and also on behalf of our -- a

few housekeeping announcements before we get going. most of you have been to events here, see you know the drill. if anybody doesn't, michael will speak about his book for about the first half of the program and then he will be happy to take questions. we only have microphone up tonight. it's right here. hopefully you. hopefully you can make it to microphone. this is being recorded. so it's helpful to hear the question so we ask that you try to make it right appear if you do want to ask him something. if you have a cell phone or other noisemaking advice it but you could turn off, now would be a good time to do that. at the end of the event we have plenty copies of the book, it's a cool looking book. plenty of copies upfront so you can go get one and have michael signed it appeared the stable. if. if you would not mind just folding up the chairs and

putting them to the site. that will expedite the signing and expedite an easier exit and make our staff happy. we appreciate that. i want to make to event announcements. we have been hosting a series of teaching and starting this month. we have had to on civil liberties someone on women's rights. were nailing down the date now on immigration reform. followed by going to try for one per month. if your interested check our website and sign up for email if you are [inaudible] it already. they been well attended. i don't know how many have been to them. they been extremely well attended and quite spirited spend an interesting project that we are very happy about we encourage you to attend. on a lighter note we want to call your attention to some new items downstairs our coffeehouse and wine bar. they have just initiated a

dessert called campfire toast. a cousin of s'mores, quite delicious. the recipe of the month is the korean rice bowl which is also excellent. we continue to have changing literary seasonal drinks and a staff favorite is the sniffle crusher, so check out the menu items and of course we will have coffee and local wines and beers. i will try to resist making a comment about my alcoholic intake as of the last week. moving on. it's a pleasure to hope host

michael a politics and prose tonight. in the month that is featured a presidential inauguration back tobacco with one of the biggest social protest marches in the country we cannot seem to get enough of politics and politicians around here. indeed, michael will be amplifying our political discussion. i'm sure many of you know him as a special correspondent to the daily -- in addition to writing extensively about politics and current affairs is editor-in-chief of democracy and was previously the executive editor of the american prospect for the guardian. the author of three books including what he'll be discussing tonight which is called simply enough, bill clinton. for the record, i have to mention because i'm introducing him in this book that i was once a presidential speechwriter for bill clinton and for many years was the cheapest speech writer for his wife. but i'm very unbiased and objective. michael's book is the latest installment in the american series that's published by times books and edited by two historians, they're pretty much

think we have counted correctly in the sun brings the total to 43 of the now 45 presidents. we are missing barack obama for obvious reasons and donald trump fraud obvious reasons. so congratulations on filling the big hole with bill clinton. i just want just want to say that he's in various steamed company among the writers who has produced the biographies. distinguished up academics and even a few politicians with authors but it's without a doubt true that he drew the shortest straw of all this is been commented widely at this point, you had to write a biography not only of a president who still live and has had an enormous amount of ink devoted to him, but whose high points and low points are quite voluminous enough to priest sent a challenge to anyone who's trying to write his story in brief. he has written a thorough, clear

and extremely focused portrait of bill clinton in exactly 150 pages so you deserve a medal and we congratulate you. we are mostly just terribly excited and delighted to have you with us tonight. and to have this opportunity to remember back to the ancient past when bill clinton was in the white house. so please welcome michael. [applause] >> all my. good evening everyone. thank you. it was for those very kind words. thank most of all for doing this , keeping this great institution alive. i know time is very particularly close to david and i'm sure you knew them as well. it's very nice to know what this wonderful person is in such good hands.

it's nice to see this humbling turnout to come see if they'll dependent talk about an irrelevant politician. >> we come from being called that roughly about 11 to thousand times in the days after the election because i predicted a different outcome i had a company in predicting that outcome. irrelevant president, i'm joking, i don't think so. he was a very consequential president, but his stock is at a low point right now. i think it makes it our little adventure here tonight a little bit more interesting maybe just to examine bill clinton from that perspective and through

that lens and talk about where his legacy stands today. and worst of them. and where it stands on stood the course of the past 15 months his wife was running for president we all thought she was going to be the next president and consequently he stands with her today not been the president. where here but under very different circumstances that i imagined we would be. i think in 2015 they asked me to write this installment i was flattered in the first instance in a lot of distinguished people have contributed to the series. and i was happy to join that roster. so i said yes, but for that reason, the back of my mind i think it will commercially this could work out pretty well. we could put this book out on

