rebuilt the authority and created an independence. and i think it's time like now when it's under attack from politicians it behooves us to study under someone who is the expert, who looks at that who looks at that, that was adam greenspan. >> that's a look at notable books according to economists. book tv has covered many authors and you can watch the program on our website. booktv.org. >> college presidents, larry arndt, tell us your goal with your book, churchill's trial what are we going to learn? >> i spent a lot of time trying to figure out what churchill means, my goal in the book was to state that that's what i set out do. >> what did you learn?

the book was much harder trait than i thought. by the time i started the book i've been studying churchill for about 40 years. it takes that long, he wrote so much. i made the terrible mistake of thinking it will be relatively easy compared to the things i had written, it's much harder than i had thought because when you start writing it down and start trying to get an account of the main themes in his life and thinks he advocated or defended it turns out they relate to one another more deeply and in more complex ways than i had imagined. i came to understand him better and i hope and think, it was a painful process. >> did you approach this book from a fans perspective? >> i'm a scholar so i don't think i can write anything down but i can't defend. but i admire churchill very much.

i think it is a great man. i think if you would list the things he was chief it's very hard to name anybody in all of history like him. it's just a fact. winston churchill wrote 50 books and they are worth reading. that is despite doesn't that separate himself from everybody politician or not? and then there's a fact and one of the great turning points in world history he was there and he did things in a place that matter the most for three months and he did things that nobody else would have done. so he did alter history in major ways from good or ill. so both those qualities to be eloquent and to write as much in as he didn't to be there in a turning point and to explain what that was all about, i don't

know anything quite like that. >> churchill 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. >> churchill made his living writing. most of his life. when he was about 20 joseph chamberlain, great man father of -- chamberlain, partner of his father when his father was alive said that the young churchill should go into politics and he said i do not think that i could ever keep up with the pace of writing and speaking that would be required. >> and then look what he did. and churchill was not rich, he made a lot of money, almost, almost all of it writing and speaking. he took out enormous amount of

stuff. he called it potboiler's. he had help with some of them. but some are profound. i'm teaching a class on contemporaries huntley, lewis, and churchill. those four people, very different people had something similar to say about a tendency government in modern times and they had the same thing to say. churchill stands up to the standard of those people. >> who are his friends? did he have lifelong friends? >> yes. he had some really great young friends that persisted through life.

there is that man named reggie barnes, soldier who went to cuba was churchill they were sent on a spy mission to tell the war office what was going on there. hands they became friends there, they served into other actions together and they remained in correspondence until bernstein. churchill was very close to a man he's in the movie, chariots of fire. he was a very powerful man, i will tell you what he's like, they wrote an essay about him. he used to walk along a street in england and he would go in the liberal club and use the facility.

so finally he was not a member and they said to him, excuse me are you a member of this club? and he said club? i thought this was a public convenience store. >> churchill wrote a beautiful essay about him and when she deployed the phrase commenting he piled up his treasure in the hearts of his friend. there were a lot of younger people that churchill admired and had stayed with him for 25 or 30 years. the founder of the financial times, there's a really great man about churchill's age.

churchill gave him only hard jobs to do in the second world war and he hoisted them. a remarkable man. his grandson -- toward the end of his life and john and julie him i know is a great historian and the best tour guide that i have ever seen. so there were a lot of people in his life. >> looking back to the british people make the right decision in getting rid of churchill as prime minister in world war ii? >> i don't think so and he did not think so. he gave some explanation. first of all he ran that campaign very hard. him and down the strong implication that churchill was a nazi and that churchill lay down this drawing -- what he said was

the socialist government cannot realize its ultimate aim was the use of the secret police. it's not their intention but to get done with her trying to get on that is what they would me. so he he thought it was a disaster. he got beat by a law, he won an election and 15, he won by a little and 51 in a both of those elections he compared the ultimate consequences of socialism to the totalitarian thing of the day so yeah, i think it was a mistake. the labour party is not so much a socialist party as it was back then. i think maybe they give some

agreement to churchill about that. >> when he gave the iron curtain speech at westminster college and 46 what was he doing? was he was he in the wilderness at that point? >> he was. he had only met truman once, and in the middle of the conference the vote got for the 45 election. an enormous change happened in world affairs between july 1945 in february 1946 and 6 in the truman administration. the truman administration made a decision that they had not thought when truman first came to power that they're going to stand up to and contain the soviet union. the fulton speech, churchill gets a letter from the president

