[inaudible conversations] welcome to the panel and as you hear we have some pretty great riders to share the stories with have a couple of

announcements that was asked me to make be sure your cell phone is turned off we do not want any callsls coming in in the middle of the session and also no personal recordings of the sessions. honor that agreement so please do both for me. after the event we are going over to signing area one and if you have more detailed questions or conversations you are welcome to follow us or meet us overl there and we will be there as long as you want us to be there. we will see you at the end of the event. in general we will keep this

as informal as we can to encourage the panelists to interact with each other i last him to briefly introduce their book and hopefully it will just take over. i am a writer and historian from montana and i actually have a book here which i thought that was great but in particular i just want to give you wine quick overview and this is an amazing biography of richard nixon i call it a thriller you know the ending but yet you have no idea i highly recommend this book to have a biography of mohammed

ali again an amazing and disturbing book because what happens to him you literally see that happening in real time visionary women with andrea barnett about four leading women you have never seen written about to gather this is an interesting way that they were revolutionary for their time so this may just be your book and now adam you don't necessarily think of the author of the book and you food expert and i look forward

to having a discussion about the difference between writing we think we know all about like richard nixon are those who live on an island. so we have's a unique combination so starting with the richard nixon book and asked how he just came to this subject that we know everything about them we only know part of this story. there are rules for biographers and one of them is if you publish of an american president of your students i was asked to explore if there was a story to tell about nixon and i decided i would make the argument that we live in a world that richard nixon

left us in the polarization at home north versus south black versus white elites versus the good people of the homeland he brought china back into the world order to give us that structure if you define peace the way he did and he is a caricature the only president to resign we know him from watergate vietnam so showing up at the white house during the reagan years to join the delegation he walked in and former president gerald ford and richard nixon that said see no evil or hear no evilbo

halfback but having said that the original title was nixon an american tragedy because it really is a tragic story he came up in the outback of southern california and is parents demonstrated one way or another they did not think much of but the two favored brothers died and richard had to step in but he came away with the experience the leading that i am the most unlovable person that i am so unworthy nobody could possibly love me and that is what he believed he had this thought in the back of his head he was a load creature and throughout

his presidency constantly whispering you are no good like you you cannot succeed play the game harder and dirty so due to the mysteries of the national archives all of a sudden in this century there was a high of new material 400 oral histories from the grand jury testimony i don't deserve any accolades because i had the staff to work with all i had to do was get out of the wa way. >> you have a similar challenge with your book as we assume quite a bit about mohammed ali? >> they could have been

opposite because he said was the prettiest and slickest and probably the most famous man before cable tv he used to brag i could drop out of an airplane appears to anywhere walk up to any house anywhere and they will love to see me. but yet my story is a tragedy because what made him great is that is what destroyed him. i was ten years old when he beat foreman to win the title back the government had taken away from him it never occurred to me that he was more than a boxer i get the sense he was a spectacular personalityme and

attractive and impossible to take your eyes off of but not until much later realized how interesting his life was it is a story about race and religion and politics standing up for what you believe in and in 1964 announced he would abandon christianity to join us on tuesday i don't have to be what you want me to be and became the most unpopular man in america. . . . .

almost everybody close to him and h developed a bigger picture than most of us have when we saw lothis glowing personality. what i came away with is a story that surprised me over and over again that he was so much more complicated than we thought and his wife was one of the great drama is and a great tragedy. i felt an enormous responsibility telling his story but also given what's going on today it was relevantof and i

think that the story is one we wilwhen wewill be telling for gs to come. i'm sure this won't be the last biography but it will be the greatest. [laughter] you had another challenge with women we assume we know well, rachel carson, james caddell and alex waters. you were taking a different approach and i thought maybe you could tell us how you came to do that. >> there were four women who had changed the way we thought about this in the environment. there are so many parallels they