january 2017 and what might be happening. it might be a lot of renewed interest in this man and this couple although it didn't work out that way but there's still enough interest in him for you to come out here tonight. so let me, before i get into talking about the book and i'm gonna do a short reading selection from it it's okay to read a short. >> yes. >> i will say that we must acknowledge current reality and i assume some of your interested and may be asking about bill clinton but maybe some of you are interested in asking about other things that are going on that were all kind of either obsessed with her panicked about right now. so if you want to do that that's fine we can use a q&a session however you want to use it. all right.

so. the thing that i learned the main thing that i learned about bill clinton as i was researching this book and i guess i had known but had forgotten. is that he had this reputation this is a positive thing i learned, he had this reputation for being very poll driven. it's all they set about him on cable to be. all he does is study the polls and he does what what the polls tell him to do. well you had to some extent on some things. but actually if you dig deeper, no. he followed his compass. sometimes i agree with that and personally sometimes i do not.

but he followed his own belief system more than he was given credit for at the time. he did some unpopular things but it was pretty hard to do. and he should be recognized for. i think his intervention in haiti in 1994 which four which i'm sure many of you will remember, that was a hard thing to do. to remember the circumstances? they had won the presidency of haiti and he was a man of the last ten was going to seize all the land and distributed to the people saw obviously he was a threat and dispose by the military. they said don't to remember that phrase i probably haven't heard in a long time and the people of

haiti were desperate for someone to do something to help them restore their rightful president. and the only someone who could do something was the united states of america. so so the cold war had just ended in here was a president using the power of the american military not to install a dictator as the dictate united states had done for the better part of the previous 40 years. in guatemala and iran and wherever else. but to install someone the united states really had no such interest. and is not the type of person we supported during the cold war. you know it didn't necessarily end well.

we did not turn the country into a heaven on earth or anything like that. but it was a brave thing for clinton to do. the military didn't like it, the public didn't like it, but, but it was the right thing to do. another thing i'll points on a domestic front is his detail of the partial birth abortion bill later in his term, 1999 i think it was. which was just to set the stage for you little bit, the congress in republican hands had passed a bill outline with the republicans called partial-birth abortion which was medically it's called intact violation of extraction. it's a late-term procedure. it is quite a gruesome procedure but it's one that's usually only used to save the mother's life. public opinion was strongly

against clinton and republicans were screaming murder and all this kind of thing. and a lot of democrats but he stood firm. and he made the veto of the bill that the republicans had passed. there were more things like that that he didn't quite get credit for in the time that he served. because he had this slick willie reputation that just went all the way back to the governor's mansion. now, hillary clinton from the various point of today and thinking about what happens to his reputation over the course of the last 15 or so monster in the course of the presidential campaign, the obvious thing with conventional wisdom would be that he really took a hit and not from the right, but from the left.

from the sanders wing of the party. sanders subjected bill clinton's record and by extension, hillary clinton herself. it's a withering cross-examination. the black lives matter movement challenged her and him, bill clinton on his record on crime and on race. and bernie sanders and the occupiers shall wing of the party, the economic economic populist wing and anti- banker way really looked at him and on this one i think rightly so. for the undoing the glass steel making regulations. but for many other things as well. so, this complex of issues and

laws and decisions that constituted the clinton legacy that were thought of as positive for the democrats in the 1990s and going forward into the bush years suddenly they were horrible things. suddenly there are things that were racist and corporatist things the democratic party should never ever have done. it's interesting. we have not seen in our lifetime a presidential reputation flip like that. i was struck often over the course of the past year and a half and i wrote a lot of columns, few anyway.

trying to remind people of the context of those times. i'm not a guy who agreed with everything bill clinton did. i wasn't a big supporter in 1992, i became a bigger supporter over time as it became more clear to me just how insane he drove the right wing. i figured if he makes them that crazy there must be something about him that i'm missing. and i finally want to him. i used to joke with friends part of the few in the prow that became a clinton fan during the monica lewinsky scandal. at the beginning i was not a great fan, nevertheless, recognized that these things that he was doing the democratic party kind had to do some of these things. so so let's go back in time. i can see that some of you may have been around and may remember.

