senate seat in lincoln's tragic. pragmatism. many authors have appeared on book tv. you can watch them on our website. booktv.org. [inaudible conversations] i'm not going to leave you the rules and regulations because i suspect you heard them three times already and in any caseou i've gotten them all.

my name is jonathan and i am here from the washington post about 18 years my wife and i were living on capitol hill with my stepdaughter who was working at the time at the national geographic and one day said can i bring a friend home. [shouting] >> i'm afraid that that's a technical problem that someone else is going to have to cope with.pr if i shout does that help? [laughter] >> my stepdaughter was working at national geographic and one day asked if she could bring a friend home for dinner and we said sure, the next day at dinner time this lovely young woman shows up with our stepdaughter and my wife and i were immediately enchanted with her and she's still lovely and young and enchanting. but now she's one of the most

respective, most accomplishede successful writers of serious nonfiction in the united states. very good to see you again. >> very good to see you. thank you. [applause] >> could i just say just very briefly what an incredible honor it is to sit here with jonathan who all of you know is a huge figure in the world of journalism and in the world ofn books and by any crazy chance you don't know his work, i urge you to go out and find it and he's brilliant and humbling to me. i should be interviewing him because he's a much more interesting figure than i am. anyway, i just wanted to -- >> flattering will get you everywhere. [laughter] churc

>> you were at national geo for four or five years? >> six years. >> national geo has a reputation for being tightly if not severely ended publication. you were a writer. what influence did you have as a writer? >> i only say that my real education actually happened at national geographic. i learned so much about story telling, about the fact that the world is full of fascinating people, fascinating events and stories but most of all i learned about research and i learned that you need to dig deeply, you need to take thearcd time to understand it and you need to find the people who really know the subject that you're going to look into. at national geographic you could be working something on cats one

day and a river another day so it really fluctuated and so -- but the one consistent thing throughout is that there's always somebody who know it is subject and knows it really, really well and has spent of hit or her life studying it and you need to find that person and him your friend. the subject involved travel to go a dangerous place.su dealingdealing with languages other than your own. tell us about the challenges that started out. >> so i first heard the story, i was having a lunch with a friend of mine who wrote the books 1912. this is the election, the election where roosevelt tried to regain presidency and lost.

he said have you heard about this trip that roosevelt took in the amazon after that election and i had read about theodore roosevelt, because it was after political career it was blosessed over.os i started researching it. i went back to national geographic. they have a great library there and went to library of congress and i was stunned because, you know, there's murder, drowning, they left the murderer in the rain forest, roosevelt nearly took his own life, the richest ecosystem on earth, something i would love to write about.ght it is daunting to take on theodore roosevelt and amazon. >> to take on a book. >> exactly, but i had so much to

work with. i knew had to do research. that was the only thing i was confident about. >> you went to the amazon? >> i did. i went to this river who is incredibly remote. i did research in rio and then i went to the little town and north western brazil calledhwese puerto valio. horizon to hoarseon and -- okay, this raises the questions, had you -- how did you get the money to do that? >> i got an advance. unfortunately he passed right before the book came out which was really difficult for me, buo

anyway, so they gave me great advance in three parts, one part, you know, when you sell it and one part when you turn in the manuscript and i had the money and that's how i used it. >> i would have thought that you would have flown the planene yourself. [laughter] >> no, that was not a possibility. in our other two books you'reof incredibly genius and traveled to many great places. you seem to be afraid of nothing. >> well, that's not true. i had a lot of fears but i think my fears are sort of chattered by my interest. >> did you go down a mine in south africa? >> i went to where the mine was. it's closed now, but there's the hole where it was absolutely,. yeah. >> so far you've written about teddy roosevelt, james garfield

and winston churchill. h what if any common elements drew you to the story? >> what interest me and we were talking about this earlier. i love to read biographyies but as a writer i like to tell a tighter story, a more sort of personal story where i can spend five years focusing and digging in deep and i am looking for a story that i hope is eliminating about the person and about the time in which they lived. and specifically what interests me, i think, that often when we look at history, what -- we are kind of drawn into the bub histo public moment of triumph but what interests me are the more private moments of struggle when someone is sick like james garfield or terrified like

theodore roosevelt or desperate like churchill. i think it's no those moments and it's true for all us. it's when your true nature is revealed. >> and quite specifically what drew you to winston churchill and his war? >> i had heard the story 245 years ago. my husband was a journalist for "the new york times" for years and he actually began his career in south africa covering the national congress in 80's and when i met him 25 years ago he mentioned to me, he said, dye you know that winston churchill was prisoner of war in south africa and he escaped and i thought, you are kidding me, hoi do i not know this. and so it stayed me all of these

