live with arthur eveneds and call ins, both schedules available at booktv.org. welcome to the washington dc convention center, the 17th annual national book festival. booktv on c-span2 will be live with others all day. he will hear from condoleezza rice, pulitzer prize-winning columnist tom friedman, best-selling authors jd vance and michael lewis the master not leland melton and many others. for complete schedule visit booktv.org, follow us on social media for updates and behind-the-scenes videos. on facebook, facebook.com/booktv,@booktv is our twitter handle and on instagram we are at booktv.

this year's festival kicks off with library of congress carla hayden making opening remarks followed by pulitzer prize-winning author and historian david mccullough. you are watching booktv on c-span2 live from the 17th annual national book festival. [applause] ..

he will be followed

they struck a chord in the national conversation about poverty in america. thomas freedom barely needs an introduction he is an internationally recognized writer on the foreign affairs and the environment. in michael lewis is famous for his books about finance such as liars poker but he is equally famous for his books about topics as diverse as adoption and baseball. the screen adaptations of the blindside in moneyball among others had been enormously popular. in condoleezza's rice was the

secretary of state for the united states. and she is now on the faculty of stanford university traveling from california to be here with us today. and finally mr. david baldacci. in fact, for a record setting eight time at the national book festival's thrillers and books for young people have been read by millions. i'm very pleased to be able to turn this over to the person who has helped make this festival possible and is our cochair mr. david rubenstein. a true believer in the power of literacy and reading and mike can do for all of us.

it would not had been possible to have this event without you. [applause]. so, please walk up to the stage mister david mccall our and mr. david rubenstein. [applause]. [inaudible]

the first national book festival how many people were here at the first one. anybody. how many had been to everyone. how me this is the first time. how many people like the price of admission. we are very honored to have david mccullough and his let's get quick background. grew up as one it's for boys and a family. where his family had the small electrical supply company. david went to yale where he did quite well graduated in 1955. he then went to new york york

went to new york and joined sports illustrated which was then a novel novice new publication. and then came to work in washington at the usia and my at the usia got interested in something that he was interested in from his time in pittsburgh and then wrote his first book about the down town plot. that was his first book. he has now written with this book. the american spirit. he has written 11 books. will talk about that shortly. every single one of his books is still in print. it is very unusual. the first book is almost now 50 years old. david has won the pulitzer's price.

he has been given to the presidential medal of freedom. he has been asked to speak to a joint session of congress and given every onerous citizen can get. also 55 honorary degrees which must be a record. so that is very impressive. but even more impressive is he has five children 19 grandchildren on the love of his life is here his wife of 63 years. [applause]. okay. did you ever think when you're growing up in pittsburgh that you would one day become the most famous chronicle of american history. i never imagined such a thing. what did you want to do. i wanted to get good grades in

school. not to spend too much of my time worrying about that and i got interested in girls and that took a lot of my preparations. once i got college i knew i wanted to be an artist or a writer or an architect or an actor. i couldn't make up my mind. so when i finish college i thought i know what i'll do. i will go to new york and see what happens. so i went to new york and a lot happened. my father would call me after my second or third book and say now it was time to come back to pittsburgh and get a real job. he never understood. i'm very grateful i grew up

when i did than at that time in that city. it was a lesson in history itself it was a stimulation for the arts in the literature the principal by school was one of the founders of the first station in america and katie ka was the first radio station in america and i was invited to do a little voice over when i was still in high school. so that interested me as well. that is not american history but what did you work on there. in the circulation promotion department. they have to have the test i

was can ask if i could contribute the competitor in the test. yes we have to do it on your own time. don't waste office time doing that. tend to job. i was a trainee i broke the letter and submitted it and they decided to use it and they won the test. from that point on i was looking good. the wonderful thing about it was sports illustrated was brand-new and nobody knew exactly where it was going or how to make it go. it was a very exciting time. in the holy spirit of the city then was amazing. i went to work for $5,000 a

year they allowed me an extra $10 a week because i was married so that stereotype for women was not just in salaries it was in expressed in other ways also. i also found right away at how many wonderful women there were working there and when i came to washington i found some of the best people i have ever worked with in my life where the women at the u.s. information agency. when kennedy ran i thought this is really exciting. he was can i make a difference. he was can give us all a chance to take part. and when he gave his magnificent inaugural address and said what can you do for your country i took that entirely in heart. i quit my job. i knew one in the kennedy grout --dash my kennedy crowd.

