in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable-television companies and today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. c-span cities tour travels the country exploring the american story. this weekend we visit the homes and offices of some of the country's most prominent biographers to see where the right and how they go about their research. we begin our one-hour presentation with biographer walter isaacson in his native city of new orleans louisiana. >> i think when you write about history you have to realize that human memory is fallible. even if you're looking at

people's oral histories done right after the meeting, they may contradict notes taken in a meeting. as as a journalist and historiai like to combine the discipline by going into the archives look at the documents, but when possible interviewing people and saying what was it really like, what happened in the meeting? you have to get sort of multiple sources before you say here's what i think the truth really is. when you doing somebody who is alive, kissinger, steve jobs and mike is, you can keep growing and growing project realized that you then have to find other sources to try to cooperate what they said. >> when you're writing about contemporary figures, do you have to try and find the balance of you don't want to maybe make them upset or is that something

that you consider? >> yes, i think for me i tend to like the people i write about. i deeply admired and respected steve jobs but yet a lot of aspects to his personality that were difficult. he was tough on people. when i was dealing with him especially when he was ill i would read in certain parts of the book i would talk about it and say wozniak, the former partner says this, and you would almost give me permission to put in the book. i think the same is true with kissinger. there were times i criticized in the narrative is lack of appreciation for the values of american democracy and having to be included in the foreign policy. and had to push myself not to sugarcoat everything. so yes, some journalists, woodward and bernstein or robert

caro, are very good at being tough about their subjects. for me it's a little more difficult and had to push myself. >> why do you find it difficult? >> i came to like the people i write about. whether their contemporary or not. i like steve jobs a lot. i respected him. i admired him but i like ben franklin thought and respected and admired him. so when you having to do the downside or story and a biography that's rough, you kind of flinch a bit because you almost feel like these are your friends so you don't want to say anything unnecessarily harsh about them. i think that makes me less of a good biographer in a way that i tend, you know, to try to find the good light i can use on a particular subject but i know

that people read my books, including people within the subjects of the books deal with sometimes i was too harsh. that's what you cut a balance. you try to do it honestly but not just rigorously honestly. he also try to do with a good heart, or i do, which is what we see fight can understand why somebody did it this way even though i don't think it turned out to be the right way to do it. >> did you get any pushback from anyone that you have written about the main event particularly happy? >> i think henry kissinger for while was not happy with my biography of him. i think if he we read his own noble piece by citation, i think he understood his accomplishments. that said, over the years at a certain spent a lot of time with him and with a good enough relationship and i think that he understands, even if he doesn't

agree with certain of the interpretations i put in the book, so he was somebody who permit on after the book came out pushed back and felt that i've been to critical of some of his actions. >> you mentioned you like to choose people that you particularly like come have certain amount of respect for. what goes into your decision-making process of you you are going to write about? >> i like to write about people who are creative and imaginative. people write about great heroes or george washington or ulysses grant and other people write about military people are sports heroes, or even literary heroes. to meet people who stand at the intersection of the arts and the sciences who are able to love all sorts of subjects in the humanities to technology, they tend to be very creative and that's ben franklin.

that's albert einstein. that's steve jobs and leonardo da vinci. so i look for people have creative minds and whose creativity comes from the type of things you and i can appreciate. in other words, it's not just unfathomable like isaac newton. it's like leonardo da vinci who, as with steve jobs as with ben franklin, drop out after school, a bit rebellious to become very observant, very curious, very much in love with connecting beauty with technology. most of the type of people i get most passionate about. >> hasn't been someone that you wanted to write about but you haven't taken on yet? >> yes. i started to write about louis armstrong spirit you are in new orleans. i love new orleans and i thought you'd be away to show how different mix of ethnic groups of people coming back in the

spanish-american war or spiritual songs can , go from td plantations or -- all melded together around 1900-1950, to be a birthplace of jazz. and i think i learned almost everything you could learn about louis armstrong except for who he was. i couldn't quite get behind that mask. couldn't quite get behind that smile. couldn't quite figure out was he really happy, you know? what did he like? and so i put that aside and someday, someday i may try to take on that time dick someday i may work with -- i talked to him a lot saying all right, i'll get all the facts on strong and you give me the interpretation. you always have things that you been working on that you might go back to. >> can we talk about your connection to new orleans?