so it is 1988 and the democrats have lost three presidential elections in a row and that had never happened to the democratic party i don't i don't think ever. it only happened to the republican party with roosevelt and truman, going back a few years so that was a real crisis to lose three in a row. if you loose to you think well, you can write it off to the guy's charisma and personality. that that was reagan. we couldn't really reagan had some kinda special sauce and we couldn't really compete with him and the economy was doing well. but when you lose the third one, especially to wish a singer who is not a great politician with a candidate who seems good i'm a 17 points ahead coming out of the convention. you lose that that third one is time to take a look in the mirror. and do something a little different. and so -- who founded the democratic leadership council in 1984, 85 had seen bill clinton

give a speech, he had met them before but then he saw clinton give a speech in the mid- 1980s and he said this guy who can rescue this party. he went to him and said that to him. he recounted this and i recount al's recounting of it in the book. and he said i want you to become the president of the democratic leadership council and you and i are going to travel around the country together and made a lot of people and you're going to give speeches and mom for president and you're gonna win and were both could be important people. they said some goods to me and that's what happened. he had a lot of natural talent of course. to return to the question of the positions democratic party did have a really sorry reputation

with respect to issues like crime which was much more rampant them. this this is 25 years ago. you can put yourself back i was a reporter in new york city at the time in new york city was topping 2200 homicides per year. this back down around 400 which is what it was 50 years ago. 2200 homicides is a lot. and more than 20000 nationally. inspect down to be in half that. and welfare was an issue then you all know the story. you don't need need me to tell you this. the democrats were seen as middle america is not having credibility on this. there is historical reason for clinton to take the positions that he did. it is worth remembering whether

you agree or disagree, it it is worth remembering that he did take those positions and he did when and he did probably save the democratic party. if the democrats had nominated another mondale or whatever they probably would have lost again and then where would they be it's a very different democratic party today. you have a generation who was not around when clinton was president so they do not have any appreciation of the good things he did. but what he did, whether you like it or not what he did for the most part was pretty necessary at the time, for the party to become a majority party again. now we get to the lewinsky

question. i had fun writing this section of the book. actually because it's not a particularly fun episode to relive but i think i tell the story quite well if i may say so myself. over the course of a couple of chapters i think it's a 109 because this was something that, it was something that we had never confronted before in this country. i talk about this in the book too. we know that we live in an age of polarization. that started in the 19 nineties. at the level that we understand it now. bill clinton was the first president who had to deal with this sort of thing. first of all the media change. we have for the first time ever 24 slash seven news on

television. cnn started while they started before but the concept of a 24 slash seven new cycle became a thing in the 1990s. so there is this new beasts that had to be fed constantly. another new thing was an explicitly conservative media. again for the first time in history he was the first president who really had to deal with this. the roots of this went back to the reagan administration's decision to terminate the fairness doctrine which had existed since radiohead existed which told people with radio licenses that you have to represent both sides equally. the reagan administration did away with that historical irony. at the time they did this and the regular ministration they complained because they won't put on conservative voices now

because they're just gonna put on liberals i will never hear a conservative voice. things went in a different direction didn't they. then. then came limbaugh and then his imitators and then came the weekly standard and taking the new york post back. all of that happened in the late 80s and 90s. so you had this 247 media and a conservative media apparatus that happened for the first time that came together and i think in many ways clinton did not know how to handle it and hillary did note how to handle it. she botched her response to the whitewater thing which from the start.

and then the republicans at the same time, the republican party under gingrich and under other influences to became much more intensely partisan than the republican party had ever been. sure you you remember who the house republican leader before newt gingrich was. bob michael, this guy from michigan. central illinois, right. a moderate guy and a guy who's sort of wanted to get along and be bipartisan is replaced by newt gingrich. another thing that that happened around the same time the republican party is the rise of americans for tax reform. and the pledge that they make republican signed to never raise an income tax. that was after george hw bush raised income taxes in 1990 and