i went door-to-door looking for some place in the federal government where my training and education would be appropriate and wound up luck would have it and look is a big factor not just in our lives but in history as luck would have it i would wound up working at the usia on edward r murrow to be the director. it was a very exciting time. and it stayed in exciting time for the three years until the president was killed. but during that time i have to be in the library of congress doing some research for some articles we were to include in the magazine i was in a chance upon this big table at the library and the princeton photographs prints and photographs division of photographs taken and johnstown right after the famous disastrous flood of

1889. i have heard about the flood all my life but he really knew nothing about it and i looked at those photographs and saw the devastating destruction and could not believe my eyes and i thought what happened. so i took the book out of the library which was okay but the author didn't really understand the geography of western pennsylvania which i did understand. so i took another book out of the library and it was a potboiler written at the time for full of inaccuracies and so forth. while i was in college i have the good fortune to cross paths with thorton wilder. the great playwright and novelist. he was asked at one point why do you write the plays you do the subjects you choose what you write the novels you do. he said i imagine a story that i would like to be able to

read and if i find nobody has written it so i can see it on stage or reading a book i write it myself so i can read it in a book or see it performed on stage. i thought why do you try to write the book about the one you want to read. i knew this is what i want to do for the rest of my life. did you quit your job at usia. i was asked to come back to new york. to work at the american heritage. the wonderful american history magazine which was published with hardcovers and no advertising. in exciting adventurous time i worked there for six years and i wrote the johnstown flood at night and on weekends for

three years carry not my job as usual. after had written the book and then after i got the idea for the next book i thought i've got a quit and see if i could doubt full-time and because i was married to very brave and wonderful woman she said as that's what that's what you want to do will do it. we know outside income only had was advance on the new book and after my johnstown book was published several other publishers came to me and one wanted me to do the chicago fire the other wanted me to do the san francisco earthquake. i was hardly 30 years old and has been typecast as bad news mccollum.

in it like that. i wanted a symbol of positive affirmation. i must say it took me a while people say where you get your ideas. i was having lunch with two friends one was a science writer the other an engineer and they started talking all that the builders of the brooklyn bridge didn't know they were in for it when when they first set out to do it. i thought there is my subject. i came out of that lunch was down at the lower east side i went straight to the new york public library and stay up this -- straight up the stairs to the card catalog days and pulled out the drawer and there were over 50 cards on

the subject of the brooklyn bridge but not one describing a book of the kind i intended to write. it was on the basis of that idea and the willingness of my publisher to go behind me and give me an advance and i was able to stop working full-time. i have never changed publishers. i figured if i was loyal and faithful to them it would be to me. and they certainly had been. [applause]. as i had described elsewhere. the style of writing. it's a little unique in the sense that your wife is involved in the process of helping you with the writing can you describe how you do that.

i've been confessing to this truth more lately than before but i don't consider myself a historian. i have no degree in history and no phd either. i majored in english. i only took the history courses that were required. and i've always believed that one authors write for the year here as well as the eye. because when you hear what you had written you begin to hear words that you're using too often. you hear sentence structures and become repetitious and you hear when your study to be boring. i had two or three wonderful writers help me along the way. i had two or three wonderful writers help me along the way. a wonderful writer and charles

arterburn. a brilliant wonderful naturalist and writer. and they helped me a great deal to understand you have to cut back if you write to write and rewrite. i am a re- writer. and all the best of them had been that way. she sometimes reads a chapter three or four times because i am rewriting it three or four times. one would wear working on this book about theodore roosevelt may tell the story we are the next-to-last chapter and she was reading aloud and she said there's something wrong with that sentence i said will read it again. i said there's nothing wrong with that sentence. she said yes there is. i said give me that.