were in different fields and generations and so all of them are uncredentialed outsiders and people that went into the field and got their fingernails dirty and against all on prevailed. three out of four wrote by comic books that ignited social movements and maybe most interestingly spoken to power when women had no voice and against all odds prevailed. they had this moment in the 60s which really interested. i thought what was it about the culture that allowed these voiceses to be heard and why do they speak to the times so of course i thought my fifth character in the 1960s i started reading their work and

the books about them for this character each of these women had been pushing against the values and priorities of the 1950s. the culture is increasing disconnection, its love affair with science-based technology and its willingness to have no sense of the future. its deference to big business and all of these women had spoken up and said i don't think this is the way forward. it e. to forget how much we absorb their ideas and how much of the blood stream and culture. the idea was pesticide had been invented in the war ended ddt in particular it was good for the

soldiers in the trenches and at the end of they thought we are going to turn it into domestic use and pesticide. soey the idea is bugs would be eliminated from the earth and we would speed up farming by using synthetic fertilizer. cities were in crisis and the way to solve that was to knock down and build top-down huge development projects, put up towers basically to enter the grid. that was part of the technological or technocratic

mindset is what was driving the 50s and all of these women said i don't think this is the way forward. hethere is another way forward e need to understand the systems that support, all these things. one of the things to remember, in 1961, a woman in many states couldn't be on jury duty because she would be neglecting her domestic duties. if she had a property and married as h soon as she married it was her husband's property if they wanted to rent or have a credit card she had to have a cosigner. if she wanted to be a scientist, she could maybe teach that she was neverer sent out to the fied

and if she could be a stewardess and have children should have to leave her job. in many states she could be arrested. there was a story where a woman walked into the court road to pay her husband's parking tick ticket. that became the connective tissue i was searching for as i wasfo researching because all

along there were repetitive patterns. infor instance i was reading abt a a lot of people and that's bad news is being delivered in a way that is yo you've are able to gt through it. i realized she wasst speaking about the ecology of cities using the same language to describe the ecosystem. it's the connective tissue that puts together the grid.

they were a fragile ecosystem and you couldn't intervene without destroying their life which was the same thing carson said. a good examplele i use a is a single celled organism. if it dries out, it is just a speck of dust that doesn't exist except inn the context of its environment. so all of the were looking at basically the system that supported the living world and the environment and i was seeing the same patterns with jacobs.

so i was following fees through and i sort of feel it is a shift in emphasisre to the theory of the. you're seeing this tragedy unfolding in the most classical sense of the word. inspiration you probably haven't heard of and i haven't until i read the book. so i guess that is the question

is how do you come to a topic about someone you don't know much about the and how do you approach that as you would start to write about it. >> unlike the other figures we are talking about today, i think it is safe to say relatively unknown to most people and that presented challenges and opportunities convincing a publisher to do something about it. i had never heard of patience until she died after 2005 i came across her work and life by happenstance reading in a food magazine the editor had been a great champion and had reviewed her best-known book when it was

published in 1986 and it's described as one of the greatest that will ever be written and it's implausible but highly intriguing. around the same time i found a copy that had been there for most of my childhood and i had never seen it and have hardly used. used. used. used. there was one recipe in the marginan h so i opened the bookd was taken away by the life she lived in her depth of knowledge about the environment. she had become over the course of her life a botanist and was

able to put it together in a sort of masterful way as a travel writer and i discovered she hadem written several other books including the best-selling cookbook in the 1950s, which as andrea was saying in this remarkable period in particular for food writing a as a part of that resolution this project was understanding who she was and how she came to write this monumental book that had an impact and influence on food writers in the united states and the uk when it was published she was seenen as the kind of guru that made the journey to the tip of the peninsula in italy but by

the time she died in 2005, they described her as an almost forgotten in culinary star, so my hope in the book was to reintroduce her to a contemporary audience. >> dvds biographies of people to learn lessons and i'm wondering what are the lessons we learned from richard nixon's life? >> those of you that are old enough will remember going to the east room of the white house on the day that he designed and standing there perspiring, the only time he wore glasses because he wanted to read a quote from teddyd roosevelt and