>> i was born and raised in new orleans. here we are at tulane. both my parents and all of my grandparents and my aunts and uncles all went to tulane. so i love the city. the house i grew up in, my brother now lives in but we have a house and the french quarter. and especially after the hurricane 15 years ago. i came back as the vice-chairman of the louisiana recovery authority entity for rebuilding. and you realize that the city that so embedded into your heart and your soul might not recover. it just reminded me of the importance of home. reminded me of the importance of the community. and more recently with the dysfunction and poison in our national politics of living in washington, i said, this is not going to be solved, this ripping

apart of american, politicians in washington. we should all take time and move back to our own communities and maybe work on the neighborhood level and the community level and try to make sure we do things that are healing and bring people together. i've always felt i was in new orleans in. i came back a lot after the hurricane and a year ago i came back pretty much full-time, my wife and myself. >> have you written any books about new orleans, and if not, did you have any comments. >> was i've written a book called american sketches and it is a series of essays and reported pieces that mean maino with the heroes of the hurricane. and deal with sort of new orleans and its culture. it begins with walter percy was a mentor of mine, a novelist from here. and he had a theory of

hurricanes. this was many, many, many years ago. when i was a young kid he told me people are happy, happiest when there's a hurricane because we pull together. we know the suddenly will be tested and ready to work together to survive a challenge. so i start the book with walter percy is the root of hurricanes and then i go through the great people in the city who came back after the storm and rebuilt it, whether it's about education system, and i have done as his butt of the leaders but it was my way of trying to gather my thoughts on the importance to me of new orleans. as i said, i've also been interested in maybe doing louis armstrong, but if not the concept of story field which is where louis armstrong first started playing his clarinet when you're six or seven or agers old which was the red light district right on the edge

of the french quarter in which there was a great mixing of socioeconomic groups, different races and ethnicities, people at lulu white who was a light skinned free person of color. she had the biggest haul, the greatest businesswoman in story bill. so the music and the sex and the race and all that jazz, it would be a fertile ground so i keep poking away in that to see if there's a good book. >> your latest book to come out has been a biography on leonardo da vinci. can we talk about how did you choose him and where do you start in the research process? >> i chose leonardo da vinci because over the years of begin to notice the pattern of how attractive i was the people who connected the arts and humanities, sciences in the engineering and all of these

fields. weather was in franklin who is a great scientist as well as a great diplomat, publisher, or even an einstein who whenever he was stumped by the equations of general relativity with pilates violin and played mozart because the connected in he said to the harmony of history. when i was writing about steve jobs he kept emphasizing that all of my book a bit about people at the intersection of the arts and technology, and that steve jobs indeed was part of that tradition. and steve jobs said the ultimate in that tradition was leonardo da vinci. people write about him who are historian and they go until 12 or 15, great works of art. he said somebody should also treat them as a wake he thought of himself, which has, is as an injury as well as an artist. then bill gates put the same thing. bill gates thought the most

beautiful, wonderful of leonardo is notebooks and it's a 72 page notebook filled with geology and astronomy and the flow of rivers and waters. when bill gates bought it he said we have to look at leonardo through the lens not just as an artist but as a scientist. over and over again i was thought of how cool it would be to ascend assume that mount too take on the greatest of all creative geniuses, leonardo da vinci. and i approached it by going through his notebooks. as i said, of the writers approach to pricing let's go through his artworks, but he left more than 7200 pages of notebooks. and on a single page and you can see him to a sketch for the last supper but also try to figure out how to square the circle,

and two styles of waters the flow past the obstacle into a stab at some mathematics. and then pushing, like why is this guy blew? something einstein asked. what does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? so i would go through his notebooks and connectives are in engineering. >> you went to italy to see these? >> it was a tough job. my wife and i had to go to places where there were notebooks and that's florence, venice, milan, paris, madrid in windsor castle. so it was a lot of fun, because nobody has ever collected fully all of his notebooks. so you get to go to the places like the biblical text and procyon are for the notebook on the flight of birds is and that's in milan. or in seattle with a notebook on geology and waters owned by bill gates is. and there's something thrilling

