we oftentimes hear people say leave war to generals. well, had war been left to william westmoreland, this could have been nuclear in 1968. you need a president with a broader perspective. thank you so much for raising that. >> "presidents at war" is the name of the book. michael beschloss is the author. he's been our guest. thank you for your time here today. >> thank you. thank you so much. >> book tv continues now on c-span 2. television for serious readers. >> hello. can you hear me? yes. great.

hello? welcome, everyone. welcome. good evening. you can't hear. okay. better? no better? good evening. no, it's not. it's on, it's just in the back, the back is saying they can't hear. i will try to project as much as possible. okay. good evening, everyone. my name is adele gulfo. i'm chief of commercial development at rolvant sciences. this is a first event of the rolvant re-thinking leadership series. in partnership with hudson union, somewhere here tonight. we're excited to begin this series of conversations with a remarkable leader, general stanley mcchrystal. before we begin, please join me in thanking margo stanis, melissa adler, kristen ammond, for making this happen. stand up, please, so we can clap for you. thank you.

thank you. general mcchrystal has been called one of america's greatest warriors, a retired four-star general, he's the former commander of the joint special operations committee or j-soc, and former commander of all u.s. and international forces in afghanistan. general mcchrystal is perhaps best known for developing and implementing the captor insurgency strategy in afghanistan and for creating a comprehensive counterterrorism organization that revolutionized interagency culture, so imagine if he got military agencies to work together, what that must have been like. his leadership of j-soc is credited with the capture of saddam hussein and the death of the leader of al qaeda in iraq. over his many decades of leadership in the field, general

mcchrystal came to realize that our models for identifying, educating and evaluating leaders are woefully incomplete. in his latest book, "leaders, myth and reality" he profiles 13 famous leaders from a wide range of fields, including margaret thatcher, robert e. lee, coco chanel, just to name a few. he's also the author of two other bestsellers. "my share of the task" and "team of teams, new rules of engagement for a complex world." if you haven't already, i encourage you to read them. paul davis, head of communications at roivant, will be conducting tonight's interview. without further ado, please join me in welcoming general mcchrystal and paul davis to the stage. [ applause ]

>> well, as adele says, the title is "leaders, the myth and the reality." to kick things off, general mcchrystal, what are the most prevalent myths about leadership? >> let me first thank you for having me here today and thank you for the wonderful introduction. let me say that my two co-authors are in the room today. the former navy s.e.a.l. and former marine. together, we had this cumulative, amazing iq. i left the group, it would have gone down slightly. when the tough questions come, the right answers are back there. thank you guys for being here.

thanks for being on the team. [ applause ] now -- >> what are the most prevalent myths about leadership? >> i want to start, the first myth is that we understand it. we study it, we have books on it, we categorize ourselves as leaders, but i went through a lifetime of trying to lead, trying to learn to lead as my co-authors did, and yet we never really thought we got it. so we went back to first principles with this book, "leaders," and we said all right, let's go back to first principles, figure it out. we started studying it and the conclusion we came to was a little upsetting. that leadership is not what we think it is, and it never has been. we have lived with this mythology about leadership. i grew up with a mother who loved mythology, so she read to me all the time. i have a little orange book that she got when she was 5 years old in tennessee, and one of the

myths in it i loved is about atlas. you have this muscular atlas standing on a mountaintop, holding up the sky. the thing that was amazing for a long time, people accepted that. they just said well, the sky's still up there so somebody must be holding it up. if you think about it, that sort of defines how we let mythology explain things for us, and simplify things for us. so we came into three myths as we studied 13 leaders. and the three myths, the first was the formulaic myth. that is if you follow a list of behaviors or you've got a list of traits or that sort of thing, you've got all those, you are likely to be a good leader. yet when we studied it, we found that there are people who had all of them who are absolutely unsuccessful. we've got other people who have none of them who are rich, famous, successful, whatever you

want to call it. so the formulaic myth is disproven time and again. the second is the attribution myth. that is what happens in an organization, success or failure, can usually be traced back to the leader. we found that's not true, either. in fact, what happens in an organization, the outcome is often only marginally affected by the leader. when i got out of the military, i wrote my memoirs. people come to you, they say you have to write your memoir. that's easier said than done. so we go to start and i said how hard can this be. this is the story, the play of my life and i'm the star. and it shouldn't be hard because i was there. but we did all these interviews in prep for the book. what we found was my memory of things was usually not completely wrong but it was always incomplete.