i said she said yes there something wrong with that. i said just keep going please. i did do not do anything about that sentence in the book went to the publisher. and it came out and got wonderful reviews including a very timely review in the new york review of books. up until he was about to end the review he said sometimes however mr. mccullough doesn't write very well. consider the sentence. so when historians do a lot of research and then they write you perhaps do something different. you research and write can you describe why you do it that

way. i never undertake a book about a subject i know much about. if i knew all about it i wouldn't want to write the book because the research would not be an adventure. and for me each subject i undertake is a new experience. i'm setting foot on a continent i've never been on before. i really don't know much about the research of the last half of the book and i don't want to know that yet. i want to be involved with the people that were involved in the story. i want to be with them. i want to know them. i want to be inside their time. people used to say to me are you working on a new book by really say i'm working in a book. you have to get in the other time and you have to understand those human beings. history is not about statistics and memorizing dates in boring quotations history is about people about human beings when in the

course of humans and we have to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of those other people and know what the life they lived was like and what the hardship and adversities that they faced that we don't even have to think about. and what spoiled brats we are that we have so much that we know it all to them. and yet we don't bother to know who they were. it's not right. i do the research as i go along. as you learn more than you have different questions you have to ask questions all the time what was he or she worried about. and we have to keep learning more from the original sources. letters, diaries unpublished

memory wires and the like. so much of it is right here in the library of congress. all those letters that they wrote to each other into their father into their mother and sister are all here in the library of congress and you read those letters these two young fellas who grew up in the house a house that had no running water no indoor plumbing. no essential he and no telephone you could put ten of them in this room a tiny little house but it was full of books and their father insisted that they all read and that they read above their level in those letters that they wrote express what he drummed into them. and learned how to use the

english language on paper and on your feet. their vocabulary in the handling is breathtaking and they never even finished high school. and when i see the writing that is produced by college students today when i learn that nearly half of all the law schools in our country are now requiring incoming freshman who of course are all college graduates to take a basic writing course because they can't write a respectable or presentable letter or report in the work that they're there could have to be doing. we have to knuckle down and get back to learning how to write learning how to read and with concentration and understanding and teaching history we are raising a generation of young americans

and i know this because i lecture or teach at colleges and universities all over the country where raising young people who are historically illiterate. it's not their fault. i think some of the brightest people i've ever met are some of the students i'm involved with in colleges and universities. and we have to stimulate curiosity ask questions. don't think you always had to have the answer. i don't have all of the answers. i hope i never reach the point where i think i have all of the answers. one of the great writers said curiosity is what separates us from the cabbages. >> when you are writing do you type it do use a type writer or do you longhand what's the

answer. i'm proud to say i work on a manual typewriter and when it breaks where do you get the parts it's never broken i bought it secondhand in order to write my first book. i went so we were living in white plains, new york and i went to a typewriter shop and bought a secondhand royal typewriter that was then 25 years old. i paid $75 for it. i have written everything i have ever written, every speech, every article every book on thar typewriter for over 50 years and there is nothing wrong with it and there never has been.

talk about by no means did the notion of planned obsolescence enter into the manufactures of that machine. >> it's fantastic. why this typewriter? why not wordprocessor? >> we go's too fast. i don't think all that fast. and if you hit the wrong button you can eliminate months of work [laughter] i have a friend bill fowler of very good historian and a very good book writer lost 5000 words because he hit the wrong button. also i'd love to take the paper out of the typewriter and after i finish a chapter put it on the clipboard, good weather find a nice comfortable place to take an outdoor chair and sit under a tree and let the editor in me sw

show that mother who wrote this stuff how it should really be done and editing on the manuscript. but the machine all that is eliminated. you never see that again but with this you can see the process. the only other avid devoted typewriter man that i know is tom hanks and tom hanks writes all of his letters everything on a typewriter and he has what must be the worlds greatest typewriter collection. i'm sure they are at the smithsonian and he understands perfectly why i work on it typewriter. and i urge others to do it and i urge others to remember how much work goes into writing a book. >> i think robert caro still uses a typewriter the how many words do you do a day before you say okay that's it? >> in the old days when i was full of teens i would do four

pages a day when i was rolling. now i try to do two pages a day and two pages a day is 10 pages a week or more because i work seven days a week and by the end of the month you have a chapter or the beginnings of a chapter. i'm often asked how much of my time i spend writing and how much of my time is spent doing research, perfectly good questions. nobody has ever asked me how much time do you spend thinking? >> how much of your time do you spend thinking? answer. >> yeah. you are the first man. >> what is the answer? >> answer? >> allah, allah. if you are looking out the window at work you might think that guy is asleep. [laughter] but i'm thinking deeply. the mac in one of my roles at the smithsonian whenever you do retire in can you give us aou

