do something. but, nothing was really done. in fact what was done was a great deal more repression. anyone who was caught having the letter asking for help would be thrown into keep lock. which meant you were thrown into your cell for indefinite periods of time, you couldn't get out it was in that context people start talking across political lines, start talking across racial lines. >> that is a look at some of this year's notable books according to "the new york times" book review. booktv has covered many of these authors. you can watch the full programs on our website, booktv.org. >> >> host: helps dale college president, larry arnn, what was your goal, churchill's trial, winston churchill and the salvation of free government? what will we learn.

>> guest: my goal was to state that and that is what i set out to do? >> host: what did you learn? >> guest: oh, lots. the book was much harder to write than i thought it would be. by the time i studied the book i was studying churchhill for 40 years. i made the author terrible mistake think it would be relatively easy compared to other things i had written. much harder than i thought. when you write down and give account of main things in his life, things he thought, things he stood for, things he advocated or defended, turns out they relate to one another. more deeply and in more complex ways than i had imagined and i came to understand them better i hope and think and it was a painful process. >> host: did you approach this book from a fan's perspective? >> guest: well, i'm a scholar, right? i don't think i can write

anything down that i can't defend but i do admire churchhill very much. i think he was a very great man. if you just list things he achieved, this very hard to name anybody in all of history like him. it is just a fact. winston churchill wrote 350 books -- 50 books, they're worth reading. that separate him from nearly everybody, politician or not? there is this fact, and it's a big fact and one of the great turning points of world history, he was there and he did things, he was there in the place that mattered the most for about three months. and he did things that nobody else there would have done. so he did alter history in major ways whether for good or ill. there are arguments about that. so to both those qualities, to be eloquent and to be, to write as much and as well as he did

and to be there at a turning point. to write all about that and explain what that was all about, that, i don't know anything quite like that. >> host: churchhill wrote as much as he acted, you write, and he wrote about every action. his books number more than 50, his articles are almost numberless. >> guest: church hill made his living writing, most of his life. when he was about 20, joseph chamberlain a great man, father of neville chamberlain, partner of his, churchhill's father when they were, churchhill's father was alive, said that young churchill so go into politics. he said, i don't think i could keep up with the pace of writing and speaking that would be required. and then, look what he did. and churchhill was not rich. he made a lot of money, almost

all of it writing and speaking. so he turned out enormous amount of stuff. some of it is, he called them pot boilers. he turned them out fast. he had help with some of them but some of them are profound and i'm teaching a class this term on contemporaries, george orwell, arthur kessler, c.s. lewis and winston churchill and those four people, very different people, very different people. had something similar to say about tendency in government in modern times, totalitarianism and they had the same thing to say and churchhill wrote much, including an essay we're reading called, mass effects in modern life, that stands up to the standard of those people. >> host: who were his friends? did he have lifelong friends? >> guest: yes, he did. he had some really great, sort

of young men friends that persisted through life. there is a man named reggie barnes, a soldier. went to cuba with churchhill, when they were young soldiers. later learned they were sent on a spy mission to tell the war office what was going on there, with the spanish war, with the cuban people. and they became friends there. they served in two other actions together and they were made in correspondence until barnes died in the '30s sometimes. churchhill was close to a man named, fe smith, lord birk ken head. he is the in movie, chariots of fire. he is a very learned, very powerful man. wrote an essay about him, very worth reading. he is shown to pretty good effects in "chariots of fire." he used walk along pall mall, famous street near whitehall, in

england in london, he would go into the liberal club and use the facilities on the way if he needed to go. and finally a porter in lord birken head. he was a member of the carter club. excuse me my lord, are you a member of this club? birken head said club? i thought this was a public convenience? he and churchhill were very close. churchhill wrote a beautiful essay about him, deployed the phrase that lord birken head said he filed up treasure in the hearts of his friends. there were a lot of younger people that churchhill admired for 25 years. brendan bracen, founder of ""the financial times"." there is really great man,

alfred duff cooper about churchhill's age. he stood with churchhill in the '30s and churchhill only gave him hard jobs to do in the second world war and he always did them. a very remarkable man. his grandson is lord norich. alfred duff cooper became lord norich toward the end of his life. john julian norich i know is a great historian of venice and the best tour guide of venice i have ever seen. there were a lot of people in churchhill's life that were constants. >> host: president arnn, did the british people make the right decision getting rid of churchhill as prime minister at the end of world war ii? >> guest: i didn't think so and he didn't think so. he gave explanation of that. he ran the campaign very hard. adly laid down the strong