so i would have made this great decisive decision, something would happen, i would get credit for it, but then we did all the interviews and we find out there are hundreds of other people doing things, hugely important, or other factors affecting it and it meant that i still mattered but i didn't matter like i thought i did. then the last one is results. you say we hire or elect or select or promote leaders because they get results, they make us money, they win battlefield victories, they win elections. the reality is, when you sort of do a blind test, we don't. we support serial failures. we follow people who take us places we know we don't want to go. we promote people who have never really been very successful. that's because as we found, leaders, it's not an objective transactional relationship between follower and leader.

it's an organic, it's a visceral, it's an emotional connection that we make. and they fill some requirement in us as people. so as a consequence, we tend to be supportive or loyal to people who, in many cases, the results wouldn't support. so these three myths put together mean that when we look at leadership, we're doing it through blurred glasses. we've got this fog and even though we know it, it persists. i would argue that it's pretty costly in many ways for us. >> you say there's a great man myth of history, it's toxic and intoxicating. why is it so attractive? why are people drawn to that particular notion that individuals are responsible for major events in history? >> it's simple. first and foremost, you say things are bad, we will wait for the great woman or man to show up and make it better. you think about it, almost any of the leaders that we have held

on exalted status, we put the spotlight on them and we say that they bent the arc of history. in many cases, they had a big effect but it really makes it simpler. george washington founded the united states of america. well, that's not, in fact, true. he was there and he was part of it, but if you go back to just any number of leaders, we tend to want to simplify it. the danger of that is we have simplified it dramatically with a couple of problems. one, we have ignored all the other factors and other personalities and complexity of it, and two, we have a tendency to be waiting around for the next great person. we say we're not happy with the way it is, we will wait and somebody will come along. they never will. now, someone may come along and purport to be that. they may show themselves as that. they may advertise that. but they are not really that. and we've got to understand that

they never will be. >> you said there's a crisis of leadership in the united states right now. what exactly do you mean by that? >> i think that if you look at our nation, it's divided politically, it's divided socially, it's divided economically, and we could go on down. so that's sort of obvious. that's what we see every day. we have gotten to the point where we don't believe many of the leaders that speak to us. we watch on television, somebody says something and we immediately discount it. i would say if you had someone who worked for you and they lied to you, you probably wouldn't work with them anymore. if you had a client and you lied to them, they probably wouldn't work with you anymore. but it's not just our political leadership. think of our corporations and whatnot. the length of tour for a ceo now has shrunk dramatically. what has happened is we get very

unhappy with senior leaders very quickly. partly because we put them on a pedestal and nobody can meet up to expectations and partly because we created this atmosphere in which it's very, very difficult to lead right now. so we have a case where i think our leaders in many cases don't live up to requirements the best they can be, but clearly, we also have created an environment where leading is extraordinarily difficult. >> now, in terms of your book itself, why did you choose these particular 13 individuals? >> we got this dartboard. what we started, plutarc did a series of pairings of greek and roman, romulus, whatnot, founders. we wanted to look across the spectrum of leaders in different fields, backgrounds, diversity. we wanted diversity of sex, diversity of nations, diversity of the field they were in and

whatnot. we came out with six genre. we came out with geniuses, albe albert einstein and leonard bernstein. we came out with founders, walt disney. you will be surprised, i didn't know who coco chanel was but i do now. we came up with power brokers. we came up with margaret thatcher. reformers. martin luther, the protestant reformation and martin luther king, jr. we came out with heroes, harriet tubman. then we had a stand-alone. the stand-alone was general robert e. lee. we put robert e. lee because of all the figures in my life and my youth, he was the iconic leader. i went to west point like he did. i live about 70 feet from his

boyhood home right now. for me, he was the exemplar of military and battlefield quality in leadership. and it's complex to write about robert e. lee now. i have a complex relationship with his memory. but i didn't think i could honestly write a book about leaders without addressing the one that i had probably spent the most time in my life thinking about. >> you said that you re-evaluated robert e. lee and there's a portrait [ inaudible ]. why is that? why did you change your mind about him? >> my wife of 41 years, annie, is in the back. when i was a second lieutenant, she spent 25 bucks and bought me this painting of robert e. lee. you get quite a painting for 25 bucks. framed. it was just a print of a more famous painting and they painted clear acrylic on it. but we had it in our quarters everywhere we lived, and i loved