with several you come give a talk. and there's a script script in the hand of harry truman. it's a nice college, please, and i'll introduce you. so churchill was there in a heartbeat. that turned out to be part of a plan by truman and developed with churchill in that speech announces the cold war. speemac, anytime said churchill spend in the wilderness office crew? >> oddly enough on the long line from 1931 until 1939 a shorter one from 1945 until 1951 on the rest of the three years or older. it means your party is not empower, it means that you are not holding one of the leading positions in your party and

likely to succeed if your party wins. but that was not very long in his life. >> in your book you reprint churchill speeds from 1946, i have now stated the two great changers which menace the homes the homes of the people, war and tierney. what is the tierney part of this? >> churchill had sophisticated understanding of politics, i teach aristotle and one marvels at how consistent the thought about this. in tierney there six runs of government, three of them are good in three or bad. they're categorized by how many people rule.

one person is monarchy and one is tierney and tierney is the worst. it is a rule that is in the interest of the rules rulers, and the ruler is our powerful on the politics in chapter 11 was worth reading. you should go read that today. he describes what a tyrant has to do to remain in power. in the previous chapter he's repeated the story that the young tyrant sends a messenger to the old and says how have you stayed in power so long? when they don't say anything, their standing in the field and he stopped lopping off the heads

of all the tall stalks of gray. and they come back until seven units anything he just did this and he says i know what it means. so churchill thinks and churchill lived in the age of the birth of totalitarianism. what that is, first while it's different all it's different in scale and intensity from anything that could be achieved. and churchill gives a lot of explanation about why that becomes possible in the modern world. sorry it's makes it so we can do play people to rule other people , it makes war worse for the same reason and gives them tools for both. in ideology, this idea born in the modern world that we can take everything into human hands and perfect it and churchill pure that.

he saw that. he thought socialism could develop into so something worse before the turn of the 20th century. he came into into parliament the same year the labor party came in. the same thing about war. he was afraid of where his whole life. he thought they both been transformed into yet more distractive forces by modern conditions. it's your viewers should read 1984, or darkness at noon. one of them is a view of the modern totalitarian state from the bottom of its victims and one is the view from the top from the point of view of its rulers. if you put the two together you'll see the classical teaching for example identifies

hero, hie arrow, it's a conversation between a poet and a tyrant hero. one thing that emerges in the dialogue is that hero is miserable. so so it's not good to dominate other people. they don't like it, doesn't breed happiness there is friction everywhere, they are out to get you, you, you can never turn your back. . .

in the a-train and they sat in there an and the museum revealed what they were doing like when you are a kid in school and they had lenin and stalin and all of them lined up there and they are making up lists of people to be killekilled and they send them . there's a photograph taken all in a line. he's in the middle but they are all in a line and they take a picture of all of them and by 1939, every one of them that having died of natural causes, stalin had killed and he was one of the last arrested in the work of fiction. the whole book is an explanation

why did these guys come this to crimes they haven't committed knowing, crimes against a man they hated and feared, why did they confess to those crimes knowing they would be executed a few days after that was over, why did they do that? the answer is not torture. the short explanation is they have done this to other people and it was just pointed out to other people so it takes over and u the tiger and is caught -- tyrant is caught, and it's a horrible way of living. it sounded in the utopian hope and in the power of modern

science into those are among us today. >> host: here you have a triangulation of statutes, margaret thatcher and winston churchill all done by the hillsdale alum. one is done by one of his students and one is done by bruce wolf who's doing frederick douglass for us right now. the photograph on the visiting card if you gave his card at the photograph of him was taken in that building standing right over there. >> host: is it the profile picture? >> guest: he's a very striking man and it's a beautiful photograph and the original

print we hunted down the man that owned it and bought it from him. we couldn't get him to sell it to me so we doubled the money. it wasn't for money. it was the obligation and we said in a circle for some of whom heard frederick douglass talk on the occasions at the college don't you think that photograph belongs here and the man send it to me. he's a photographer for the society. in the back but you're talking about for modern people they were all heavily admired or had a connection and if the that thh did that. in the middle are founders with washington and jefferson and

madison. and in the fron front are civilr people because we were founded in the civil war so if a statute that was done in the 1880s is in honor of the civil war. and probably more than any other except yale. so those three in the back are the statesmen of the government which we were born where the picture was taken and dedicated on the fourth of july. at the beautiful speech by edmund fairfiel fairfield that o fund the party was the lieutenant governor of michigan during the civil war.