they made sure that no republican would support an income tax ever after. and to this day, depending on how you count, there couple of you that you could put in there, but basically to this day not a single republican house member senator has voted for a single tax increase, would you say that's where? >> there were a couple of deals in the second obama camp that might be arguably a tax increase, but not really. think how much that change politics. up until that point when it came time to raise taxes and support social security which happened in 83, 84, regulates up o'neil did it. when it it came time to raise taxes the democrats said it's time to raise taxes and we have to raise them by x. republican said no will raise

them by why. so we will raise them by wire somewhere between and that's what happened. more often than not. sometimes democrats cut taxes too. lbj pushed through jfk's tax cuts. but my point is republicans pre- 1990s were not inherently against a tax increase. that change politics a lot. so clinton walks into this bellows saw these arrows coming at him that no president had faced. by telling of the lewinsky story discusses how on the one hand will first of all it happened only because of the government shutdown. you remember that? mean i know you remember the shutdown but you remember that he met her

during the shutdown? so if there had been no government shutdown, there had been no partisan gingrich effort to shutdown the the government the two of them never would have met. so let's start with that. then, there was a group of people, it was a right-wing conspiracy, it probably wasn't vast. hillary probably hillary probably got that word wrong but there was a white wing conspiracy that was trying to catch bill clinton in a perjury trap. around probably the issue of some woman that he had slept with because there were all these rumors back then. so it's all been detailed before and joe spoken michael's book and some others. but i have it it in there and a punchy short version.

so there's a group of lawyers, chiefly chiefly on the right who call themselves the elves who are trying to get the situation was such that they could interview bill clinton about sex. i get bill clinton to lie about it. but they were only grasping at straws they didn't have anything solid. then goldberg calls one of them and says hey i met this woman and she has been talking to monica lewinsky and guess what. and that is how these things came together. and that's how it happened. it's the most -- so another improbable thing, monica linsky gets transferred out of the white house after her association with the president

ends. she gets transferred to the pentagon where linda trip happen to been transferred to after she left the white house. she was better kaisha got thrown out of the white house and she was angry at the clintons and didn't like them in the first place. but it's just a coincidence that they ended up in the same place. if monica lewinsky had been transferred to the federal aviation that never would've happened. so, i don't want to tell him not to much because we should talk about other aspects of his presidency and his legacy. wanted to talk about it to short up setup the short read that i'm going to do here. which is from a day in august august 1998 a day you may remember when bill clinton finally had to tell the truth to

us about the nature of his relationship with ms. lewinsky. i'm sure many of you remember that night and his appearance on tv. it was the same day the same day he had been deposed by ken starr and his attorneys and asked point blank about monica. he told the truth more or less and he knew it was going to be leaked out. so he he decided he better go on tv. so, this starts a couple of days before. on saturday morning on august 1519 98, bill clinton woke up his wife and told her the truth. he said he was ashamed and sorry but he cannot tell anyone even her at the time because he did not want to be run out of office

in the flood tide that followed his deposition in january. the faith by the decided to have the president and needs her day work was but there is a terrorist attack, car bomb that killed 20 people. on the fateful day of the deposition the speechwriter later wrote, the west wing was ghostly. outside it was a unnaturally dark, rain on the windows and a rather uncreative movie director -- a grand jury and watch about ten blocks away. when asked if he is physically intimate he read a statement acknowledging conduct that was wrong that stopped short of intercourse and thus did not constitute sexual relations as he had understood the term to mean earlier. the question continue for four hours. he

never asked and went to lie, the, the whole thing wrapped up around 6:30 p.m. white house staff had agreed in advance that clint would have to address the nation that night. two speeches were prepared. one that expressed only contrition and another that did that but added a few things in his tactics. top aides argued that clint should just go full contrition, stonefaced hillary told them you're the one who got yourself into this mess and only you can decide what to say about it. clinton was still peeps so speaking from the same room that he had been question he went with the angry version. indeed he said i did have a relationship with ms. lewinsky there is not appropriate. then he pivoted and said, it has gone on too long, cost to much and hurt too in her too many innocent people. now this matters between me, the two people i love most, my wife and our daughter, and our god. i must put it right but it is private and i intend to reclaim my family life for my family.