it because this was the symbol of what i thought about leadership. when people came in, they would see this is what stan mcchrystal admires. it was true. then after charlottesville, to be honest, annie asked me what about that picture. i said what do you mean, you gave it to me, i could never get rid of something you gave me. and she said i don't think it means for everybody what it does for you. i think it's sending an unintended signal that some people may go home with. we talked about it and i said he's just a soldier, he made the decision to go with the south. she said maybe in your eyes, maybe even his eyes, but not in a lot of people's eyes. so after about a month of talking about it, thinking about it, i took it down and threw it away because she was absolutely right. however we think about robert e. lee in many ways, his legacy

became used by people to include some of the iconic statues to send a message i don't seek association with, so i took it down. now, he's a complicated character because much about robert e. lee is extraordinar y extraordinarily, something that we should admire. if he was here today, he would be the most impressive person in the room. but the reality is at a key moment in his life, after 32 years in the united states army, he made the decision to violate the oath that i also made at west point to turn himself against the united states, and not only turn himself against it, but try to destroy it. the very nation that george washington had created. and he did it in defense of slavery. there's a conflict there and i'm

not here to tell you that robert e. lee is an evil guy but i'm telling you, in the one moment, the biggest decision of his life, he got it completely wrong. and i can't ignore that. and i have to learn from that. >> now, serving in lee's army or the army of northern virginia was not a particularly safe thing to do. most of the soldiers died, i think two-thirds of the infantrymen. why are people still drawn to him? why are people captivated by his leadership? >> this is what's so interesting. general lee took over after the seven days battle in 1862 and from then on, until the end of the war, he commanded the army at northern virginia for the south. he had a higher casualty rate among his army than any other commander in u.s. history. we talk about patton, we talk about any of the other, you know, commanders, ulysses grant, that incurred a lot of casualties. nobody got close to robert e. lee.

if you were an infantryman in 1862 in his army you had a 71% chance of being a casualty. 71%. i mean, grant's not even in the same neighborhood with that. yet robert e. lee's army stayed entirely loyal to him through the war, then after the war until his death in 1870. then his memory just kept getting burnished even more. so here's a guy if you look at results, he had a huge casualty rate and he lost, not a small thing, yet the loyalty to him, and part of it was how he was. he was a charismatic, devoted person. he was loyal to his people. he was personally courageous with them. all the things that make us feel good about working for someone or around someone, robert e. lee epitomized. so for the 150 years immediately after his death, there was just

this series of extraordinary platitudes that described him as the greatest american general by franklin roosevelt to winston churchill. just really iconic members of our history, putting lee in a category by himself. >> now, in terms of other people inspiring loyalty, you talk about walt disney. he didn't seem to be the most pleasant boss. very grudging in giving praise, sort of demanding and a perfectionist, but why did people find his leadership style compelling? >> he was a talented animator but in 1934, after some success, they had created mickey mouse with steamboat willie and had done some technological things. in 1934, he gave every employee in the company 50 cents and told them to go get dinner, then come back to work, to an auditorium. in the auditorium that night for the next three hours, he acted

out every part in a story that he wanted to create a fully animated feature on. it turned out to be "snow white." he played the dwarves and snow white, all on the stage, magnetic in front of people. now, what he was asking them seems kind of normal now. it was absolutely not normal. there had never been a full length animated feature before. cartoons had preceded movies and had been funny little things. he created the first sound. he's trying to make a movie in which people are not just entertained for a few minutes or made to laugh. he wanted to make an animated picture in which he could also make you cry. so he was entering completely new territory. for the next three years, he pushed his team, he led his team, he worked with his team, to make this extraordinary picture.

he mortgaged his home, he mortgaged the business, he mortgaged the intellectual property to mickey mouse. he put it all on the line. at one point, as they're working through, because he's such a perfectionist, one of his animators, remember the seven dwarves, there are about 40 names they went through before they came with the seven. you have dopey at the end and you have dopey walking, the seventh one as they move along and dopey did a hitch step. walt disney saw it and said i want every time dopey comes in a scene to do the hitch step. it cost him six months of going back and working reanimation. but it was that level of perfectionism to try to create something that not only was new, but it was a standard nobody else could get close to. that kind of leadership is intoxicating for people who get to be part of it. you want to be on that team.