about being in actual presence of a notebook page look at vitruvian man, that guy in the circle and the square, and it's in the top floor of a place in dennis, just staring at it and say oh my goodness, look at the grooves on the paper. look where he put his protractor beadle and feel a connection after 500 years. >> was there anything that you discovered in doing your research of, or maybe someone else, that really surprised you that you didn't expect to come across? >> i was surprised with leonardo da vinci on how we connected all of the disciplines, how understanding racial muscles and have muscles that do with the eyebrow touched the lip, and that is reflected when a student at smile of the mona lisa. i also loved looking at how theater affected him. because during his 20s his

main work was as a theatrical producer of pageants in place, both in florence and in milan. so there's contraptions like a helicopter we know that he drew. that starts off as a prop to bring angels down to the stage. you look at the last supper and how the walls coming kind of fast in the last supper and you say, , i get it, it's like the drawings he did in his notebook in which when you do scenery on a stage you make the walls come in faster. and so looking at how is theatrical work connected to his site and his art was to me just one of the many wonderful discoveries about leonardo that i enjoyed. >> do you ever see yourself going back to washington? >> i can't imagine what i do think most of the creativity is happening at the local level. most of the binding the nation

together is happening at the community level. people pulling it apart operate on a bigger stage. this is why c-span, not just on this type of trip, but for 40, 50 years c-span in my mind is always at its best when it's on a bus going somewhere and stopping in at local community. i've watched that for 40 years on c-span, how they capture what's happening locally. and to me i'm just deeply in love with new orleans, but also i believe in the concept that if we're going to get it right in this nation, whether its innovation, creativity, tolerance, diversity, all of those things we are going to start by getting it right or keeping it right at the local level. >> historian brooks simpson is author of multiple books on the civil war including works on general and president ulysses s.

grant. we visit his home in tempe arizona as he discusses some of the criticisms his face and his approach to writing history. >> went by like to write? ofttimes early-morning, the house is quite, nothing else is going on. i can get some right in undisturbed. also like writing filing of late at night for the same reasons, that i can pay attention to my daughter, my wife and everything else bring the day but during the evenings for ernie moniz that's my time. >> i make the past come to life. it's like a musical hamilton who lives, who dies, who tells story. i'm the person that tells that story. and i'm going to try to do as best i can as solidly as i can, as balanced as i can. but i get to do something fundamentally creative and say this is what i think happened. my routine in writing is pretty

nondescriptive sometimes night before a a taken some notes abt things that i want to talk about can sometimes some sentence fragments, some ideas or phrases i want to try have, so i have pretty good idea by the time i get in front of my computer what i'm going to do. but i had usually thought about it quite some time before then. most people know me as the destroying history of 19th century america, especially political and military topics. in that area, the place went vestal, the very known is civil and reconstruction. where i've written about united states military political leaders fund associated most notably with ulysses s. grant of the people as well, abraham lincoln, andrew johnson and other people. i would spend time to write about presidents as a whole, so i now bear the title. that is immediate tweeted title of being a presidential

historian when it comes to certain things. election years can be very busy for me to assess a civil war, sesquicentennial was a very busy time for me. one of the challenges that you know you are not working with everything that happened, that the material have is but a slice of what happened. things survive, other things perish. so trying to take them to exit okay, now let's find out what really happened forget about what you think about, forget about how you interpret it. just what really happened? that i find a lot of historians don't understand what did happen, how did people sit at that time. that can be challenging enough. forget about this notion that a sink some people have historians sit down and have pre-arranged agenda, they have an ax to grind, that they want to celebrate their subject or

denigrate it, just find out what happened is challenging enough many times. when you write about civil war generals, you are trying to get your reader to understand what that particular individual understood. you know in hindsight what happened, and hindsight you think would sharpen your understanding but, in fact, it's very distorted because now you know what the result was and you say why did someone do something so stupid? history goes from front to back, not back to front. you didn't have to look and say hey, what were they thinking? what was her understanding of the situation at the time? why did he make the decision they made? sometimes people we can understand they made the wrong decision but at least we have a better idea why they made the wrong decision given what they knew at the time. political figures i think that's a challenge in a different way because i think they carry their

