for the space mission you might be the lucky one but if you get an opportunity whatever the experience you have ticket to see this, it's cognitively changes you as a person to make

you want to do better when you see the planet from that vantage point. >> now joining us on booktv is biographer mar mark elliot who's written a biography about the hollywood icon. we are talking to him on booktv about politics. when did he become political? >> he was political for most of his life for the better part of the generation he saw action in world war ii off the coast of alaska he was on several missions because he was trained as a radio man and enlisted after pearl harbor. it took about a year to get him called him just before he left he married his wife, they were

married for the next 65 years so he was in the illusion that they were about to invade japan for the final push and then the estimate was the army would lose up to a million men. so when the bombs were dropped on nagasaki, he was overjoyed, and even though that was a controversial move more so as the years went by, that kind of cemented the political point of view for the world war ii soldiers in the greatest generation of men and women there was a very clear delineation between right and wrong and between good and bad

they all felt they were the good guys, the whole generation and they all felt quite clearly that the japanese, the germans were the bad guys. all of that kind of black and white definition of the war, good, evil, all of that fed into the acting career. it was easy for him to play a hero because he identified with heroes and believed he was part of the hero mission. when the war ended, he was a huge supporter of fdr.

he was in adelaide stephenson supporter. he adapted campaigns for adelaide stevenson in 1952. stevenson was running against eisenhower, so that's part of his individual thought where even though eisenhower was a war hero and celebrated, he believed stevenson was more on the same level as roosevelt and was the real roosevelt liberal and eisenhower might have been a touch too militaristic for the

case. again it was a losing proposition that between 1956 and 1960, charlton heston became a major hollywood star. in fact, the biggest star of the 50s in hollywood. see supported john kennedy over stevenson in the democratic convention he supported jfk who won the nomination.

he was in shell shock after the assassination. it wasn't what the jfk people have implied since presidential future. so, a lot of them dropped out of politics for a while. it was somebody that he liked and could support and the reason for it is goldwater's campaign which essentially was in your heart, you know he's right. somehow that resonated with

heston. he looked up and saw that and he thought that's right. and of course at the time, vietnam was just the beginning of johnson's great leap backwards into vietnam. so he voted for goldwater and lost again. something happened to cemented the shift. in 1968, he decided that he wanted to go to vietnam and meet the troops. this was not a popular war. younger people today want to throw out the first baseball and

all of that. that's not the way it was in 68. it was a counterculture movement that climax to the ear with the student protests, the anti-johnson assassinations, bobby kennedy, king. so there was a lot of unrest in a lot of that anger was directed not just words mixing and the vietnamese war and johnson, but for the soldiers who were fighting. that drove him crazy while other performers like bob hope were going over there to there is a

major network making money off of it, nothing wrong with that. they did a good service. so he is a good guy. but heston went right to the front, he worked his way to the front and he met with only soldiers, no performing, no pr people.

he felt that it was focused on these soldiers and that point the last shred of his labor. the liberal leaning paper torn out and he felt that if it didn't support the men who were fighting for your country, fighting for your free time, fr, there's something wrong with it. and of course, the countercultural movement was all leftist liberal kids who were anti-vietnam in anti-americanism i remember all this because i lived through it. it was to go into a defense of whathe defense ofwhat he felt w. again remember his war was

delineated between right and wrong, evil hero. the people that he thought were the heroes were "-begin-double-quote as evil. the screen actors guild that was seen in the 40s less so today as a kind of liberal organization may be softly communist organizations and he was the head of it and ronald reagan actually saved hollywood but that is another story. he mentors heston into the

screen actors guild he put them on the board. he retired because he became a producer and you can't be a producer there's jus there is jg vats of the left and there was another president in between and then he became the president of the screen actors guild and what's needed is worked diligently to reverse the liberal direction and believe they should be much more to the right and in the six years that he left which was the longest continuous presidency he in fact

did move it to the right. as an example they wanted to merge with the screen actors guild and their position is we are all actors and there's strength in all of that and he was against it and said if we bring you in, we will dilute our ability to get work. we will be diluting the agents. that was very controversial because a union president walking out union members from the possibility of getting work and secondly, he worked out a deal with the networks to avoid a strike. it was an extension of the reagan deal. very few people thought this was

the right thing to do, get up residuals and get a better deal of front. he was at the helm of the deal and that ultimately cost him his presidency because it was felt that he was too far to the right by the constituency. so the interesting thing he was never a romantic figure onscre

onscreen. but as he got older and work became less frequent in the 80s he had the nra which was almost bankrupt. they were looking for the face for the radio to make them plausible or acceptable and easier to align with.