typewriter? >> i'm not sure. i'll have to talk to the boss. >> are right to let's talk about this book. you've written 10 books before this is your 11th book. you talk shortly about your new book the pioneers. this book is a compilation of your speeches and honorary degree commencement talks. you have done 55 a world record when you give us commencement speech what do you have left to say they haven't said before? do you get tired of the same things to students and are they really listening? >> the setting of every talk to everyone you meet is different and so you want to know something about the university where you are speaking or the college where you are speaking or if you are invited to speak let's say at the white house event at the capitol you have to do the homework. i do a lot of research and very conscientious what i'm saying is

going to go on the record as the university. >> let's talk about some of the speeches and it's a highly readable book and i highly recommend it and let's talk about one of the first speeches. you are asked to give a speech to the joint session of congress very few private citizens are ever asked to do that. how did that come about and what did you want to talk about to members of congress? >> there was a gathering of historians and biographers that spoke at a conference here at the library of congress on the congress and after that was oves when it came time for the folks to go to the centennial in 1989 i was asked to come and give a shorter version of the speech i gave at that gathering at theat library of congress. >> shorter version because members of congress don't like long speeches?

[laughter]id i >> i think they were afraid i'd run a play with my excitement. and go on forever. but it was a very high honor and i work extremely hard on preparing this. >> one of the people you talked about was john quincy adams who had been a member of congress for 20 years after he left the presidency.s afte why did you talk about him and what is so appealing about john quincy adams? >> john quincy adams had been a diplomat who served in several diplomatic posts very important diplomatic posts. he had been a senator and he had been president of the united states and after he left thecy presidency he was asked if he would by any chance run for congress and he said certainly. he went back and served in congress until his death and he

died on the floor of the congress died in what is now statuary hall a little room off to the side. he died in harness as they saidn their and he didn't have to do that. he didn't have to be a congressman as he was but he had a mission not only to represent his constituents in massachusetts but to represent the country and more that really than a constituency and he was ardently against slavery so he was battling the slavery on the floor of the congress until the day he fell dead or fell down and died a few days later. talk about devotion, talk about integrity, talk about truth and ho honesty and loyalty his father john adams was the only founding

father and president. he was the founding father who never owned a slave. out of principle and his wife abigail was even more adamant on the subject.xt pre it ran in the family asked a dedication to public service. it ran in the family. he's also brilliant. he was interested in everything. he spoke many languages in many ways i think he may have had the highest iq of the most fertile versatile mind if anybody including the founders. but as chance would have it he was only one a one-term president than one term presidents get the attention that the others do. >> let me ask you about another president that we talked about it he spoke on the 4th of july

at an immigration and naturalization ceremony in monticello which is held every 4th of july. marcellus thomas jefferson's home. thomas jefferson gave us the creed that all men are created equal by the road in the preamble but how did you square that with the fact that he was a slave owner and how did you address that issue and how do you think he addressed the issue the fact that he was a slave owner but he thought all men should he the created equal. >> i don't understand it nor do i understand the fact that he destroyed every letter he evertt wrote to his wife and every letter that she ever wrote to se him so we know nothing about her. we don't even know what she looked like and i can't understand that. i can't can understand that he kept very close track of every time he ever spent on anything, incredible. the national record but he never added it up. [laughter]

>> that was probably why he was bankrupt. >> you is never a doubt from the time he was a young man and he just kept spending.f i do understand it but i also don't understand where that genius came from. the man was a genius and he had been nothing but an architect. that alone would qualify him to be somebody we all should know about. and he served eight brilliant idea that all men are created equal but he also said something i think has not been sufficiently played out. he hasn't been given sufficient credit for it and that is his absolute relief and education. he said any nation that expects the ignorant expects what never was and never can be. we have to be educated. we have to be literate.