he paid them well, he pushed them hard. he treated them well. but really, the thing we most want in life is to be a part of a very special team, and do something of real value. so in 1937, when the movie came out and it was this extraordinary hit, it just reinforced for him and of cou e course, the power. as the company got bigger he had trouble scaling his own leadership style but you can see why he could pull people to him. >> somebody else who could pull people to him, as you know very well, abu musab al zarqawi. you talked about him removing his tattoo in a jordanian prison. can you talk about that? >> sure. abu musab al zarqawi ultimately led al qaeda in iraq, the godfather of isis. he's the person they talk about. they don't talk about osama bin laden. abu musab al zarqawi started life in a tough jordanian

industrial town. not a good upbringing. he was kind of a bully, got involved in fights, alcohol, got a bunch of tattoos. then as he got a little older, he became idealogically very interested in islam. he went to afghanistan and became very interested in the holy warriors. he came back after that experience, starts to plot against the jordanian government, gets caught pretty quickly and thrown into prison. here's a guy without real education or religious education. but in prison, he finds the environment in which he can do very well. he studies religion, studies islam. he has the personal discipline to show himself to be idealogically committed. he tries to use bleach to remove the tattoos. when that doesn't work, he has a razor blade smuggled into the

prison and he cuts off the tattoo that was offensive to islam. he did it in a way that other convicts, inmates, saw. so what he was doing, he was showing people look, i am greatly committed. i am a zealot for this. he also was very strict with them. he says you must live up to the standards as well, so when there was offenders in the prison, he would be the guy who would basically intimidate them. but when there were others who needed help, he was extraordinarily loyal to them as well. so what he did was he showed himself a natural leader. he wasn't intellectually superior to them. in fact, he was intellectually inferior to most. but he was so committed, so convicted, we could say, that he became very, very magnetic to the people around him. when he left after five years in the prison, he realized what he

had was the ability to lead, and the way he would do that is leading by example. it's the exact same thing i learned as a young military officer. lead by example. do more than the others, when it's hard, show that you can do it. he did that in spades. later, in our fight in iraq, horrific as he was, he personally beheaded people, he was willing to walk the walk. he was willing to be completely committed. he was willing to put himself at risk and ultimately he died for the cause. that made him extraordinarily powerful. >> do you think he succeeded in achieving what he set out to do in iraq? >> he absolutely did. i mean, his stated goal was to help create an islamic caliphate emanating from iraq but his near-term goal was to foment civil war inside of iraq between sunni and shia. at first we thought he was a terrorist group against the west and we were a problem but we

weren't his target. he wanted to incite the shia into a civil war with the sunnis and largely by the end of 2006, june of 2006, he had done that. what we saw after that was that playing out. so in reality, mostly he was successful. >> now, turning to another topic, you have written about the role of military, you know, soldiers in politics. during the 40 years from eisenhower to george h.w. bush, we had sort of a series of eight presidents who all served in world war ii. the last four presidents have not served in the military. do you think that's a good thing, do you think that's a bad thing? what are your views on the degree to which military experience is useful serving as president of the united states? >> i think we have to do context. first, there were certain periods where we had huge percentage of people serve like world war ii, where you were likely to have people in politics that served because just so many people did. i think that that just reflects

the times. i think now, we've got the opposite. we've got a very small percentage of the population serving in the military, so a lot of people just don't have that experience. so i have a few views on it. first is, there should be people who serve in the military and go into politics. but just because you served in the military, that's not a qualification for office because having been in the military, i will tell you there's a lot of people i wouldn't vote for if you put a gun to my head, nor should you. joe mccarthy was in uniform. so the reality is, you don't judge by the degree, you judge by the individual. military experience can be great because you can become more thoughtful, you can see things in a less simplified way and you start to understand what life can be, so i think it's a good thing, but it's just a data point. the other thing i would say is i think all former professional military people who make it a career, there should be a time

when selected people like dwight eisenhower, ulysses grant goes to the senate or something, i think that's a good thing, but it shouldn't be viewed as a normal route into politics. because if that happened, if being a politician, senior politician in the u.s., was best facilitated by going through the military, being a general and doing that, you would change the officer corps. it would take a generation or so, but you would change it. we would be a lot like some countries whose governments we are not as comfortable with. so i think it ought to be an aberration, an occasional thing, but you don't want people entering the military because they think that's the way to get to be a senior politician, because we have separation, and the day we don't have separation, we will wish we had separation again. >> served 30 years in uniform in