it's nobody's business but ours, even presidents have private lives. the poll suggested that most americans would've agreed but clint was savaged by the proponents who wanted contrition only. then they left for their summer vacation the next day. the new scammers lingered as they walked across the white house lawn. hillary on the left, bill on the right and chills in between holding both parents fans. with his other hand the president held the leash of his new dog, the well named, buddy. at least it was observed he had one friend in the picture. so, that is that. but he came out of that pretty well, didn't he? you? you know his approval rating for the whole thing never went below 60%. usually it was 65, 60 six, 60.

so should he redesign, no huge majority. should he be impeached, apsley not. do you approve of the job history and its president? of course we do. seventy-four and 75%. bombed iraq, the night that the articles of impeachment, remember that and people thought it was awake the dog thing. everybody thought it was awake the dog thing. i think we all know now that the joint chiefs of staff are not going to order a bombing raid to get the presidents chestnuts out of the fire. it's not going to happen. bombing raid approval 70%. even newt gingrich said the president did absolutely the right thing today. so, he was by that time really popular, successful and surefooted president.

there's no question that he would have won a third term if he could have stayed in. he left on one for him was a frustrating and sad note that remember the last thing he was trying to do was middle east peace deal. i do a pretty good job of discussing that in the book although it's very short. it was quite riveting and ere some other good versions of it out there too. literally every second down to the last second of his presidency as it was ticking away as he is doing his duty by the way to ensure the peaceful transition of power, he

privately he thought the decision would be absolutely appalling but he didn't say that publicly. he didn't say was in his job. his job was to ensure the peaceful transition of power that is what he did. who is using ever he could to get middle east peace. and he got the israelis to agree to the most remarkable set of concessions, that they had never agreed to before. then he went back and said yes, come on look at what they've done, you've, you've got a go for this. in the call the saudi's and the prince and he called several others and he said you have to talk them into taking us. he's crazy of he doesn't take it. and they walked away. arafat just to have the guts to do it. and arafat called him the day before he left office and said to him, i just want to thank you

for all of your efforts mr. president, your great man. any sediment not a great man come on failure and and you have made me one. so, when interesting complex man who got a lot done, did a lot of necessary things and did a lot of very good things in the face of the kind of opposition that no president had ever faced before. if his legacy is a little bit down right now, i think there will come a time when it will come back up. that time, depending on how things go in the next four years make sooner than we think. so, thank you all for listening to me. [applause]

>> can get to the microphone please step right up but i'm sure people have questions. >> thank you for being here. did bill clinton cooperate with the -- and if so how? >> no he didn't. and i asked him to. i asked him for an interview. it's usually not been the case for these books that the authors seek or receive any cooperation. how would -- cooperate after all. but i thought well since he's alive and since i know him and i've interviewed him. i don't know him well but i've interviewed him. i know plenty people in that orbit who are in the white house i thought that was worth a shot maybe i would put an interview and as an epilogue. they considered it seriously but then said no. they didn't really say why.

i'm just speculating but i suspect it was because it was like during his wife's presidential campaign and they did not want him to slip up and say anything that he wasn't supposed to say. i did get cooperation of some of the folks who were around. greenberg greenberg and a few other. >> the president -- no. not at all. >> thank you for your talk. from the younger generation born in 92 dear clinton was elected. i agree, i think my generation should be better informed about bill clinton, especially now that obama has completed his presidency. the last two presidents lester to terms with the rocky times. the comparisons are notably going to rise. why would you say to inform people more my age of bill

clinton? a special when brock obama who they are more familiar with? >> that's a good question. i hope you people are interested in reading this. you want to get a good sense of the guy without having to read a 66 on a page doorstop and this is where you come. as i said in my remarks, a lot of the things he did that young people today would disagree with you need to understand the context of the times. the democratic party was perceived in a different way and there was no sense at that time that there was any public a ground swell for the kind of populism that bernie came to represent. there were politicians that were trying to do that sort of thing. tom harkin tried to run that campaign in 1992.

he won his home state. so, there just was not much of a sense that there was a lot of hunger for that kind of politics at that time. there is more of a hunger frankly for what clinton did. everyone is a product of their time. he did largely what his times demanded. he also did a lot of progressive things. they just don't sound as progressive as young people want them to sound today. but, he moved the country forward on racial stuff and he protected choice and there were a number of things that he did that helped working-class people and poor people. middle people lifted out of poverty then certainly any other modern president.