we have to understand there are no easy answers to big problems and so forth and nobody has glib solutions to big problems. it has to be worked out. i wish i had the chance to know him.sh i wish i had the chance. >> think about and all the people you've written about john adams harry truman john quincy adams thomas jefferson if you could have dinner with anyoneonr president not alive who would you like to have dinner with? >> john adams.some q because there are so manyto questions i want to ask him. >> let's talk about john adams for a moment. he gave a speech at the university of massachusetts and you talked a lot about john adams. the founding fathers he would at got less attention than george washington thomas jefferson and james moffitt -- james madison. why do you think so few people

paid attention until your book came out of why do you think there is still no monument for john adams in washington d.c.. >> yes, there is. some amount of peace and the white house. you don't know about that? >> i don't. >> john adams was the first president to resign in the white house. his first night he was alone. abigail had not arrived yet and his first morning after his first night he wrote her a letter in which he said, what he wrote in the letter franklin roosevelt had carved into the wooden part of the mantelpiece in the east room in the state dining room. when truman was in charge of redoing the white house he made sure that quotation stayed thern when kennedy became president he had a carved into the marble of the mantelpiece so that it would stay forever.

and what adams had said in the letter to abigail was this. may none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof. [applause] and i think it's very important, very important to understand and to think about he put honesty first ahead of wisdom, honesty.. [applause] >> in your pulitzer prize-winning book on john adams which was also made into an hbo series and won a lot of awards as well you went through a thousand letters between john adams and abigail adams. have you ever experienced anything like that between a husband and wife before? what was it that struck you sod unusual about those letters? >> the quality of the use of

anguish languish in the quality of the use of the mind, how well read they both were. john adams advised his young son at the time about 10 years old when they went off with his father to europe to serve as a diplomat, he said you'll never be alone if you have a poet in your pocket. in other words carry a book and that was part of the attit relationship. they were incredible readers and abigail was right there in her letters are phenomenal. >> she was not college-educated. >> she never went to school. she tutored at home as they were but she never stopped reading and she was brilliant and she was brave and patriotic and she put up with incredible incredi difficulties running the family, running the household trying to

stay afloat financially when he was off serving overseas and those children were raised by her in a way that they would never forget. that dinner party you are asking me who would i have? i would definitely want to abigail adams there and i would definitely want the sister of the wright brothers. you can't understand what they did and how they did it if you don't understand the part played by catherine ride and was she something. she at him and made him tow the line and behave himself themselves in a way that we all need. >> you gave a speech at dartmouth in there to peoplele featured in a speech about a mere britain. one was teddy roosevelt and he wrote a book not about his

presidency but about the time he left new york and went west. why did he find that such ang appealing part of his life in what was the most importantnd question you took away from that though? >> theatre roosevelt is like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. he was a child that was not expected to live.o he suffered terribly from seizures of asthma which were really life-threatening. he was afraid of everything fearful of everything and he outgrew it and he out or let by facing adversity. he took hold of himself and he worked hard at it all the way through college and then on into life. l his father's death was a

devastating experience for him. then his wife and his mother died on the same day and he was shattered man. that's when he went west. this idea of going west is so american. it's a way of healing and a way of escaping and many historians obviously have written quite profoundly about this. he is the essence of that but he never forgot who he was and where he was going back to and when he comes back even remarries and gets involved in politics in a very serious way. >> he was brilliant.erful writeh and he was a wonderful writer and an historian.

>> he wrote about 40 books. theodore roosevelt wrote many books including a very good book i consider a good book about the naval war of 1812 when he started when he was still in college.whhe woodrow wilson was a professor of history. dwight eisenhower's crusade in europe is one of the best books about world war ii ever written and he wrote every word of thatp himself. no illustrator did anything toab help him.r. and kennedy wrote several notches profiles encouraging kept referring to history citing history bringing history into the dialogue of the presidency of the executive office at hand and again and again. >> in the dartmouth speech attacked about harry truman in which he wrote another pulitzer prize-winning book. why was terry chairman so unpopular when he left the presidency but now he's everyone's favorite president? what happened after he left the

presidency other than your bookn [laughter] >> we begin before i wrote the book, believe me. i grew up in a very tid-fashioned republican family and i was a high school student and i was very interested in politics and i tried to stay awake. some of you may know or remember the final tally didn't come in until 2:00 in the morning and i just couldn't stay up that late. i fell asleep. my father was in shaping the next morning and i went in i said dad, who one? he said truman like the end of the world. 20 or 30 years later i was back home and we were having a chat after dinner and he started in on how the world was going to hell and he posited he said too bad old areas and still in the white house. [laughter]