years and after i turned in the manuscript for the second book, we went to lunch and he said, do you have any ideas for your next week. you know, i said i would love to write about winston churchhill and he said, yes. it just went from there. >> with the story of nearly disastrous war and barely understood at all, i wonder if the vietnam war was in the back of your head when you were writing that. >> to be honest, nothing was in the back of my head. >> it was in the back of mind when i was reading. >> i can absolutely see the connection but to be honest, so, you know, as you know i have three kids, i live in kansas city, i have this very normal day-to-day life with laundry and dinner plans and stuff, but i have an office outside of my home and when i go into my office and i close the door,

it's like a time machine, you know, i literally feel like i'm going back in time and i just emerse myself in the documents that i've gathered and the pictures and maps and things like that and i'm really only thinking about -- about this moment in history. >> speaking of time, you seem to be very strongly drawn to the late 149th and 20th centuries. >> i do.dr i think that's fair. i didn't set out that way. i didn't think thises what i want to write about and i never do but i do find it veryhink t evocative. i feel like i can -- that time period you can see it and smell it and taste it. there's so much primary source material., the

narrative nonfiction you have to have that, not a lot but not a huge amount but you have to be drowning in it and there are certainly times when i'm working on the book and the research takes me most of the time, good god, i will never get through all of this. >> i have done projects less ambitious than yours. when you have the wealth research materials there's the problem of choosing what to use. you have to truly understand it before you begin writing it. it does in a sense --

>> it's really a lost world. it's the period when the world began to change, incrediblylo dramatic ways more than it's changing now because you literally went -- >> right. >> right. that's another thing, actually that interests me about it because the world was changing so quickly and -- in every conceivable way. our knowledge of the world andhe so that too is fascinating and churchill was right in the middle of that and he's right on the cusp of this incredible change and it's fascinating to see it through his eyes. >> a couple of things that are connected.

it would be a grand adventure and most romantic kind. notion of british ideas of war as romance is a strong undercurrent in your book. manchester in introduction of churchill's memoir, experience in india and south africa let him to see quote, the glori glorification of war or the fraud it was, do you agree with that?. >> yes, i do. 450million people and they were spread all over the world andd spread very thin. they are constantly putting down ri -- revolts but it was all about dashing and they hated losing their red coats. they thought the khakis made them look like bus drivers.

even for the boer war when it began, they would fight in precise lines. it absolutely was. it was the beginning of modern warfare and i think, you know, not that many salespersons specially know much about the boer war but it was some of the first guerrilla fighting andd modernization of weapons and all those things. the british army going in wasn w completely different going inm than coming out and prepared them for world war i. you were right about the boer -- people who we know about very little.. is the boer presence in south africa still very strong? >> fortunately things are changing a lot. the boars were interesting people. they were independent and

religious and racist and that -- you may have heard of the great track in 1835 they moved from the cape and that was set up primarily by the fact that two years earlier the british empire had abolished slavery. even though the british empire promised people in -- native africans and indian population that was living there, as soon as they won the war, things would change and be better for them as we all know that took much longer than anyone would have hoped and so, of course, there's still presence but, you know, obviously nelson mandela was a huge breaking point. tell us a little bit about churchill. he did change his the experience in south africa did change him and what i kept thinking when i read your book that the

perfectly title would have been naked ambition. >> absolutely. he was a bundle of burningng ambition.>> g the one description of him that's absolutely true throughout his life. >> do you think that's traceable to his feelings by his father? >> some of it. >> naked ambition and well to do -- they weren't rish, -- rich. it's not that common in that particular class. >> it's looked down upon. i always thought that that was the american in him. his mother, beautiful social american and he -- in fact, he told his mother, this is a pushing age and we must push with the best and she was very connected. she had all the powerful men who adored her and so he was always having her, you know, help mel out here, have this person give me in assignment, he thought

that's the best way for me to win fame and propel myself to political power and he called it the glittering gateway to distinction. >> right. you quote at the end famous remark by first love pamela plowden. when you first meet winston you see all of the things that are wrong with him and once you get to know him you get to see the things that are right of him. >> so what was wrong he was obviously not only ambitious bu incredibly, incredibly arrogant and that is probably -- >> self-indulgence. >> i found it entertaining, again and again and again in letters and journals and different newspaper articles people would say, you know that winston churchill, i cannot stand the kid. he's going to be prime minister one day but he drives me crazy.