>> a question about maybe the post-presidency. how do you understand bill clinton after he left in terms of an international global focus and domestic and in comparison to those who came before him and also subsequently taught we have seen with president bush second and what we will see from a more vocal obama we take him at his own word in terms of his role now with a trump administration. >> i'm glad you asked. i wanted wanted to talk but the post- presidency. it's important. it was a big factor in this campaign. not to the good. unfortunately. so remember the context when he left office, remember the scandals and are some of the scandals that were cooking

around as he left office that his staff had trashed the white house. remove the w's from's from the keyboards of the computers in the east wing west wing as a protest against bush. that he and hillary had gone to westchester county with a lot of white house furniture that belonged to the white house. most of this, almost almost all of this is not true. but, nevertheless just pounding, throbbing cable news through the days of the final days of his presidency. and then the -- that something that he did do of course. those genuinely scandalous to a lot of people who fled on millions of dollars of taxes. apparently clinton from the sources i have read clinton really understand that is going to be this controversial.

it was recommended by -- anyone? good guess. eric holder. ha they say. this just absolutely aid to all of the coverage about clinton. it really did damage them. so he comes out of the white house flying at 65% both in a month i don't know where honestly he is but well down so he is kind of in hiding for the first few months of his post- presidency. up in westchester hillary's and senate so they have to go to jamestown or watertown and do the things that a senator does.

so he doesn't quite know what he is going to do with himself. the clinton foundation started out for his library, then there was a natural disaster of some sort, do you remember where? indonesia? india may be anyway he and the foundation got involved in this natural disaster in the relief effort. that is is kind of what led him to move the foundation in a global direction. so that is when he decided to take on the foundation working on aids, malaria, third world health and those kind of issues. that's when he set up the

fundraising. when the foundation foundation really became what it became. the foundation got a lot of good press for about eight years. it really helped resuscitate them. everybody forgot about mark richman because the clinton foundation was doing such good stuff. then the new york times ran a story and i think 2009 about him and this guy mr. -- and the kazakhstan deal, and it made it sounds impossibly sleazy. the story has since been in questions or discredited. ann's that story really set the template for the covers of the clinton foundation has gone for the last several years, ever since. i think he has made some mistakes and she should not have given the speeches to goldman sachs. i think they saw too big a

fortune. they just don't need 60,000,000 dollars million dollars or hundred million dollars or whatever it is. they made a lot of errors. but the foundation got a lot of undeserved and unfair bad press and then she got a lot of undeserved and unfair hits over the course of the campaign. there were stories that i'm sure you will remember. some there is a judicial watch freedom of information request that found that some donors to the clinton foundation had sought access to the state department. they didn't get it, there's there's a story that some of you will remember and maybe september about a lebanese, nigerian businessman who they befriended because he gave money to the foundation and he emailed houma abbott in and said what you arrange a meeting with this guy and she said yeah sounds

interesting. and that she did with people in washington usually do which is nothing. she just ignored it. so it never happened. the guy never got his meeting. but there it but there it is, the front page of the washington post. in the seventh paragraph or a paragraph. no meeting never took place but it nevertheless reads the perception, blah, blah, blah. >> thank you for your work on this book. my question is, what my question is, what was it about bill and hillary clinton that really drove the right crazy? i work in industry and at that time they never gave the clintons a chance. does it get to the issue of a democratic president is not legitimate in a matter who he is or is it more of a generational thing. military service, wrote scholar, et cetera? >> that's a great question. i think it's sort of all of the

above. depending on the eye of the beholder. but yes, there is a sense back then and among republicans at the white house is ours. and this guy was some -- made the worse by the fact that he was a draft dodger in their eyes. that was a big thing in 1992. the lieutenant colonel in arkansas with whom clinton had dealt in the late 60s had always said while clinton was governor whenever reporters came well, i didn't treat him differently than anyone else. but then in 1982 he wrote a calm in the wall street journal that said this man is a draft dodger were about to recommend and this is a danger to the republic so he completely changes too. there's just a general generational stuff about the woodstock generation and so forth.