they said you can be the star so he did it and the audience went crazy. so, followed by this name was the head of the pr organization that they had hired to find somebody. he then made a deal. he said we will give you a private plane and the best hotel rooms in the world. we will promote you everywhere. we will bring you back to the hollywood providence if he will be our spokesman and like that,

he eventually became the head of the nra is just as he was the president of the screen actors go, now he was the president of the nra so his political journey continued back to the illusions of the nra and one meeting they had planned centcom meets charlton heston and that would bring 5,000 people who were not really members. the big meeting that they had took place a week after columbine and everyone told him don't go to that meeting and it was only about 30 miles from where it took place. they dropped out of this one, let it cool down.

my beliefs don't depend upon what happens outside. i still believe in what i think it's american rights come first amendment rights our second amendment rights for getting my amendments. and he went and did that meeting and that cost him 11 years of blacklisting in hollywood so what is interesting and ironic about that is that the children of the blacklist generation when hollywood was in the grip of the right and blacklist of people on the right so that is the profound generational shift of what they did and it was having done something awful and they

wound up doing the same thing. there's a certain quiet nobility. when there's the implication of evil and i find that fascinating so a lot of what i've written in my biography is a journey as a man and a filmmaker and star and as a political figure. i don't take any sides but i lay it all out there and let me say one thing to you. after a year of working on this but i approach the family and i thought they are going to be paranoid about anybody.

i sat down with her and he said what is your plan, what is your agenda. there's the actor and the movie and the story behind people who become so much larger than life and he said i've read a few of your books. i get it and i'm going to open everything that we have to view and that is what made this book without editorial control. you've been listening to mark elliott who is the biographer of charlton heston hollywood icon.

here's the stories he told an a lot more. you are watching book tv on c-span2. david osborne examines the charter school movement and offers his outlook for the future public education. and discussed how mass incarceration an impacted her family and radio host mark levin warned against the expansion in

the coming week's investigative journalists will report on the mental health industry and msnbc contributor will offer his thoughts on the conservative movement in america. craig shirley will discuss the political career of newt gingrich and this weekend "the new york times" magazine contributor reflects on her travels abroad and weighs in on the global standing >> there's also just a question of why did i never think this would perform a propaganda what was the job but it was doing for individual americans and i think that one thing i was realizing is this took a long time to realize the very language that we use when we talk about the foreign countries has determined for us a very long time ago

because we tended to look at the countries in the east as were they catching up with us or were they behind us. trump had enough resources and as i looked back on it as one of the great acts of genius in american politics comparable to fdr and vetting the chat this is part of what i wrote, donald trump had a primetime television show for 13 years.

not because it wasn't on pbs nobody understood that so nobody in the city said she is by definition formidable. he writes about this in the art of the deal so what he learned in new york in the 80s is any publicity will build strength so he was happy and i think that he should modify what he's doing because i told him i think 10% less trump would be 100% more effective. but he figured out early on that if he could engage the media that the 2 2424 hour a day cable news system and the power of facebook and twitter meant he

could take all the air out of the room so all these other guys are running around raising money to be able to buy tv ads to be on television and that would then set up his argument with morning showing tha joe and shod argue for 25 minutes and then he would call in to fox and friends for 25 minutes and then he would have breakfast. so all morning they are covering the argument that he's in the middle of and about ten the morning he would do a press event and then about ten in the evening about an hour so in the course of a normal day he's got all of his competitors off the air trying to raise money to get on the air and what was happening is there's only one poll in the entire campaign

where he's not ahead for the nomination. he was the front-runne front rue day that he announced a. nobody could say to themselves if he is the front runner in every single poll could it be that he is the front runner because then everythin everythie the lead would be crazy and since they couldn't be crazy, he had to be crazy and if he was crazy, he couldn't be the front-runner even though he was the front runner. this went on so i'm in a situation where i'm watching these so-called experts who by the way have learned nothing. the stuff you get on tv today is as stupid and wrong as the people that announce laughed whe announced in the last of the convention and they didn't want anything because they can't because it is a repudiation of their own life.

so the choice is i can believe in the fantasy that validates the more i can decide what has changed dramatically and i think the fantasy and that's literally where we are right now, which dramatically everybody is going to see how it continues the next three years because gradually trump will figure out an angle to get over this in a way that will be historic. >> look at the whole russian fantasy. what happened the democrats said hillary can't have lost and donald trump can't have one so i wonder who cheated. that means there must have been collusion. so everybody has been walking around town saying watch the connection. even dianne feinstein said that

there was an obstruction of justice so the fantasy that did not occur is being replaced so all they have to do is fire him and it was a very good test if john f. kennedy fired j. edgar hoover over investigating people thought that it was obstruction so there isn't really collusion. in their energy and enthusiasm they have been even more wrong in the time which is actually in the stupidity and enormous

challenge. they called him the godfather to his children prince gerald in order to appoint him a special counsel retainer there was no crime because valerie plane has already been no longer a protected me that the cia and they knew who had done it.

the example and the danger of the cover of the government if you go back and look at that case that is why i'm very worried about me when it's not that he is a bad person. i have no doubt. i encourage everybody to read arthur miller's the crucible in the late century of salem