>> very amusing story that she tells while he was in prison in south africa. he ordered a soup and he went to south africa with what? cases of champ -- champagne. >> 10-year-old whiskey. he doesn't want to be uncivilized while at it. >> but what was interesting to him and if you look at pictures you almost don't recognize him but obviously when we think of winston churchill we think of the older winston churchill overweight and older and has cigar and whiskey and this one he's young and he has red hair and he's of energetic and he's the one throwing himself into war. but inside, inside he was already the winston churchill we know and it's fascinating to

read the letter that is he wrote at the time and there was one in particular that he wrote to pamela cloud and he ran for parliament before the boer war and he lost, but during the election and he's loving it, t he's loving all the opportunities to be on a stage and he writes to her and says, i don't know what's going to happen with the election, i don't know what the outcome will be but with every speech i give, i feel my grow in powers. >> something that you don't go really into the book occurs after the period that you covered, what happened between him and pamela? >> this is a great story. he was in love with her and she was a beautiful young woman and he had met her in india when he was there fighting in british india and she was sort of the toast of london when she went back so she had many admirers and he was in love with her and he wanted to marry her and her

father didn't let her marry her because he didn't think churchill would amount to anything. >> before we turn it over to questions from the floor, could you say a few words about popular history in review of wall street journal describes you as, quote, a popular historian. i guess that was a complement. the phrase popular history has been always condescending even though much of the best history is being done by nonacademics, matt, david and yourself. >> to be honest, i feel so incredibly fortunate to be able to do what i do. every day i go to work, i can't believe that this is my job. my job is to read most of the

time and dig and meet fascinating stories and, you know, i know a lot of historians, i read a lot of academic histories and i respect them. it's just not what i do and i hope that it's actually a collaborative. i hope that there are people who -- i have a lot of people i've met who say, you know, i thought i hated history. i was never interested in history and then i read something by david mccullough o anthony beaver and so then i started to read more deeply and so i hope that in a way that's a conduit for people who don't like history who realize actually they do and there are fascinating stories that they will absolutely love. >> stepped into a gap by decline of narrative history in the academic department and serious

about the cause of that, but as academic historian digs more deeply in the specialized areas often with political or ideological patents, the field is left wide open for people who want to tell stories. >> right. >> that's what i love to do. >> there are microphones in the middle of each aisle and you're welcome to come up and ask anything you like, you will first -- >> hi. >> well, being part of the timee i teach history in high school, i appreciate your books. history to me is very exciting and when you take colorful or compelling historic figures like you've written about i think you add a lot quite a bit. now when dealing with churchill and the boer war, one of the primary sources is going to be a lot of what churchill wrote. but i always find that he exaggerates things and he likes to put himself in the best

light. how did you deal with the challenge of dealing with that? >> well, you know the nice thing is for most of the time he wasn't alone. so the way he was captured for those who don't know, so he went to the boer war to cover as journalists, he was on as very soon after he arrived on armored train that was attacked by the boars and good friend elmer had invited him along and actually in command of the train and invited him along and he was there and many other men including the boars who were attacking them and so i have their accounts of it as well and the same thing that when he was in the pow and the other men. so even when he was on the run, he hid in this cold mine shaft with the rats for three days. and they really did collaborate. the only thing that he got wrong

and he was insistent about this, the man who organized the attack on this train was the main name loui, first prime minister of south africa and he was a very young charismatic general and they became friends later in e life and churchill insisted that it was personally who had captured and later churchill's son started researching and he said, you know, i've done the research and i don't think it bi could have been, it's impossible that it was. personally captured you. and churchill said, it was. [laughter] end of discussion. and but it wasn't. [laughter] >> but organized and saw everything and talked about it, but that's the main thing that's

the center. >> thank you. >> this is a historical question in terms of your writing and hearing about what you decide what you're going to use in your research and what you don't use when you do your research, how do historical writers avoid revising history to their own liking?vising >> i'm sorry, avoid --ry >> how do you avoid revising history to your own personal opinions about the things? >> well, i do a lot of research and i don't come at it sort of with an opinion, i really don't. for instance, i wrote a book about james garfield and i honestly did come to admire him but i didn't even set out wanting to write about james garfield. i wanted to write about alexander graham bell and i found out that he invented something called an induction balance trying to find the bullet.