we were proud of all that and think that the cause of the limited constitutional government is a great cause and the greatest political development in history we think. so we study back here and come to admire those people. >> for those that are not familiar with is the uniqueness of hillsdale college? >> guest: we don't take any money from the government direct. all that stuff is private. as it was fo for a free colleger most of our history which goes back to 1844, we think that's good because we think higher learning is to be done by people that really want it because it isn't easy to get. and with lots of learning its noble that everybody should get,

but the highest kind of learning is the sacrifice, and you have to want to make that. so that's unique, not money from the government, but the college has always been a freedom loving government but helped us out in the party and had a big part in the civil war and is always rallied to the country's war and thought the constitution and always had a huge history just the largest department in the college right now. so there is that. the college is interested in the christian faith. that's interesting because they always believed in the religious freedom in the line of the articles found in articles association of the college into so we never required the statement to come here. on the other hand, what we do is have a code that requires to demand respect from everyone

here. of course you could argue with them but it's not to be pressed to abandon them. so there's that christianity. then we are interested in character. we think the moral character of a person is the armor in which the person lives and unable to live without that armor and then finally the subject matter of the college is the ultimate things cometh ththings cometh t, the things for which we live our lives and those are things that are identified in the renaissance literature as being the things that are good simply for their own sake and there's nothing you could add to them that would make them better so those are things of happiness as the ultimate good for human beings and happiness is the sole active in accordance with virtue

and that means both doing and thinking. i teach ethics and would love to teach that as much as anything at all the kids love it and agree than the rest of the four hears ufloorhears us to come tod what that and things like that been. it's also true it makes it singular and half the curriculum is the same for all the kids here and that means we have young men playing in the nfl right now and three young men that worked on the supreme court of the united states and they spent half the time studying all

the same stuff and if so, when they get together with their friends, they have a lot to talk about. >> host: when you became president in 2000, what was going on at the college? >> guest: it was just like it is now except it wasn't as good. you are probably referring to the fact of the college and that is what happened was my predecessor by the name of george roche was here for 28 years and his marriage had broken up and his son and daughter-in-law were living with him for a time and she took her life and left a note that said they had been having an affair. that was not good.

he retired. i personally don't believe that he did. but what do i know, they were living in a house together. and the college of close with -- couldn't continue so they started looking for a president one day and i think it's sad that have been absent for george and his family and the young woman that took her life and if it hadn't happened that way i doubt they would approach me about this and i would approach them because i refuse to them for a long time and didn't want to talk about it. why would you want to be a college president. i was running the claremont institute. there are people interested in the things i've been talking

about in the conversation and so i felt to build a better place and worked with people that were friends of mine and educated just like me. i didn't have a lot of kids to deal with. why would i want to leave that. especially because it is the famous things on the college campucollegecampuses i sent it e chairman of the board, he said a lot of my friends are faculty members. why would i want to do that and they said it's different. do you really think so? what made me change my mind is the document is pure chance. a friend of mine said they want you tthat theywant you to come . they said i want you to do me a favor. ask for the articles in the

bylaws. i said i'm not going to do the job. i don't want that job and they said humor me. so they called and they said the that the lawyer said i should read it. so they were unexceptional but i get these articles and they are written by these people that i described in the 1840s. the reads like the declaration of independence, which i happen to love. and i remember i was in my study and claremont. that's right. this place is old. i've been here once but i have forgotten.

they showed me the statute and i remember what it was. i said wow. you had a big part in the civil war. why don't i know that? if you are any good at your job, you would know at least to tell me that. so i see that and i think to myself maybe it will solve the problem, because people that are smart and know their disciplines better than you know they can't really work for you because you are brilliant, you know. and anyway, to be in charge of anything, churchill said this beautiful thing. he said in a saying that the bolshevism cannot succeed in this effect on modern life he

says human nature is more intractable and it's entirely unpredictable and is at once the safeguard and the glorsafeguardf mankind that is easy to lead but hard to drive. so then you say isn't that how you would like to be governed so i saw in the document a way to do that. if you don't find that beautiful, what are you doing here? and if you do, why don't you help me do it. so that's why i came here. >> host: what is the president of the college to?