own baggage. you've got to think about the decisions they had come the options they had come what they sense political reality was before them. politics they say is the art of impossible but great political leaders expand what is impossible. say abraham lincoln who responded to the situation took advantage of opportunities include forward to someone like ulysses s. grant who often found himself in den by the notion, it's impossible and did didn'to much to expand it. i want you to understand that from me, grant is a moving target. that when i i started to write about grant as a historian, the most famous biography of print was that by mcfeely, it won a pulitzer prize, took a largely negative view of grant, some saw as unsympathetic or caustic, and

if you sitting thing else it was bound to be more positive. that said, by the time i started writing after a while a making some points about grant and the more focused ways first-come of the people start to get interest in grant thinking he might be safe as as a biographical topi. some of them went too far in the other direction. at the beginning people saw me as the anti--- that i was going to correct the historical record and return grant to his pedestal. now we had a slew of grant biographies. now people think it's safe to write about grant. they were not around when i was writing but now they are around. even ron chernow is writing a grant biography. we know when the big names come in that someone is now seem to be right for revision but the revisions been going on for about 25 years. so there really come in due the end. i notice a lot of those people are into talk about how they

rehabilitate grant, how the elevated him. it's not my objective. my objective is to make you understand what ulysses s. grant was about, what he did, the things they did that we may find raise worthy, some of the things he did we may find questionable, the strengths and weaknesses. in that sense the people i study i can identify with them at certain times, at other times if i had them in the room i would say what were you thinking? why did you do that? and so i don't see myself as somebody who is there to raise grant a few pegs on something, on somebody's scale of greatness but i do see myself as saying this is what grant was about and i think in that way. i tried to be very fair and try to be dispassionate. i don't try to be enamored or

hypercritical. once the civil war -- why was the civil war of popper subject? some people are still refighting it. i think especially as someone who is taught the american south who is married to a southern born woman, i understand that many people are interested in the civil war, identify in a very personal way. they talk about how we lost. they had nothing to do with this. in fact, they become very agitated if you say certain things about the confederacy because they think it has a personal attack. they talk about their heritage and honoring their ancestors. that's all well and good if that's not but since understanding their ancestors for the role that their ancestors may have played in that time. a lot of people get involved in this very personally. reconstruction is different and i think reconstruction companies

people are interested in the civil war are not interested in reconstruction. the war is over, let's go home. reconstruction, the story that americans pay attention to in one of the reasons is because of the use of terrorism to reinstitute a white supremacist order in the american south, a process that many white northerners acquiesced in. i think that's an ugly part of our past that we don't want to confront head-on. and yet i think we must understand that and we must understand why after the civil war the united states came back together after but the struggle for reconciliation took place by trampling over racial justice. americans have to look at the dark pascoe notches a celebratory parker there will not be reconstruction musical but i think that something we ought to pay attention to. the war in many cases still continues in part because reconstruction left so much

undone. when people react to my writing and cannot enamored with it, first, that's their problem, but sometimes i think it's because people who read what other people right assume that the do come with an agenda, that they do have heroes and villains that they're going to celebrate or vilify. and that historians come to their task with really so solid ideas about what they want to do and that they're going to exalt somebody on praise somebody. it's interesting to see, often in fact, i see those critics are actually projecting their own issues onto me. one time i wrote a book on henry adams back in the 1990s, a short book and i knew it would be then you that historians would like it and the literary critics or enamored with adam

would hate it and would take issue with it even if they had to begrudgingly admit that i might have a point. and so when the book came out and then the review is followed, if it was a review which said simpson doesn't appreciate adams great literary achievement, i just did the ghost that was done with the book was about. it was how henry adams tried to forge a a political career andw we failed and how that was reflected in his later writings. historians like it. literary critics did not. i knew what i was getting into. history is never just the facts. it's how you put the sex together and how you bring the past alive to the reader and give you insight, the things you know and incorporate, making it were, that's a lot of fun. when work is over and you conflict of what you've written, that can be a lot of fun. a little phrase you like, , i cn be a delightful novel.