implication that churchhill was a nazi. and churchhill laid down the strong ex-flickcation. what he said in july, 1945, the socialist government could not, paraphrase, realize its ultimate aims without the use of secret police, a gestapo. they would not moon that. that is not their in10 shuns but to get done what they're trying to get done that's what they would need. he thought it was disaster. he got beat by a lot. he won, nearly one in election in '50. he won by a little in '51. in both those elections he compared the ultimate consequences of socialism to bolshevism. which is totalitarian thing of the day by '50 and '51. yeah, i think it was a mistake. and you know the labour party is not really so much a socialist party as it used to be back then.

i think maybe they give some agreement with churchhill about that. >> host: when he gave the so-called iron curtain speech at westminster college in missouri in 1946, what was he doing? was he in the wilderness at that point? >> guest: he was. he had been beaten. he only met harry truman once at potsdam. in the middle of the potsdam conference, the votes got counted for '45 election and truman atty look over for him. enormous change happened in world affairs between july of 1945 and february of 1946 in the truman administration. because the truman administration made a decision that they very much had thought when truman first came to power, that they were going to stand up to and contain the soviet union. and the fulton speech, so churchhill gets a letter from

the westminster college in fulton, missouri, and there is a postscript, would you give a talk? there is a postscript in the hand of harry truman. it's a nice little college. please come. i will introduce you. that is a paraphrase. churchhill was there in a heartbeat. that turned out to be part of a plan by truman, then developed with churchill and speech really announces the cold war. >> host: how many times did winston churchill spend in the wilderness throughout his career? >> guest: oddly enough only one loan one from, 1931 until 1939. a shorter one from 1945 until 1951. and then the rest of them were three years or under. the wilderness means two things, really. it means your party is not in

power, and it means you're not holding one of the leading positions in your party and likely to succeed if your party wins. well those periods were not very long in churchhill's life but two of them were longish. >> host: president arnn, in your book you reprint winston churchill's speech from 1946. i have now stated the two great dangers which menace the homes of the people, war and tyranny. what's the tyranny part of this? >> guest: , well, churchhill had sophisticated understanding of politics. one marvels, i teach aristotle here and read a lot of aristotle, and one marvels how consistent the way the classics thought about political categories churchhill's thinking was. and tyranny in arris to the tell, there are six forms of government. three of them are good and three

of them are bad. and they're categorized in secondary way how many people rule. good rule, up with person is monarchy, bad rule of one person is tyranny and tyranny is the worst. it is rule in the interests of the rulers, not the ruled and the ruler is all powerful and has, is one of them. and aristotle in the politics, book five, chapter 11, very worth reading, everybody should go read that today. he describes what a tyrant has to do to remain in power. and in the previous chapter, he is repeated a story from heroditus, that the young tyrant sends a messenger to the old tyrant, periander, how have you stayed in power so long? aristotle's point is tyrants don't last very long.

he doesn't say anything. he is standing in a field. he has a sickle and starts lopping off heads of all the tall stalks of grain and the messenger comes back and tells the young tyrant. he didn't say anything. he just did this the young tyrant says, i know what it means. so churchhill thinks that and then churchhill thinks, churchhill lived in the age of the birth of totalitarianism, a new word for tyranny. what it is, it is certainly different in scale and in intensity from anything that could be achieved in the ancient world. churchhill gives a lot of explanation why that becomes possible in the modern world. it's a mixture of science and ideology. science makes us richer so we can deploy more people to rule other people. makes war worse for the same reason and gives new tools for both. ideology, this idea born in the

modern world that we could take everything into human hands and perfect it. churchhill feared that. he saw that early in his career. he, he made his first warnings against socialism and it would develop into something worse before the turn of the 20th century. he came into parliament the same year the labour party came in, elected its first people. and same thing about war. churchhill was a fray i had of war all his life. he thought that they had both been formed into destructive forces by modern conditions. you just, your viewers should read 1984 or darkness at noon. one of them is a view of the modern totalitarian state from the bottom, from the point of view from the victims. one is a view from the top of the point of view from its rulers. if you put the two books together, the classical