the only time that he reflected on the tragedy and with a less than was. i think it is applicable as we look at the country torn apart. you never hate your enemies because it is when you hate them they win because you destroy yourself and that is the lesson that i think i can think of too many moments like that in american history. words of wisdom was really hard through a lot of suffering. >> host: your book is very political. i am old enough to remember the protest and whatnot that he got involved in and the religious side of his conviction. i'm wondering how yoi am wonderd

to balance all of that to make him come alive as a totally three-dimensional person. >> he's not reflected at all. he's making it up as he goes along and yet he becomes an icon for the civil rights movement. when he died a year and a half ago of these people refer to his role in the civil rights movement and he was opposed to it and he said it was a waste of time. people would never give up any power. they would form their own organizations and they found kind of a new version that suggested you have to be independent. she never had a strong center when it came to ideals.

he was most famous for saying he wouldn't fight in vietnam and have no quarrel with the viet cong. years later he was asked by an interviewer if he had any regrets in life and he said i regret that stuff about the vietnam, vietcong. i couldn't believe it because this is what most elevated him from being an important political figure. why would he say that he regretted it? he always wants to rebuild and these two impulses were at war with with him. the simplicity of us .-full-stop

all-time? and he said yes he was just doing it for the attention. he didn't regret the stand he took, he said he would rather die than go against his principles. he was upset that it had offended so many people. he had a great desire to be loved and that trumped it to bed his desire to be respected. >> you get back throughout the book there is a lot more to that story. >> he was married four times and had a few extracurriculars. [laughter] and why he thought so often because hed needed the money.

>> but also what else are you going to do that with even that kind of spotlight where you have people watching you live on tea. v.. he was offered tv and movie deals he would sit in ae trailr for months and then you are not bear m to watch you don't get to see their reaction. he had no interest whatsoever and he needed that immediate gratification. >> i want to raise the one thing that struck me that you are able to accomplish, and you may not like him anymore than you have this image of or respect him, but i do feel like i understood him more and how he got to where he was and i wonder if you can just briefly thought that challenge was because they want people to care about people you

are writing about a. >> it was important to get to where the pathology comes from, but the rule of the biographer is to approach a subject fairly and without sympathy that empathy as a human being. when immediately struck started interviewing friends and family members about how protective they were of him anda immediately ate a light bulb went off andnd i thought there's something more here. talking about all of those documents that were released, it

showed an entirely different side and it was tragic that this person had the ability to move so far beyond his imitations. henry kissinger said that nixon met the classic definition because not only did he have this flaw but he saw it in himself and brought down the punishment. >> i'm interested based on what you said earlier what made these women kind of acceptable in the culture that they were being listened to when they did make a difference because it is an unusual time for women to be

rising to the forefront and intellectual thought. >> the culture in that moment gave priority to the technical expertise. one of them had been trained in their fields. they were not a part of the status quo so i was struck by the fact one of them are interested in power. rachel carson was shy and quite mortified when she was asked to speak. she wanted to get the word out. she was dying of cancer at the time she was writing silent spring and she thought the chemical companies that use it against her. because they were not trained and they didn't know any better, they were observers and started

visiting cities all over the country to figure out what makes the sidewalk work, why do some field wonderful and others are empty and abandoned. a i think he wanted to still have her around. she had no methodology so she started following themm and watching and she would sit for hours and started to see the theory that they were biological monoliths operated by these six rules and they defend have emotion or intend.

again for weeks and we in these conditions she started realizing there were friendships, she noticed there were two chimps that she'd identified a brushed off and hugged each other and she realized this is more than just clockwork. it seems to be a whole constellation of demotions, tenderness, some were better than others. and the same with rachel carson. it was about categorizing things and in a way that they would measure thei their bones and cut their teeth and that is the way that it was perceived. day after day she was seeing the world as a whole web.