>> while in santa barbara, california, we visited the home of ronald reagan biographer lou cannon as he talks about his relationship with president reagan and the challenges of writing about a sitting president. >> well, i was a reporter in sacramento in the '60s. i covered ronald reagan a little in his first campaign for governor, which he started out in 1965 and he was elected in 66. i don't know, i had been there eight months, maybe six months into his governorship and i thought i don't really understand this guy. as a get into writing about my first book was called ronnie, a political odyssey. as a cut into writing what was a history of in some ways the early part for local history of california and history of these

two men, i found that people would say, tell me things and giving insights, they just never would as a news reporter and i wasn't interested in, wasn't so much how are you going to vote on that bill or why, but where did you come from and why do you care about the things you care about? and i became deeply involved in the stories of these two people. i gained a lot of confidence writing it and i thought how, well, i can do this. this is something i can do and it's something i enjoy doing. and the other thing is when i i was finished with it, although i probably like the critical claim and all that, i realize that although i knew an awful lot more about them that it do i

started that there were lots of things i didn't know. in fact, i sometimes think as you get old it's a matter of subtraction. we realize how little you know let anyone or anything. i guess that was, i was inspired to write more books. my second book which was to simply about reagan which is simply called reagan, he never commented. reagan was smart. he didn't comment on books about him. it was another book written, the first book written about it and used as what he thought about it and he joked i didn't have time for light reading, and he would not, he was smart enough not to get drawn into a conversation about books about him. but he did say, i interviewed him and remember what it was because he had been elected and it was december 1980 and use

elected but he had not been sworn in yet and he was president elect at all of us knew, we called in governor pence of the day he became president and he was mr. president. he said, well, i hear providing another book about me. and i said yes, governor, i'm going to write about you until you get it right. and he said good line, which about come from reagan, was about as much praise or, , as you're going to get. reporters are always struggling with questions of access so that was, that wasn't so much of a problem for me. when you're writing a book about someone, if you have a reputation, as i have, of being fair-minded and trying to get all sides of the story, people would talk to, most people will talk you about books. i say most people, all these

years i had help, the one person would never talk to me was -- did want to talk to anybody, and she didn't. but most people would talk to you. the problem with reagan was this, if a specific problem. reagan was, in 1968, nixon had been nominated and reagan was going around the country speaking for republican candidates. the way they put to me is he put to me, they said you have more time with him, then you be able to get but actually it was mostly because reagan was afraid to fly. he didn't like flying and so, the second night out i'm going over, i would interview him during the day. i had a tape recorder and they k notes and has gone over my

notes, to see come at a realized he had told me, because had this new photographic memory, he told almost word for word what he said in his, he wrote a memoir, he really dictated it called where's the rest of me, 1965. so i'm kind of, i i feel anxios about this because i go to the next and i said governor, this is very interesting but you've already told this story kind of word for word in your book. and he looked at me, cocked his head, if you want something you? i suggest, governor, that would be very helpful. in every interview after that, including all the time he was present there was always something he would tell me that was new and remember going over with a colleague for the "washington post" many years later who was kind of

complaining, he was a young colleague and use complaining that reagan just repeated speeches and i said yeah, but he will tell us something you come and he always did i try to sort of listen for it. so with reagan the question for me wasn't so much about access as it was trying to separate, you know, trying to find out a kernel of what he was telling me. after all the time i spent within in all the years, i felt that i couldn't really get to know -- was part of him that he helped himself. mrs. reagan bailed me out. i called her up and she said, and over to the house. she never did this before or after. this is the only time she ever, she was always quite formal interviews. she was dressed in jeans,

putting stuff in the laundry. she was just, you know, being a housewife and i didn't take it because -- i i said i just feel stuck. she said lou, there are times that i can't get behind this barrier. and her analysis of reagan was that her husband was about he had been, we always focus on the alcoholism of his father. but the other thing was that he had been nomadic. they kept moving from town to town, part i guess because of his fathers drinking. partly it's because of the times and they were trying -- and so reagan didn't have a lot of friends like you and i might have in grade school or something. his only friend was his brother, and so there was a part of him