the military. since 2010 you have been in the private sector. are there things the military can learn from the private sector? >> absolutely. it's funny, we are sort of walled off from the private sector. i spent a year at the council on foreign relations as a colonel and that was the biggest look i ever really got at the private sector. i was just sort of shocked of the things that i did. i had spent one year as a fellow at harvard before that and i had had a young person come to me one day and they said so you're in the military. i said i am. he said wow, because you seem kind of smart. and i realized he knew as little about me as i knew about him. and i think it's very unfortunate we have so little interaction. after i got out of the service, i got to know civilian people in business and different things, there was so much i wish i had known. i would have been desperate to go spend two or three years in a

civilian corporation, and come back in the army. many businesses do things so much smarter than the army. now, the army does some things so much smarter than businesses. but we don't find that out until too late. we both sort of look over the fence and think the other people have got it all going on. i tell the story all the time, you know, in the military, you think that everybody in the civilian world is a godless greedy bastard. but just extraordinarily efficient. and i couldn't believe that, because every time in the military, you had a meeting with just army officers or military officers, somebody would slap the table and go if we were a civilian company we would go bankrupt. they would never be this stupid. now i get in civilian boardrooms and whatnot, somebody will say the army would never be this stupid, would they, stan, you can't believe it. of course, i would say straight-faced, no. it's exactly the same.

but it's people saying the same things, but the problem is we don't -- we don't allow ourselves to learn well enough. >> now, in terms of our current leadership, i mean, what do you think of our current commander in chief? i know you have thoughts around obama that led to your resignation in 2010. is there any -- have you thought anything about your own evaluation of past presidents over the course of your time in private life or no? >> i think we all do. i got to know george w. bush pretty well. that was the first president i was senior enough to know. i got to know president obama well and i got along with both of them. i got along with president obama very well and still do. but the relationship between presidents and senior military isn't what it should be. it's not negative, it's too separated. they don't understand each other well enough. so as a consequence, there's not a real -- there's almost a

tentativeness and a fear of the other, and i used to tell people in the military, remember that when you wear your uniform you look kind of good, you got badges and medals and all that kind of stuff. that doesn't help the conversation. that stops it. that's like a wall, because people see that and that's what they see instead of seeing you. president kennedy after the bay of pigs was advised by someone, next time you want the military to brief you on a plan, make them come in civilian clothes. if the plan is still impressive, it might be good. that's a fair point. think about that. here's what i think about now leaders. instead of judging each leader, i wish we could pull a white board up here and say what do we want for our president. forget about democrat or republican. what values do we want. what qualities do we want. what experience. let's write that down.

let's talk about that. i don't think we would be that far apart on different parts of the aisle. instead we have a bunch of candidates come up and we try to trace to that. if we started with that, and we said well, we want this, this, this and this, and then we looked in the mirror and said are we willing to demand that of our leaders, are we willing to demand that of ourselves, then i think we might start to reach different conclusions. because at the end of the day, what we demand is what matters. we found the interaction between leaders and followers is extraordinary. that means followers have responsibility. big responsibility. we can't sit by and say ah, the president's bad, congress is bad, whatever. we elected them. we support or don't support them. and the reality is, if we like some things but don't like other

things, yeah, there are compromises to be made, but if we like one thing because it benefits us and we think something else is terrible and we don't do something about it, history's not going to treat us well, the followers. the leaders are going to be treated however they are going to be treated. but i think it's a time in america when we need to look in the mirror, stop looking at the tv, start looking in the mirror and start making tough evaluations of ourselves. >> one question before i open it up to the audience. in your book, you say reading this book will not make you no a great leader, it won't overcome weak values, lack of self-discipline or personal stupidity. i find it personally disspiriting. but seriously, what is the value in reading about the lives of impressive figures from the past? >> that's a misprint in the prologue. if you buy and read this book, you will lose weight, you will be smarter. trust me.