so they were grounded in the physical and they were not afraid of being intuitive or of workingbe hard. thus objective wasn't considered very professional, but they worked hard in the status quo of their field and they were not afraid to use personal anecdote. they were all incredibly beautiful writers said they wouldd leave these things as a part of their argument and so they were able to put a human face on very big question about where to the country was going in that speech because they had a different orientation. >> so, again when we are dealing with somebody like a patient's claim who runs off and does her

own thing and it's time period how do you approach those from a biographer's perspective? this not only did she shunned the limelight she was appointed the first editor at the observer in london and she also published a cookbook in 1957 and in 1952 gave all of that up and rejected the consumer society and in the end settled in a place that was so remote so in a sense it is a

very elusive figure and a she had a section that begins on 300 it says all autobiography of suppression and wise so i shutter to think what she would imagine in my book. patients left behind a remarkable treasure trove of letters and corresponded on an almost daily basis they had no other way to communicate and she saved all those letters in an attempt to preserve them. without those letters i think

the project would have been doomed but it made her a fascinating person and that is one of the threads that runs throughout the book. >> bringing that life is important. you started a thread i am interestedry in pursuing with al of you here. i know as writers you often get the question do you write with a computer or by hand. there is an art and a lot o of work. i'm interested if you want to pick up on what started the process and then i would like to move down and talk about that a little bit. >> i never imagined i would write a biography or that i

would write this book with how i word when i embarked on the research, which was a bit of a blessing because i didn't come at this with some sort of preconceived idea of how to put this together and over the course of about ten years collecting material and reading through her letters and visiting archives, the process to use a word that wasn't illuminate much was very organic and this is my first book. writing e it came much more easy than i thought. when you are dealing with material you have to be selective. you can't just dump everything into thest book and think people

are going to appreciate that, because they won't. then you have to be your own editor. we know every life contains multitudes and if we try to capture all of that it would be pretty dreary stuff so that is one of the great challenges. i'm sure if i had the opportunity to write another book it would be a different experience. >> i guess there was a lot more involved than camping outside of the nixon library and i wondered what that was. was. i'm also interested iner the tie frame because these are not folks who turned arounbooks ande usual history.

>> for you writing about people i despair sometimes when you think about what you have to keepme your head to write a lif. in some ways it is easier because you have the plot written for you. there is a freedom of style you get to deal with but basically it is grinding. when they were in a small school in duke it stood for gloomy gus.

he would go to the library and sit there and study and then go to his part-time job or room in the woods that you can't do with a spin. there is a lot of iron in the craft as well. >> to give people a sense of the time commitment that goes into this. >> my first books had been six years from the time. spent just to get a sense of what is involved in going to alert you that in a few minutes i'm going to ask for questions from the audience if you have questions i always like to point out if you have comments or you

want to talk about it but have plenty of time to do that afterwards. i think we have microphones somewhere which this gentle man in the back will help us when the time comes. i just want to give you a heads up on that. >> i would typically spend at least a year without even thinking of writing just doing the initial research and training to become an expert on the subject figuring out where the archival material is. i was writing about somebody whose colleagues and peers and family members were still alive so i hate to be crude about it but as quickly as possible. and when you are dealing with people who've been around

someone very famous it is difficult to can't just say can i come over and spend a week interviewing you it can take years to win them over. the first time he's had a thousand dollars so i would call and ask what is the name of your dog. a thousand dollars. [laughter] i would say that it's a terrible namis a terriblename for a dog. he said that isn't funny and it's still a thousand dollars. so that was the case over and over again. a year or two later you might realize just all the wrong questions and then you hope you can get back in the door and going through the process now

going back to some of these same people hoping i haven't burned tooo many bridges so for someboy that is a contemporary, a lot of it is interviewing which i love and i didn't get to do much for my other books. then when youso feel if you hava mastery of the subject it is okay to begin writing, but if you start writing to say you are wasting time because a year later you realize you were an amateur, you didn't have command of your material or a standing importance in the subject. one of the first people said to me especially for you as a white guy you are going to have a challenge. you need to make the understood what made this kid think he could be special and that is true of anybody that made them think they could do something special but it's true or for ad that is the same age as nfl who