but harry truman is a great american story. this wonderful gathering here is about the american story. if there ever was a story that is so american, he is harry, true man or my place called independence and he never went to college. he had to go it on his own and he had all kinds of bad luck and defeat but he never gave up. my favorite people are the people that don't give up the george washington in 1776 had every reason in the world to say that's enough we can't win this to hell with it but he would not give up and he knew how to convince others we are not going to give up to the wright brothers never gave up. the building of the brooklyn bridge they had many reasons to

say this is more than we can achieve but they wouldn't give up. >> talking about never giving up you gave a speech at ohio university about people who helped build the northwesty territories or you are now working on a book called the pioneers as i mentioned earlier. what was so unique about it and why did those people not give up >> i was invited to speak at ohio university for the 200th anniversary of nesbitt and i had to find something about a prior university. i found out the oldest building on campus was called cotler hall i thought who is cotler? and it was the oldest, i was told it was the oldest university college building west of the allegheny mountains. while cuddlers name was majestic cutler. he was a classic 18th century

poly man. he was a doctor, medical doctor, a lawyer and a minister of a small church in ipswich massachusetts. a group of war veterans in ipswich in massachusetts revolutionary war had the idea that because they had been paid in worthless money all the times time said they served eight and a half years in the revolution the one way to compensate that would the in this new northwest territories ceded to our country by the british at the treaty in paris and that land was for going away in a way that nobodyo could even imagine and it belonged to the government era was. so this man cutler was picked by

these officers from the war to go down to the capital which was then in new york and sell them on the idea of creating a northwest territories whereby new states could be born. now monastic cutler had neverhig loved anything in any way in his life. the word lobbyist or lobbing hadn't even entered the language yet. he'd never been to new york never been out of new england but off he went in his one horse shade down to new york to convince the continental congress there was no constitution yet to go ahead with this. this was the summer of 1787 and he put the ordinance through. he did it, one man, he did it and the ordinance stipulated three things of immense importance. what are the most important bills that ever passed our congress even before we had a president.

they would be complete freedom of religion absolutely -- absolutely freedom of religion and the government would be involved in education.uc there would be public education all the way through college since the beginning of the statv university university system for example in third and most important of all there would beo no slavery. now what that man closed his territory was as big as all of the 13 colonies. it meant this new empire doesn't wilderness empire would be free to everyone. all you have to do was get across the ohio river.itory it was the only territory north and west of the ohio river. it now constitutes the states on ohio, indiana, illinois, michigan and wisconsin. it's as big as all of france. no slavery so half of our country would be no slavery.y.

imagine with one vote of congress, one man put it through and yet i never knew anything about it and most people know nothing about it. now i go back to clinton wilder. clinton wilder was once asked about how he got his ideas and so forth. i thought our town was one of the greatest things i have ever seen on stage. i still love to see it and i have always wanted to write a book about people you've never heard of to see if i could get you into the tent as it were without relying on storied celebrities. so none of the characters except one or two in the periphery of this new book are people you have ever heard of but all there'll letters and diaries

have survived in the archives at murrieta college at murrieta ohio. it was king tut's tomb or something. really truly and oh my goodness what they talked about what they revealed and the first cities they faced and they would not give up. >> is the wind-down the time we have available to final questions. one, what is the great pleasure of your life to dave? when you look back on what you achieved is that exposing all of these americans do we know more about our history and what hasas given me the most -- the greatest pleasure relight between -- besides your wife and your children what gave you the most pleasure in life? >> being american. [applause] >> and when people talk about you and the legacy you would like to have left behind not that you are leaving anytime soon but what would you say is the legacy you are most proud of

having achieved? >> he's tried to do his best. >> we have done a terrific job and a final thing about the library of congress. the library of congress is a place you got a lot of your research. how important is the library of congress to you? >> the library of congress is indispensable for me professionally but i also see it as a shrine on our acropolis devoted to the idea of education it's available to all. our whole public library system is something that is a miracle of creation. [applause] the library of congress is the greatest library in the world. no question. and we did it. we did it.

and if you ever get down about american culture you might like to remember that there are still more public libraries in this country than there are starbucks. [applause] .. [applause]. thank you. [inaudible]