james garfield was killed so early in his first term and largely been forgotten and so i start researching him and he was extraordinary, absolutely brilliant, he was kind, he was instrumental in bringing about black suffrage. he was a decent modest human being and i was impressed with him but i didn't start out thinking i want to make people think that he is an extraordinary man. i took him as i found him and that's what i tried to do with all of my books. >> i might interject. i know what he's complaining about, not to pick on one person first in multi-volume incomplete history of the roosevelt administration, franklin roosevelt and various writings on jack kennedy was writing from a very distinct ideological point of view and may have been bending history to suit his to

ideology.absolute >> absolutely. >> i loved it and i came away after reading it thinking that we missed out on a potentially great president. i wanted to hear your thought on if garfield had not been assassinated what type ofwa president do you think he would have been and would he have been different than maybe some of the other string of 19th century presidents? >> i agree. i believe that he would have been one of our -- one of our great presidents and i think that he is inspiration to the country, really, because he had come from such poverty and he seemed to bring the country together in a way that was sharp contrast from what happened after lincoln's assassination and because so many people admired him and so many peopley had put so much hope into him

and as i said, he was a very progressive thinker for that time. he -- and if you can imagine, h. didn't want to be president, was forced, shoved into this situation and so, i think, that -- because of that he was uniquely powerful because he wasn't beholden to anyone. he hadn't made any promises or sacrifices because it's notni something he, you know, he hungered for and he used to call the presidential fever and he saw it all around him because he had been in congress for almost 148 years. i so i do think that would have made him uniquely power president had he lived and i do think it was quite a loss to the country. >> i told candice came with a tremendous sense of loss that this man never had his opportunity to be the president he could have been. >> you made a brief message for

policies which is one of the shameful episodes in british empire's history and impact on women and children and other noncombatants.nd did churchill ever acknowledgege that or did that affect him in any way? >> well, it would have affected him, i don't know if it was his own imprisonment and affected him deeply and he never forgot it and even though it was completed on the other side of the spectrum and just of thoseh who don't know, the british had gotten into the war thinking it's going to last a couple of months and it started october will be out by christmas and lasting three years. by the end, they were desperate to get out and so they did some pretty horrible things. they resorted and set up concentration camps for as you

say the women and children who were supporting these men who were out fighting in the field, the boars, so they wouldn't have any support and it was disastrous and native africans were forced into concentration camps and even more of them died chan the boars. .. of the boars were either to show the british that they were civilized. the british dismissed them as being backwards. they allowed incredible leniency but churchill couldn't stand the idea of being captured. he said he hated that period in his life more than he had ever hated any other period in his whole life and he was desperate to get out. he remembered that so later on in public life, becoming health secretary it was one of his

missions to show compassion to his prisoners, he made sure they had access to books and the outdoors and could exercise because he said whether or not they are guilty of a horrendous crime, they are still human beings. >> i would like to say your first two books are wonderful, some of the best i ever read. my question is early on in the book there is a passing reference to teddy roosevelt and the other journalists met him in cuba, i i couldn't believe how close it seems. can you contrast teddy roosevelt with winston churchill? >> i kept thinking how much they reminded me of each other and how many similarities these

young ambitious men, very arrogant, drive everybody around them crazy, and had so much in common, to -- too similar and it wasn't a love affair. >> thank you. >> churchill went to south africa as a journalist. he had preconceived notions about the british empire and as he experienced more war, how did his view change about the british empire? did he realize, did you see evidence he realized the sun was setting on the british empire at this time? with the second question is if he did, did that contribute to some of the most amazing things he did in life like the battle of london when hitler was trying

to take over england and so stalwart, the idea that i never want to be dominated again? did you see evidence of him changing his thinking towards what the british empire was and how he wanted it to fit into the world? >> we all know winston churchile was far from a perfect man. one of the things about him is he was an unimaginative imperialist. he was very proud of the british empire and its standing in the world and felt it was part of his mission to keep it intact. i don't think the boer war changed that at all. i think, another thing, on the opposite side that i will say about winston churchill, something i admire is no one thought harder than he did during the war, no one is quicker to reach out the hand of friendship afterwards that he

was magnanimous, trying to help someone, that was true during the boer war and it got him in trouble with his countrymen and it was true later in his life. that was a constant throughout his life. he was at that time and for many years absolutely and imperialist. >> hi. i just want to say the republice was an extraordinary book and i enjoyed reading it. as i was reading it i totally marveled at the conversations the characters have with each other as if you had a tape recorder in their room. i was wondering what you drew upon to get such verisimilitude in terms of what these people were saying to each other?