you know, we need to look back at history to understand that, because if we look back at leaders and we have a simplified view of them, if we think coco chanel was this perfect thing and wasn't a pain to work for, but extraordinarily talented as a marketer and then we start to think how we should lead or how we should select leaders in a skewed way. we start to look around for this two-dimensional character. a lot of leaders are only too happy to portray themselves in two dimensions because it's easier. so we have got to go back and really tear apart these leaders. every one of the leaders in this book was flawed. i can't find a leader who isn't flawed. but at the same time, some of them did some amazing things. in many cases, they did amazing things because they were part of teams. the miracle of the civil rights movement is not that martin

luther king had a worthy cause, it's not that he was a brilliant speaker and a charismatic guy. it was that he pulled together these disparate groups, all pulling in slightly different directions, against great resistance, and against uneven political help, and he kept it going and the day he was killed, the movement kept going. it wasn't about martin luther king jr. it was about everyone in the movement. i'm not sure many leaders come along that can do that, but we need to understand, that was the genius, that was the miracle. not the "i have a dream" speech. >> all right. question in the front? >> how do we get leaders who can get the technical things right so we're not focusing on battle ships when we need aircraft carriers, we're not focusing on aircraft carriers when we need missiles, and how do we find leaders who get the emotional, psychological things right so that we don't lose all of our

allies but we don't ultimately deal with people who chop people up into little bits? how do you handle -- >> good question. the question is how do we get a leader who is correct on tactical issues, whether on the battleship or aircraft carrier but also the emotional issues, being able to maintain our alliances? >> first off, you're not looking for a leader. you're looking for a team. in fact, i think the next presidential election maybe shouldn't be about a person. it ought to be about a team. what if a candidate came forward and said i have a hundred people from across the u.s., accomplished people, who have already sworn to spend at least two years in this administration bringing forth the right answers, doing the right things, and you didn't judge just that person because nobody is smart enough to have all the answers. but someone who is good enough to pull together a team of the right talent and the right commitment can do amazing things. the senior leader, however,

there are certain things they have to provide and as you talked about, the emotional part, the representational part, the inspirational part. there's a role that only the most senior leader can be the head of. other people should reflect it as well, but there are things that we want our most senior leaders to be and we want them to make it better than we are. i remember having leaders in the military, i would be tired, i would be just about to be lazy, i would be wanting to take a knee, and that leader walks by, i know they are more tired than i am but they're standing up and suddenly, they make me want to do that. that's what the leader does. even if the leader never knows the technical right answers. you can get people to get them. all you have to do at that point is do a multiple choice test. you just have to get the right kind of advisers. that's the way i think we ought to think about that. thank you. >> next question. remember, brevity is the soul of wit. >> i think he's talking to me.

... had been written about so much. now would be interesting if we

look closely. we had some negative leaders here. robespierre is pushing for virtue and will do it by spilling a lot of blood. those two and bosch tweed doesn't come out in the pantheon of most honest people. we thought we could cover that and show they could still be effective like boss tweed is effective in his corruption, and he helped administer the city and effective in the low level. when we looked at those we were trying to get a balance. we spend more hours with 13 leaders and guarding fistfights

somewhere in the one i lost and am deeply bitter about was davy crockett. i wanted davy crockett in this book so bad because i loved the walt disney show about him. maybe next book. thank you so much. >> talking about leadership, we would be involved in afghanistan too long. we don't have leadership that could get us out. what is the problem? >> we don't allow time. i see the politics in albany and ask what is the problem? it is never simple. afghanistan has been at war for 30 years and they were a compex tribal place to begin with. there are a few things to offer. first is afghanistan is not the same place it was on 9/11. the number of females who have been in school almost a generation, 17 years and the number of young afghans in school has changed the complexion of the country. the reality is my generation, our generation has to get off

the stage because we are in the way of afghanistan. 4.4 million afghans, which is impressive considering the situation. there's corruption and challenges. but i believe there's a way in. i think a partnership with the afghan people is important. after world war ii, what we did in japan and europe, those are painful and expensive and whatnot. by making a commitment over time it pays off in the long term. i would argue we must be open eyed and realistic about afghanistan. i'm not a proponent of walking away. it sends a message not only to the afghans but the world and

-- hopefully the world will go on forever and we will be connected. this idea of america first and build wall in the border, a lot of those places are going to be fun. open eyed, your point is a blessing. >> please join me in thanking the gentleman. >> you have the signature, please remain seated so we have to enjoy coming tonight. [inaudible conversations]

>> best-selling thriller author brad meltzer will be on in-depth, fiction addition with our live call in program sunday at noon eastern. 's most recent book the escape artist debuted at number one on the new york times bestsellers list. 's other books include the inner circle, the book of fate and the first counsel plus eight other best-selling thrillers. join us for in-depth fiction addition with author brad meltzer live sunday from noon to 3:00 pm eastern on booktv on c-span2.