friend who traveled with mrs. roosevelt. they drove around the country visiting the distant franchise
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and the poor to see exactly how they lived. they went to the tennessee valley to inspect wpa programs, charted by started by fdr and henry junior, they went down into a coal mine in west virginia and came up as much with black dust and shocked with the terrible conditions the manners miners worked under. you can be sure that mrs. roosevelt, as she would want to do march right back to the white house and got franklin to do something about it. once when the press was decrying the plight of underpaid, ill treated orange pickers who came up north to work on apple farms and other fruit farms, mrs. roosevelt proceeded to ceremoniously inspect the morgenthaler orchard. she pronounced the workers
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extremely well treated, ever after henry morgan paul junior was able to say quote mrs. roosevelt has given fishtailed arms a clean bill of health unquote. eleanor roosevelt had the uncanny ability to go to sleep as soon as she got into the front of her car. this preserved her formidable energy, unfortunately eleanor morgenthaler did not go to sleep, she was in the back of the car, she couldn't sleep but she kept up with her friend although after their trip she took to her bed for at least a day. the rarely quoted letters between the two eleanor's on earth in the roosevelt library show an unusual emotional bond between the two, they also give a rare glimpse of the character of eleanor morgenthaler, she was
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a mysterious woman, her husband henry junior refers to refuse to talk about her to his biographer and she's rarely spoken of by her family today. here in these letters, a hidden eleanor, beneath a hidden eleanor is discovered, beneath her iron fist there is a vulnerable woman who seems to be depressed about her health problems which led to her untimely death and on 1949. she was envious of eleanor roosevelt other friend and felt beneath her confident beside, sometimes unloved. the library has many letters from eleanor roosevelt to eleanor morgenthaler but only one has been preserved from mrs. morgenthaler to her friends.
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where are the rest of the correspondence, nobody knows. the evident robert clark speculates that mrs. morgan fall was so smitten with the first lady she preferred to hear her voice over the telephone, then right. i have a few letters which i left in the green room, thank you. sorry about that. [laughter] black bag. will get back to that in a minute. i have some letters written by eleanor roosevelt to eleanor morgenthaler which are kind of revealing. but that is timeless, it's not only about relationship it's also the political history of an era, if bob's and my journey through nearly four decades in
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the public eye as seen through applied private lands. robert morgan fall is on argue billy one of the great men of his era, he is the only prominent statesman left from the kennedy time, as da of new york he accomplished changes such as almost single-handedly wiping out the delft penalty in new york. he has made new law, indeed change the face of the law in america with many of his criminal cases, and he has invented prosecution of white-collar crime as we know it today. he is seldom stayed within his jurisdiction of new york county, and has gone offers sacred cows that the federal system hasn't dared to touch. his long rubber arm has
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stretched into porn waters cultivating a network of global espionage partners, including the most the british intelligent jensen the cia. he has unraveled the international money laundering and indicted nine presidents who are funding terrorist organizations. just before he retired at age 90, five years ago, bob caught two huge banks, credit suite and lloyd's of london who were conspiring to help iran build a nuclear bomb. in spite of the sanctions against iran the banks have laundered $1 billion for the iranian who ironically, use the the money to buy uranium and other material from america. there is much more to bob's investigation into international terrorism which have remained unpublicized until now. just to give you a little teaser from the book, 40 boxes of
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instruction and blueprints for 911 came into the possession of bob, sometime before the tragedy. he tried, and he tried, and he tried to warn the fbi and the cia, and they didn't listen. the fbi said the fbi said they didn't have an arabic translator to translate all this inflammatory material. i did research of my own after hearing this, and after 9/11, and put together various documents that pointed to the role of the intelligence agency in support of al qaeda. until they're ready to undertake their greatest attack on america. since i have the letter, we'll just backtrack a minute.
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these are letters, as i said that were written by eleanor roosevelt to eleanor morgenthaler ." dearest darling eleanor, i have always felt that you are hurt often by an imaginary things and have wanted to protect you. but if one is to have a healthy, normal relationship, i realize it must be on some kind of equal basis. you simply cannot be so easily hurt, life is too short to cope with it. much. much, much love always, eleanor. on quote dearest eleanor, i didn't say half of what we wanted when i was talking the other day, i want to love you so much, so i can't take away the
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feeling you have. it makes me unhappy to feel that it is whirring you, and i want to put my arms around you and keep away all the disagreeable things that have made you feel this way. dearest eleanor, it worries me to have you tire so easily, i wish i could give you some of my toughness, your children will all come out of any phases just as bob has done. they are such grand people, but then you and henry have been wonderful parents. my dear love, dear love, i must run to some wpa project. dearest eleanor, more love than i can tell you devotedly e. r. i first met robert morgenthaler on a stormy day in 1972 with my hair in strings and my white and it can't show dripping all over, i had been assigned by united press international to interview
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new york's mafia buck sting, u.s. attorney who had just been for fired by nixon for investigating the president crooked cronies. i asked so many questions that morgenthaler thought i was either the dumbest, or the smartest reporters had ever met. when the interview was published he decided i wasn't the dumbest. he couldn't get the rug i had been wearing, at as he called it out of his mind. he wanted to ask me out though he had concerns about praying on an innocent lamb, but he pursued me anyway. so there was a little problem, you you see i was harboring a draft resistor.
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roger the dodger never would tell me when bob had called. finally, bob got me a job on the new york times where i would have to answer my own phone. to me, robert morgenthaler was strictly a new source. i never i never had a clue we would be anything else, after all i was in my 20s and he was an old man of 54. besides, i too was rising in my career, doing stories like red dye number two, if you remember that red dye permeated our food supply and i found two systems and with the fbi who gave me printouts of how these experiments proved that wax got cancer after ingesting tiny amounts of the dye. there is a public outcry and the
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fda banned the dye. bob would usually call me with 12 story tips, one day he got up his nerve and called me for a date. he said, after i reluctantly accepted, he said we are going to arthur's questions jurors home for a party for jimmy carter. well, i dressed up in my best silk louse, peasant blouse, my bellbottoms, my platform shoes and i thought i looked pretty spiffy. we walked into the home and there was a ghastly fairyland of silk and satin, and feather boa was coiled around swanson next. i turned around and was going to walk out the door and instead i
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walked directly into jack lee kennedy onassis. now she hadn't been seen for several years and the society ladies, through drop their jaws and smile that heard and couldn't stop smiling. i looked up at bob and he was smiling to, but not a jackie kennedy. he was smiling at me. eighteen months later we were engaged, our friends and family went into shock. it was as though the pope had asked for the hands of a squeaky frown in marriage. [laughter] professional women and men 30 years apart just didn't get married in the 1970s. his cousins urged him to see a psychiatrist.
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so faced with all this opposition we of course got married. there is a question people don't ask me about timeless, although i can see how much they would like to. there was a time i prayed this question wouldn't be asked but we just celebrated our 30th anniversary and tomorrow is father's day, so let me answer this question before you can't ask it. did i marry my father? do we marry people similar to our mothers and fathers? i'd like to reply by reading a short passage from timeless. >> quote i believe that love is no accident no whisper from a random universe. it comes from deeper
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