teaching, in hero,hiero, it is a conversation between a poet, and tyrant, hiero. one thing that emerges in the dialogue is that hiero is miserable. actually not good to dominate other people. they don't like it. it doesn't breed happiness. there is friction irv where. they're out to get you. you can never turn your back. rubisthof in, "darkness at noon." is the protagonist. he is tiled as one of the -- styled as one of the people in the 19, there is photograph taken in petersburg. it's in the home. there is a museum there. i've been there, of a ballerina. she was the czar's mistress. it's a very beautiful home and the germans put the bowl show vick leaders into-- bolshevik

leaders into russia. churchhill wrote, injected in a poison bazille la in a sealed train. they sat in there and museum reveals what they were doing. they had little desks in school, like when you're a kid in school. there is trotsky and bagara and lenin and stalin and all of them, they're all lined up there, right? they're making out lists of people to kill people. to be killed and they send people out to kill them all day. there is a photograph taken and they're all in a line. and london is in the middle. but they're all in a line. somebody higher or lower. just lined up and they take a picture of all of them. and, by 1939, and everyone of them that had not died of natural causes, stalin killed.

they all knew that rubishof is one of the last arrested in the book of fiction. why did these guys confess to crimes that they had not committed, knowing, in public, crimes against a man they hated and feared, why did they confess to those crimes knowing they would be executed in a you few days after it was over? why did they do that? and darkness hat noon explains that. and the answer is not torture. this is a short explanation is. they had all done this to other people. and it was just pointed out to them, that they owed. and so, it takes over the tyrant is caught in it too. and it's a miserable way of living, and i will repeat, it is founded in utopian hopes and

it's founded in the power of modern science. and those things are among us today. >> host: here at hillsdale you have a triangulation of statues, ronald reagan, margaret thatcher and winston churchill, all done by hillsdale alum. >> guest: one of them's not. one of them's not. one was done by our senior skip tore here at the college. tony and one was done by one of his students and one was done by bruce wolf, very well-known sculptor in california. he is doing frederick douglass. the photograph on frederick douglass's visiting card if he gave you that card, that photograph was taken in that building standing right over there. >> host: is it profile picture? >> guest: sitting in a chair. legs crossed.

million bucks. striking man, strong features. beautiful photograph. and, we own a original print of it. i, i hunted down the man who owned it. and bought it from him. and i couldn't get him to sell it to me. i doubled his money. i knew what he paid for it but it wasn't the money. it was moral obligation. i sent him a list of people we had died fighting for union army in the civil war, some of whom heard frederick douglass talk on one of the two occasions he was here at the colleges. i said, don't you think that photograph belongs here? and the man sent it to me. [laughter]. he is a photographer for the maryland historical society and very fine man. and, so, yeah, but be so in the back where you're talking about, are modern people, they were all heavily admired here or had a connection with the college,

reagan and thatcher did that. in the middle are founders, we have washington, jefferson and soon to have madison. in the front are civil war people. because we were founded in the civil war. so our soldier statue in the front which was done in the 18 '80s by laredo taft, is the honor of our war dead in the civil war which is very many and probably more than any non-military college except yale. maybe most of all in percentage terms. we're all proud of that we were lincoln people back then. christian abolitionists. and, yeah, so is, the, those three in the back, those are statesmen of free government which we were born in admiration of our oldest building where frederick douglass's picture was taken, dedicated on the 4th of july, the beautiful speech by edmund fairfield who

helped found the republican party was lieutenant governor of michigan during the civil war. austan blair was the governor. so we're proud of all that, we think of cause of limited free, constitutional government is a great cause and greatest political, greatest development in political history we think. we study the founders and come to admire those people. >> host: president arnn for those not familiar what is the uniqueness of hillsdale college? >> guest: a few things are unique. we don't take any money from the government, direct or indirect. >> host: including student loans. >> guest: every transaction is voluntary for most of our history goes back to 1844. we think that is good, higher learning are done by people who really want it.

it is not is to get. there is, there is lots learning that everybody should get, highest kind of learn something sacrifice. you have to want to make that that is unique. not money from the government. the college has always been freedom-loving government. it helped to found the party of abraham lincoln. it had a big part in the civil war. and always rallied to the country's wars. always taught the constitution here. always had a huge history department which is the largest department in the college right now. so there's that. the college is interested in the christian faith. that is interesting because the college always believed in civil around religious freedom. it is in the first line of the founding articles of the association of the college. we never required a faith statement to come here. and on the other hand, nearly everybody here is a serious christian here.