that he kind of developed and inner life there was very personal and that he didn't let people into. so he was a challenge. he was a challenge. he was always, always had good manners and he got very angry at me at some of the stuff i wrote in the "washington post," but he was never uncivil about it. he was never, i mean come in one sense he was good to cover because he recognized you had a job to do and it wasn't just demoting him. >> you know, the hardest thing for anyone, the hardest thing for any of us is not to be judged by somebody else's premises somebody might say reagan is this, too conservative, i don't agree. the hardest degreaser judging by your own premises because none of us ever quite come up, reagan included, to our own opinion of

our self. that's why do for a variety about stalin or hitler, you know, or an evil person because i wouldn't have enough empathy within to be able to want to see the world the way they saw it. but, in fact, i tried it once. i'm not going to say the subject, and i quickly gave it up because i didn't have enough respect for the person that i was writing about you really want to write about him. i have to write about people, not that i agree with, but that have some regard for. reagan once said something to me, one of the things that surprised the dickens out of you, because i don't know what -- my father who was jack, the same name as his father, and he is also an alcoholic. irish-american, an alcoholic. reagan said once, and he didn't

say this kind of thing and i don't know why he said it. maybe that's one of the reasons you're interested in me. i don't know what i said but i thought about it and i think maybe he's right. what i need to stop myself from is i think becoming too critical. critical. because you can always see things afterward and much more clearly. there is a a bridge the story,a woman, she wrote that history is written backwards but it slid forward. and those of us who were not there can never understand what it was like at the time. so i asked one of my editors

once, editor at the "washington post" who might give a respected, one of the great people i've ever worked for, a great reported in its own right, whether he thought i'd been over backwards too much and was too critical of reagan. he said i thought i was but that i had to figure it out. those things used to bother me a lot when i started writing. after while they didn't bother me at all. it's one of the few things about getting old that is good. i don't worry about that at all anymore. i don't worry if the call is too soft or to understanding. if a writer just try to get it right, he's doing the greatest service to his readers into himself that he can possibly do. >> that is grand rapids, and the

grand river which opens the book in which divides the city and which in many ways defines the city. >> history and other richard norton smith is working on a new biography of gerald ford. we caught up with him at his home in grand rapids, michigan. >> on the west side in the 1820s, a baptist missionary put down roots and a year or two later on the east side, a french-speaking entrepreneur showed up he was as eager to sell liquor to the indians as the reverend mcclay was to save their souls. it set the pattern in some ways for the two faces, if you will, of grand rapids, westside and beside. both sides of the river banks for most of the 19th and early

20th centuries were covered over with factories, furniture factories come back when grand rapids was a french or city, furniture capital of the united states. they are gone now, but the city that has replaced them in many ways was seated by that building, the ford museum, that was opened in 1981, located downtown at president ford's insistence, in the hope, long since realized, that it might in fact, spark the beginnings of an urban renewal, a genuine urban renewal. when i decided i had another book in me, there were some folks here at grand rapids who are interested in having a big

comprehensive david mccullough ask biography of a general ford. anyway, one thing led to another and so a year and a half ago after publishing the rockefeller, i had the opportunity to move back to grand rapids and i have been working on the ford biography ever since. there's so much to four personally and publicly. i mean the ford public after presidency. the popular thinking is nothing much happened. people skip over four. it's like nixon is in carter and reagan. if you step back it's true. he seems out of his depth. he's preceded by these three shakespearean figures, kennedy assassinated in his prime.

there will always be a sense of what might have been. johnson tormented by the war. richard nixon, you know, was a soaring vision and international affairs, but a self-destructed nature. those are figures with shakespeare. for actually is a bridge between the nixonian pragmatism and ronald reagan's more doctrinaire conservatism. but because reagan was reagan, because reagan was such a larger than life figure, because you so witty, you know, in his own way by john kennedy before him, master of the media in a way that ford never was. for tends to get overshadowed at the very least sitting at the