saw what happened and was raised in a society where he was told he certainly wasn't the greatest in facimpact was inferior and nt entitled to the same rights that people were entitled to. what made him think he could go around and challenge authority. that is a serious marching order when someone puts it in your face and says don't write a book unless you can answer that is somethinso that issomething we . >> i remembered a comment made writing aia biography is donkey work because there's a huge amount of spalding just to get a lot of material assemble assembd then you begin to see patterns. but i have to say i admire all threebu of you because doing a

full life and trying to hit every phase of their life and give it adequate development is enormously ambitious and admirable. i was very much looking for moments that eliminated the character and this genesis of their ideas and the common ground of a shared but also as jonathan said, you start to think okay what do i need to tell my audience about these women that makes it all makes sense so i would do a huge amount of research and write a rough draft of and then move onto the second and then i ended

up giving a huge amount of free writing because there were all kinds of things. you have to know so much more than you can include and there were places where i had gotten off jane goodall had a fascinating childhood and i spent a lot of time and realized this doesn't belong in this book.ve it's out of proportion so i would cut out easily 20 pages which i guess is why it is so slow because you have to know so much more than you can include and you don't really know or want to keep the story going sadistic kind of dramatic arc. for me it was always looking for connective tissue and moments that illuminated eachfo one. >> one of the things you run into is especially the older folks they don't remember the actual events. they remember the memory of it

and they read back what was written so you have to be you have to persevere. george shultz was the secretary of state and the economic adviser and secretary of labor and when i interviewed him he was doing the same thing. he was a nice guy and so you are going through all these stories and finally i said okay that he tried to get you involved in watergate and he finally got frustrated and said richard nixon was like the poem and i ti said was one and he said the one we learned in first grade there was a little girl who had a little curl and then she was good she was very very good and when she was bad [inaudible]

[laughter] >> i want you to start thinking of questions right now and in those stories you uncovered -- >> we've told the stories over and over and perhaps embellished them to the point they no longer represent the original story. george foreman told me that he was drugged by his own manager for the fight and i said do you really believe this and he said yes. i know it and in fact they found evidence he was hired by the camp. he also said to me i gave the referee $10,000 in cash to make sure that it was a fair fight. [laughter] and i found out later he gave 20,000. [laughter]

so i called and said this is true george said he gave 10,000 you gave 20,000 his managers got really angry and said that's ridiculous we only gave him 5,000. [laughter] if your mother says she loves you check it out. [laughter] >> the skill of crafting a very loose interpretation she embellished, romanticized in the autobiographical writing and played in her life she drafted a bunch of letters to a writer and journalist who was thinking of giving a biographdoing a biograd a lot of personal details including a reference to someone who had told her in the early

days of the second world war that she had been a subject of interest to the british intelligence agency. this seems like one of those things that couldn't possibly be true because by the british secret service be interested in this woman so it was something that i thought was an interesting notion but probably have no basis for fact. as i started doing archival work and requested information in the uk it turned out instead gone to the london school of economics with a woman whose sister had been a spy for the soviet union and this woman was being watched by intelligence agencies and it turned out the name turned out the file frequently and detailse

details were at times hilarious and surprising. and i also learned they had a separate file that when i requested that they said they no longer have it. biographies are littered with those threats are never quite get to the end of and that was the case in this instance. >> one quick one and then i will ask questions. >> there was a period in the early days that was chaotic and there were a lot of drugs in the kitchen and so when i was there interviewing her i said about the cocaine. i realized more in-depth stories

of this was going on then i probably needed to know. there's always stories that can't make it in but they are great stories. >> i saw a couple hands out here. please keep your questions short so we can get to as many people as would like to get questions and if we run out of time, we will meet you over at the signing area. >> i have spent many years teaching highrs school students english and literature and writing. they can't grasp what it means to edit or revise. they make a few comments here and there and i know a few