with hillary a lot of it is purely ideological and about her stance as a feminist and her positions and i finally read for the first time during this campaign her thesis that she wrote at wesley about lewinsky, certainly a radical organizer in chicago whom she studied. and they made this thesis into being some kind of document that was a secret plan to, you know the right wing hillary has had 50 secret plans of the last quarter century. it's a study of three things, that so they tried to do was organize a community into her failures. and she said that. so it's just what they represented. in a lot of ways.

i don't know, it took me time to realize that and to see that. i did not understand how ferocious they were about it. >> i just wanted to make one response to the man who is saying what your generation means now. there's two points, one is a think if you look at the appointments of the current administration, it's easy to forget the diversity of the appointments of bill clinton's administration. he really ushered in a whole new contacts for presidential appointments that involved much greater diversity, that was shocking some of the emphasis on

confidence as well. that gets lost especially after eight years with brock obama. we forget forget how significant and unusual that was at the time. the second thing, i'm in a bookstore so i have to say this, it's refreshing to have a president in blue clinton and barack obama who are deeply intellectual. who read constantly. you might want to comment about this but bill clinton would literally read four or five books a week while he was president. so i just wanted your comments on that. >> yes on the diversity question. he was the first president who set i'm going to have a cabinet that that looks like america, and he did. and not just a cabinet, but at at other cabinet levels and throughout his presidency and it was really an impressive thing. another thing i learned about him that i had not quite fully appreciated is the extent to

which i think hatred of racism was a deep in him from the time he was a little boy. he grew up surrounded by it of course. and he saw it. he really it really was genuinely antiracist in a very personal way. his enemies in arkansas when he was coming up were republicans but were also the democrats. the old-line dixiecrat people -- hated him and justice jim johnson and these people. and clinton really took them on. on racial stuff in arkansas with that was really hard to do. that's another feather in the

clinton courage hat. now on his intellectual curiosity. yes. just like he knew policy just like inside and out. and he knew history and ideas too. but really policy he knew inside and out he would talk to his aides about bills and they were astonished at the stuff he knew, the specific things that he knew about legislation and about what kind of effect it would have. in this policy really, this knowledge and this ferocious and and getting good at important times. like when he was negotiating with gingrich and bob dole at

the time of the first government shutdown. they all expected he was going to cave. that kind of had happened earlier on an earlier budget. so they thought we can roll this guy. he's not going to shut down the government. but government. but he stood up to them and he stood up to them for very specific things and cuts that they wanted to make to medicare. very specific cuts they wanted to make to education and what they wanted to make to environmental programs that he just would not tolerate. and he argued them under the table he said no, i will not take that cut. you can run me down to 5% popularity rating and i will not make the cut. so it was the knowledge and intelligence that he put often to very good use.

any more questions? the book is available at front. please come up front and get the book. join me and thanking michael. [applause] [inaudible] >> -- was looking at we are going to get to this magnificent images. looking at images taken from south america because the sky had to be covered. there is a second observatory built in peru to photograph the stars of the seventh hemisphere. she was looking at images of the clouds and she discovered a couple thousand variable stars i made a fundamental discovery about the pattern of variation at the stars that took the

longest time to go through their cycles tended to be the brightest stars. she figured all of the star shoes looking at were roughly the same distance away. so the ones that looked brighter really were brighter. that observation led to the first usable yardstick for measuring what we would call now galactic distances and space. her work enabled the size of the milky way to be determined. maybe getting ahead of the slides here. there is figure out the milky way is not the only galaxy in the universe. it consisted of multiple galaxies. >> it would be fair to say that time they were not sure if the universe was maybe just a few hundred thousand light-years across, maybe that was it. the shape of the universe like

this led to us looking at what geometry of clusters and spiral galaxies and then to place yourselves within that geometry. >> he could watch this and other programs on my netbook tv.org. >> this is book to be on c-span two. television for serious serious readers. here's your primetime lineup. radio host and author dennis speaking of the recent rancho mirage writers festival. at seven we explore what it means to be jewish in the world today. we will also discuss the misconceptions of government employees have about the public. on on book tvs afterwards program at 10:00 p.m., will share the story of a syrian woman's journey to europe. we wrap up saturday primetime lineup at 11:00 p.m. with economist dean baker who argues

that the upper redistribution of wealth is a direct result of government policies. that happens happens tonight on c-span twos book tv. first up, dennis prager. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]