desk and looking down on the ford museum. speaking of books, this is what a a book looks like before it's not a book, basically. these are the tip of the iceberg, but this is essential research material for the next six months to nine months. you know, there are piles of oral histories set off by themselves, but there's a whole section, several piles, dealing with his congressional career. here's a pile just devoted to the contest in which he became house republican leader in 1965 with the reminisces of people like don rumsfeld who were instrumental in managing that

campaign. i think it's much more, one of the things, gerald ford was much more ambitious and he went on. i think he was perfectly willing, rather like ronald reagan, to be underestimated, including intellectually. there are much worse things in politics strategically than to be underestimated. and anyway, 1948 he went into the race underestimated as a political force, by the out campaigned the incumbent all his life, extraordinary physical stamina. loved campaigning. loved rubber chicken, loved stale oratory. i mean, was just at home. unfortunately, when he became republican leader in the house,

it really exacted a toll on the family. on mrs. ford and on the children. because at the time he was on the road over 200 nights in the year. i think, , well, i think he felt guilty in later years about that. but he was a young man and he was claiming the latter and he could see his life goal, which was to be speaker of the house, in front of him. this is first and foremost a workspace. my work tools begin with what any writer bob. these are books on european and american history. i am an autograph collector and at one point in time had managed to assemble a complete set of

the presidents, which i liquidated a number of years ago. and ever since then have been collecting sporadically people who are heroes or just objects of fascination. and this well illustrates both. orson welles, and above in another authentic genius, charles dickens. well, it's sort of a homecoming in some ways. i have lived here for six years when is director of the ford museum, and library which is over at ann arbor, and went away. did a couple other libraries in institutions, and then wrote the rockefeller book. but but i did before i finish tt

when some days i wonder if i ever would finish that, that there had to be a life after rockefeller, and fortunately the presidents mother was a pack rat. she saved everything. she kept scrapbooks and they grew into group and they grew over time, and you are about 65 immense scrapbooks. they are absolutely an invaluable source. and what is so exciting to be in my position is to be able to almost day by day trace the evolution, the growth, of this individual, of this young man, his first serious love affair was with a supermodel, i cover girl for cosmopolitan and other

magazines, a woman named phyllis brown who as i say played pygmalion in reverse. she was the worldly sophisticate who introduced him to new york, took into the rainbow room. they went to the theater frequently. she taught him bridge. she taught him to ski. and, in fact, the two of them famously were featured in a six page spread and look magazine in 1940. but phyllis brown was very much of that eastern establishment, if you will, set. gerald ford spent much more time at yale finitude of university of michigan. it really was the chrysalis out of which he emerged as, he had never been east of ohio before, before he went to yale.

and it was the school in many ways. he was offered legal jobs in new york, in philadelphia. but he knew even then he wanted to come back to grand rapids, because i think he knew even then that he had his eyes set on a political career. phyllis, on the other hand, did not see herself leaving her glamorous modeling career in new york to live in grand rapids, so they agreed amicably to go their separate ways. but it was a relationship about which not a great deal has been written for which i think was absolutely pivotal in reshaping the man that she herself

referred to as the hayseed from grand rapids. the popular notion of gerald ford is vanilla, congressman, west michigan, we don't really know a lot about him. and gerald ford was a man of come as a say, great party loyalty and could be a fervent partisan, but he also embodied civility and respect for his adversaries. i mean, he literally went to his grave believing he didn't have an enemy. the picture on the wall actually was signed to leave and not by all four presidents at the top of the medication of the bush library. if you notice two of the signatures, gerald ford and president bush himself, have all but disappeared. the presidents used to complain,

understandably, about being besieged for autographs. and above all, every time they get together and the group photos taken, there were literally hundreds of people who wanted them to sign these. and so i believe it was president ford's idea that they would all sign 400 copies of this photo, and no more. and that each of them would have 100 to distribute as he saw fit. i mean, indie book to have credibility has to be quote, critical in the broader sense of the word. i thought long and hard about this book because i wondered if i was perhaps perceived as being too close to ford. i had run the ford museum. actually delivered one of the eulogies at his request at his

funeral, and the time has come. the president has passed on, and, indeed, mrs. ford had passed away. enough time has gone by. enough paper has been opened supplemented by hundreds of interviews that i was doing and that others had done, and i had access to for the first time. and above all the time he was right. i found varied in his writings a great line which i'm using as an epigraph for the book, and it jumps out at you because like most politicians he wasn't particularly reflective. he said my whole philosophy of life is, i don't assume somebody is trying to screw me.