writers and i say to them one paragrapparagraph can go throug0 revisions so i would love to hear from each of you. i know each writer is a little bit different but what do you do to revise and edit? >> i am a big rewriter. i write pretty much by ear and there is no paragraph i haven't worked over ten times. i really like writing. the only way i remember things is by telling stories. so, i really work at the writing and in fact i remember a writer was interviewed and the interviewer said why does it take you liv 11 years to the fid second novel and he said i seem to have to write in every

possible variation. [laughter] >> anybody else wan >> anybody else want to take that? >> my first book was 700 pages too long. sometimes students don't want to hear that. i have a question over here. >> i am on my second book. [inaudible]

i always wanted to write about what the war did to us. it seems like children have been left behind. we have to write without destroying anyone and this is what i would like to do with my book and i'm looking for help because i'm more of a ghost writer. >> so the question is to get a little bit of advice. thank you very much. >> it is always challenging when yoyou're close to the subject. biographers have the luxury of distance. but you know i think great power

also comes from that and trying to eliminate whatever that experience might have been to you and your peers. writing is so personal. i wish i could give some good advice. maybe the fellow panelists will have some wisdom on the. that i admire your pursuit. >> can i sneak in one more question we are running out of time and then we will bring the subject over again when we go over to the signing area. >> speed to a speak of

speak to [inaudible conversations] >> in some ways it is just rolling the dice. my first book is a very clunky book and the second is much smoother and easier support of it could just be that i'm 20-years-ol20years older and m experienced. >> i find a lot of times the things that are the mostys beautiful are not the most important. >> i think you are answering the question i was going to ask. could you repeat the initial question. >> how you decided to edit things down.

>> do you want to pursue this and then we will take another question when we leave here. >> readers can help you determine what needs to go. i think they tend to keep these close but it sounds like you are at the point lets people read it and get feedback and that could inform the process. >> there was a wonderful little volume called nixon at the movies. >> is very helpful to have someone that will level with y you.

it was an exaggeration but i got to like how she had this wonderful humor. i talk about these letters she would say the rain has gone and now thinking only about the princess -- >> i'm not making this up and then she would write back and say why don't you come over wednesday and i i will burn a hamburger for you. [laughter] [applause] thank you for being here and you are welcome to join us over at thend signing area. we would love to see you there and we can hav could have more s and discussions.

>> i can't explain the feelings thafeelingis that you have to ra school shooting. one thing to the feeling of anxiety there's only one other place i felt that, the united

states congress. it might sound like a funny remark but it's no joke. i've spoken with legislators from across the board, senators, representatives, mayors and not one single person is confident that one thing can be done about the people that died in my school and the others that have died as. >> texas is facing an immigration crisis. we have a thousand people a day moving to the state of texas. people talk about building a wall and we are fed up with the federal government is doing its job so here is what texas is going to do. texas is going to come out of our own budget and we are going to build a wall with this difference instead of building

on the border between texas and mexico, you're goin we are goind between texas and new mexico so we can keep all of the californians out from coming in. [laughter] whabut might sound like? >> what we are hearing are the cries of immigrant children who'd just been separated from their parents and border patrol detention facility. it's an audio i obtained a month and a half ago or so with the help of a lawyer, civil rights attorney on the border and she

had obtained this tape and thought it was important and shared it with me and asked what i thought about it and i told her i thought we should try to publish it. it wasn't an easy decision for the source of the tape who felt that it could put them at risk for being identified and fired, but the source ultimately agreed to allow me to publicly publish the audio. >> senior reporter ginger thompson talks about covering mexico and the u.s. immigration policy. sunday night at eight eastern on c-span q-and-a. a biography of harvey milk a san francisco politician killed in

1977 by a city board of supervisors member. also talked of harvey milk at a launching event at the mechanics institute in san francisco. this is one hour and 15 minutes >> good evening and thank you for joining us at the mechanics institute at 57 post street in sanan francisco. l i'm the director of events and i am pleased to welcome you here to the program for the book launch of harvey milk his life and death with author lillian who will be in conversation with activist and author keith jones. we would like to acknowledge the cosponsor for this event, the historical society and museum and i would like to welcome