>> that is interesting. my father said the same thing after he read this book, the dialogue you had, like a novel or something. it is very important to me that everybody knows that this is all absolutely factual. i get that dialogue from letters, from accounts they wrote themselves. i was talking to churchill and he said that and i said that, that is where all of that comes from. there is a trend in narrative nonfiction that in the notes section you get a paragraph about each chapter saying in general these are my sources bum in my book you can look it up. i use notes and you can say how does she know that? turned to the notes and you can find out, that is something that is important to me and going

back to primary source material it takes me a long time before i will commit to a subject even if i get a fantastic story and there have been stories that broke my heart because i really want to tell them but i had to give them up because i just didn't have enough primary source material to work with to have that dialogue, to have those details you hope will bring a story alive and unless i do i just won't commit to it and i had a wealth of information to work with in this book. thank you. >> hello. you may have touched on this earlier, concerning the river of doubt, my son was reading it. i was amazed why theodore roosevelt was doing this. why do you believe -- what was

his motivation? don't know -- don't want to give you my own opinion. >> those of you who don't know the story, theodore roosevelt iy 1912, goes to south america down this incredibly incredibly dangerous rapids choked river, no one knows where it leads. n the river of doubt. because no one knew where it would take them and what was around each benz, the reason he did it was because he is the a roosevelt and winston churchill would have done it too. he had won and won and won throughout his life and he loses and he loses a huge contest and he is a pariah for the first time in his life which he put woodrow wilson, a democrat, in d the white house, split the republican vote and he had this depression in his life and he

was devastated and to go on a speaking tour in south america, an incredible naturalist, has written many books about birds and he will take another trip, he gets there and nobody has been preparing, he left this friend of his who is a priest who hired an arctic explorer to planned this trip in the amazon. they are not prepared for a collecting trip and he gets there and the foreign minister says you can do that or you can map an unmapped river and theodore roosevelt is going to say no to that? no. he throws himself and the people with him into this outrageously dangerous trip. >> time for one more. >> can you talk a little about how you reconstructed the events after president garfield was shocked? the medical care he received? it is so remarkable doctors had left alone he might have lived.

>> for those of you who don't know garfield was shot in a train station that was on the mall where the national gallery now sits and to my outrage there is no plaque, no notice at all that an american president was shot here but the bullet that hit him that went in the right side of his back didn't hit any vital organs, didn't hit his spinal cord, his injuries were less severe than reagan's when reagan was shot. he had 12 different doctors, s, especially the beautifully named doctor doctor willard his first name was doctor, who repeatedly insert and instruments in his back, probing for this bullet even though he had discovered antiseptics 16 years earlier and

come to american doctors and it is sickening to watch this through the lens of 135 years happening to this extraordinary man. i went, i did a ton of research at the library of congress. even though garfield was president for a short time, he had been for almost 18 years, his papers and a lot of the people surrounding it were there but i went to the national wa museum of health and medicine and they actually have the autopsy report there, but more than that, they -- i held in my gloved hands a section of churchill -- garfield's spine with red plastic tin going through where the bullet had gone through.nd it is stunning. they also have, strangely, the

assassins drawer, the remains of charles bhutto who assassinated garfield and the names of john wilkes booth in the same drawer, there is the ankle bone, just bizarre. also they have a jar, and he is insane. he was executed and they exhumed his body and wanted to study it for science, especially his brain to see physical signs of insanity. they cut up his brain, and they still have it. >> before we started this program, still looking around for her next subject and admitted a 5-year progress.

>> thank you. [applause] or smack [inaudible conversations] >> my father did not sell for his worth. his sister told me that and my mother did not disagree. what does that mean, i wondered as a child? only an adult treated to a time before my birth when, as a young white lawyer, he represented a black man charged with raping a white woman in a small town in south alabama. my interest intensified as time went on because this was my father. like i became a lawyer.

because people kept saying his case could have inspired a celebrated novel to kill a mockingbird. every time i talked about it people said that. for it while the thought my father could have inspired such a great my -- novel was enough for me. when even harper lee and a lovely letter opened by her agent acknowledged the, quote, obvious parallel dating she could not, quote, recall my father's case and her work was fiction. i decided to find out for myself. before publication of the first book, go set a watchmen, which brought to mind the question who was the real atticus finch? beloved lawyer in "to kill a mockingbird" or the bigoted guy in watchmen? i can tell you after growing up

in montgomery that there were both kinds of atticus in alabama and many variations on them. some said the atticus of "to kill a mockingbird" was fictional and he was, it was a fictional book, no such thing as a southern white man who did that, and the racist in watchmen is the real southern white man. that is not true. my father never subscribe to racist materials, never went to a white citizens council or clan meeting, he hated both organizations. he never called black people by the n-word, he took for and produce as a fee, and he did courageously defend a black man falsely charged with raping a white woman in troy, alabama in 1938. >> you are watching booktv,