now, think about that. think about that in the context of today's politics. think of that in the context of the politics of watergate. he took office with his hands tied behind his back. the ford-next relationship was close. i mean come close in a way, politicians always talk about my friends at the almost devalue the word. they were friends. they were friends. they were allies. he believed richard nixon. i think he literally, the things that -- i won't say he never forgave him, but he never forgot, nor did he ever get over his disappointment and surprise that nixon lied to them. john mitchell lied to them.

the weekend after the watergate break-in, ford happen to be in a meeting with mitchell, and when they were alone he said, what's going on here? do you know anything at all about this? mitchell swore up and down he didn't. and ford accepted it until he couldn't accept it. one thing that is not known, after he lost the election bill simon who was his treasury secretary came to him and asked him if he would pardon mitchell, who is been convicted of watergate related offenses in the meantime and ford said no. it was almost as if one pardon was enough. there were limits to what he would forgive, and mitchell lied to him.

now, some would say, you spend 25 years around washington and your surprise that people fudged the truth. but you know, for better and worse, that was ford. i mean, he, in my eulogy i said emotionally he never left grand rapids. this is just a wonderful town, a place of 200,000 people last with several civic minded millionaires who have been extraordinarily generous and whose generosity is reflected in some world-class medical facilities, research facilities, the convention center that i see here, the hotel, several hotels that have sprung up along the

river. president ford was offered a slight come a very nice site on the outskirts of town to build the museum, and he thanked the would-be donor, but he always envisioned putting it down town. .. >> because there are so many empty storefronts. so many vacant buildings on the main street in grand rapids, they weren't sure they could adequately protect all of them. well, the spark that led to

today's grand rapids, which is a world-class city anyway you look at it, it is still reinventing itself. in some ways it was struck that night five years later in 1981 on the same day that they open the museum. i have a daily nonroutine which is that i basically don't sit down at the same time every day and do things methodically. i often will get up in the middle of the night and work for a couple of hours. when i can't sleep. i can make that up later in the day or in the afternoon. in some ways i wish i was more

conventionally disciplined. in the end, the other thing that does surprise people is that on technologically illiterate. i write everything longhand. i write the first draft longhand. -- is a surprising figure. the fact that he wasn't just -- the status of his career and he ended his career as an insurgent. at the end of his life. he and missus for marooned in a republican party that was increasingly hostile to the pro-choice views. for example he told someone not long before he died that people

had better prepare themselves for the coming of same-sex marriage. he expected it to be the norm in relatively short order. he's the first american president to sign his name to a petition for gay rights. again, in my eulogy i said most of us as we get older our attitudes harden along with our arteries. we have more to conserve. we become more conservative. at the same time nostalgia, yesterday was better than today. all of those factors come into play. he wasn't like that. he's too simple but remarkably open-minded. and compassionate. the schedule i am working on

will allow me to basically re-create the ford presidency and something close to real time. a little over two years or so. beyond that, i am living with them in the kind of unique intimacy that any biographer has with his or her subject. they are never far from your thoughts. >> your watching book tv on c-span2. television for serious readers.

here's tonight's primetime lineup. at 7:30 p.m. eastern legal affairs correspondent david kaplan examines the judicial power of the supreme court. on afterwards at 9:00 p.m. journalist beth macy reports on the opa crisis in america. she's interviewed by jerry connolly of virginia. the nick bunker break counselor early life of benjamin franklin. we wrap up at 11:00 p.m. eastern with mit's deborah bluhm's report on the science behind and development of food safety regulations in the united states. that happens tonight i'll book tv. forty-eight hours of nonfiction fiction authors and books every weekend. television for serious readers. the full schedule is available on our website, but tv.org. >> host: robert, were showing the book, pu pope francis. >> the book is written mainly by economists. were writing it in response to the encyclical that came out a few years ago on the care of our common home. it's known as the pope's environmental encyclical. were trying to engage the pope in dialogue, a word he uses5