and what we do we have an honor code all the things about the college demand respect from everyone here. of course you can argue with them but the institution is not to be pressed to abandon them. there is that. christianity. we're interested in character, we think the moral character of a person is the harbor which the person lives and unable to live well without the armor. then finally the subject matter of the college is the ultimate things, the ends of life, the things for which we live our lives. and those are things that are identified in the classical and medieval and renaissance literature some modern literature are things being good for their own sake and there is nothing you could add to them that would make them better. and so those are things of aristotle identifies happiness as ultimate good for human

beings and happiness is the soul acting in accordance with virtue. that means all the virtues, both doing and thinking virtues. and we believe here, i teach aristotle ethics here and love to teach that as much as anything i think. the kids love it. all the kids read the first book of the ethics before they come here for the freshman year. >> host: required? >> guest: send them a book. read this. and you know, then the rest of the four years is to come to understand what that and things like that mean including in the natural sciences which are very strong here. so, it's, you know, those things make the college unique. it is also true that the college makes it singular, half the curriculum is the same for every kid here. that means, we've got three young men playing in the nfl right now, and we've got three young men who recently clerked

on the supreme court of the united states, and those six young men spent half the time studying all the same stuff. and so when they get together and they're friends. there are three pairs of friends among them. when they get together they have a lot to talk about. >> host: when you came, became president in 2000, what was going on at the college? >> guest: the college was a fine college. it was just like it is now, except not as good. [laughter]. you're probably referring to the fact there was trouble in the college. your predecessor asked me about that too on his show and, what happened was, my predecessor, the 11th president of the college, by the name of george rush, was here for 28 years. his marriage had broken up and his son and daughter-in-law were living with him and for a time. and she took her life and left a note that said that they had

been having an affair. that was not good. and he retired. had to. denied that he did it. i personally don't believe that he did but, you know what do i know? they were living in the house together. and the college of course couldn't, he, his own judgment, the college's judgment too that he couldn't continue. so they started looking for a president one day and, i think, sad that that happened. sad for george and his family. sad for that young woman who took her life. if it hadn't happened that way i doubt they would have approached me about this. and i know that i would not have approached them because i refused them for a long time. i didn't want to talk to them about it. why would you want to be a college president? >> what were you doing at the time? >> i was running the clermont institute which i helped found. that is wonderful place.

i'm on the board still. they're very good. there are people interested talking about in this conversation, right? i helped to build that place. i became its president. work with people friends of mine of the educated like me. didn't have a bunch of unreally kids to try to deal with. why would i want to leave that the? and especially base it is the safest things college presidents are figures of fun on college campuses. i said one time to the chairman of the board, still chairman of the board, i said most of my friends are faculty members. why would i want to do that? don't you think i know what they think about those guys? and he said, hillsdale is different. i said, do you really think so? i know a couple who teach there. and, what made me change my mind was, that document as pure chance, lawyer friend of mine said they want you to come do that job. i said, well, they have been

calling. do me a favor, humor me, i'm your lawyer, ask for articles of incorporation and bylaws. i said i'm not going to do that job. i don't want that job. he said humor me. so they called and i said, would you send, they had been sending me a lot of stuff. they didn't send that. would you send, and they sounded puzzledded sure. why? lawyer said i should read it. the bylaws are unexceptional. but i get these articles. and they're written by these people i described right there. they're written in the 18 '40ss. and they read like the declaration of independence. which i happen to love. i was in my study in clermont, california, pretty little town where it is warm. and i just had a shiver go you through me. i just went, wow, look at that. and i flipped hurried to the

back, that's right, this place is old. i had been here once. but i forgotten. . . maybe that'll solve the problem because people who are real smart and know their disciplines better than you know their disciplines if it's not your discipline, they can't really work for you because you're brilliant, right? anyway, to be in charge of anything, i mean, what do you learn from lincoln and churchill? churchill said this beautiful thing.

in saying that the both of us cannot ultimately succeed. mass effects on modern life, he said and when he says in the paragraph before as he saying they're trying to turn us into insects, but then he says, human nature is more intractable than human nature. unpredictable. it is easy to lead and hard to drive. well, if you can read u and you can read that and ewe can say, wow, isn't that how you would like to be governed or everybody wants to be governed. i saw in a document a way to do that. it's not about me. if you don't find that beautiful, what are you doing, and if you do, why don't you help me do it and so we did that and that's why