>> here are some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to the los angeles times. >> topping the list is becoming, michelle obama's reflections on her life and her time as first lady . next, new york staff writer susan orlean recounts the los angeles library fire of 1986 in the library book followed by tara westover's educated, a memoir for life growing up in the idaho mountains. and her introduction to formal education at age 17. after that, and lamontoffers her thoughts on hope, forgiveness and generosity in almost everything . >> ..

when the time comes. signing will begin after words. books are available at the front of the registers after the event. one last note of store business before we begin for those interested politics and prose will be offering a class on the new novel december 4. today's guest is the writer a portrait of a decade in the life of thompson freaking dumb

adopting unnecessarily most significant decade of his life. it's unfortunately looked at by the political thoughts and his group commitment to the republican virtues. please welcome to politics and prose. [applause] thanks for coming out. to be able to read and seen so many good friends among the crowd. it's good advice.

for the evolution as a political journalist and activist in the years spanning the assassinati assassination. in the fantastic possibilities and deeply ingrained flaws of the american system of government. and tonight i'm going to read to short sections as i said about 20 minutes total. i'm going to be at the convention in 1968. for much of the violence that would erupt in the convention. wednesday night of the convention there's a police riot in front of the hotel where many of the dignitaries in the party are staying where the delegates are standing out in front of those in earlier in the day he'd

been clubbed in the stomach by the police when he showed his pass police said that since a press pass and they said what the hell do you think it is handed a ran their broad right in his stomach. when the violence erupts again it is after that i'm going to read a passage about a year later in 1969 and the inauguration and how tense debate could thompson flew out from the creek to cover the inauguration. >> on the evening 1968 about the number three of the national convention in chicago, hunter s. thompson the journalist working on the second book was standing at the corner of michigan and a motorcycle helmet stowed in a large blue kit at his shoulder.

around him 7,000 protesters tend to themselves and the intersection which the suites at the sheraton blackstone and conrad held in hotel looked down across the city evening was coming down late summer twilight air an and clear to the skyline throwing its shadow towards the lake thompson had taken up a position at the haymarket in where the other journalists stood alongside a number of staffers and delegates would come down from their rooms with their spouses to see what was going on. before 8 p.m. th the superintendency arm's-length commander in charge of convention security received word additional reinforcements could arrive with a contingent of paddy wagons to transport prisoners and to the officers to gather around and off the perimeter he gave the order to clear the intersection. at the chicago policthe chicagod

from both ends of the tight military formation and then they broke into a full-blown charging into the crowd from the most part they were from buying a fishing pole and families. before the assault did take it off their badges and nameplates and the new in order to the attack had been delayed for nearly half an hour and deliberated upon and unless it came down the rising like a small sum of money there could be no doubt represented the official position of the highest civilian authorities. a new round of tear gas shrouded the intersection and the burning fault hits striking bone with panicked footsteps and screams. a breeze came up from the lake and cops arrived. together they chanted as they approached the intersection. the protesters tried to flee. the cop doubled him over with a club to the gut and was tossing

him into a paddy wagon. at that moment they were filming the wagons and the cop turned to attack him. a doctor in a white coat ran to help and was knocked to the ground by police who kept beating him as he tried to crawl away. there were plainclothes cops, white shirt had the cops with te have antennas on their backs for instruction and others were jackets with chevron's shoulders. if you were on three wheeled motorcycles one of whom could be heard as he ran people over shouting. for 15 unbelievable minutes the battle of michigan avenue raged on the entire time he was standing behind the yellow barricade with his back to the restaurant watching up close. they were still surrounded by the officials and their wives and from the start it had been a famous spot and there was a chance the whole world was watching but now they were silent cops taking over the new assault. on michigan avenue from the north and south two rows of

police were advancing and came together at the hilton and the streets remaining protesters had nowhere to go. it's the same spot the others were standing. now the officers charge chargedd sprayed mace from the cans and came in behind the foggy bursts. they went back over the barricade and he was forced against the hel hilton stay togr some shouted. if you try to break through but they were quickly separated. it was complete. half a thousand were pinned against the windows at th of thl and police gathered again and bullets to their final assault. he reached for the motorcycle helmet ahelmet he's looked upone cops got to him. then the overhand love of the billy club coming down on a motorcycle helmet on the plastic dome that would amplify the deafening bang int and at the se time it protected its meant unlike the others lying around

him he would still register with all his faculties intact the unmistakable message to silence their opposition and observers. thompson knew immediately from national television to the constitution of the united states that could be discarded if they could do anything. from behind he heard a new crash and now the crowd was being forced through the window which shattered. men and women tumbled down into the restaurant and they followed him in with their clubs drawn. rounding the cops they shoved past what was happening to the people minutes before were standing next to him were they down there now on the floor of the haymarket? suddenly he was sure he was about to be hit by bullets fired from above from the rooftop shot exploding in his chest before he even heard its report. there was nothing he could do. i've never been caught in an

earthquake he would say about this moment but i'm sure the feeling would be just about the same total panic and disbelief with no escape. speeding towards him from the menace of the night in that instance he was overcome with terror and paralysis and regret of what it means to be hit and then as if in a nightmare to go down. it is the sort of fear bobby kennedy had been made to feel two months earlier during those moments on the ambassador hotel's concrete floor when he asked if everyone else was okay hopeless to do anything but watch it go. we are talking about the saddest moment of all the one in which he finally realized beyond everyone else is each. inside the hilton a protester was slipped against the wall and another paralyzed crawled on his elbows copps beat them anyway beating the diners who were sitting in the haymarket and then moved on to the lobby to clear the floor one of them shouted. they didn't care about arresting

people. the intersection was secure. just then hunter s. thompson saw an opening through the crowd of police and wounded protesters he went to the blackstone 60 feet away with cops near the entrance kept him back. i live him, i'm paying $50 a day. he was pushed into the door until finally someone let him push through into the lobby. he walked and changed his door. his eyes burn, this dot eight but he was unharmed. he held a cloth to his face to soak up the tear gas and sat on the bed with his legs crossed and his entire body shaking. none of it made sense. the whole week the police had known he was a member of the press. the men and women forcing through or political officials that an or of the nonviolent young protesters worked as campaign staffers and that was the point. years later looking back on this moment they knew my position and

wanted to beat me anyway. they were powerful enough to break anyone who thought about getting in their way. what i learned in chicago is the police and the government were capable of hiring thugs to break the rules we all thought we were operating under. the violence he witnessed was state sanctioned, political and had originated in the electoral process of the democratic system, the primaries is now threatened. in this same we are the authors and performers and intended audience. all along he had been with us, it was us. a song for america we have been singing from the start. it was just after 9 p.m. at the amphitheater for the presidential nomination was about to begin. thompson still had his pass that have been around his neck the entire time and he plans to put it to use now for something other than an invitation to a beating. and so, that night he goes to the democratic national

convention and h pcs musky gets nominated and is screaming at the georgia delegation of the alabama delegation that they should nominate arden who is the famous nazi because they are trying to nominate the famous police chief and eventually they kicked him out but this was right about the time on stage if we didn't have these tactics going on in the streets of chicago they were referring to near daily's police riot that just happened and he said something we can't repeat here but basically he said a few. we can swear, tammy, he said fuck you to ribicoff and he said how hard it is to accept the truth and daley could hear him saying that so they wrote a letter after letter saying how

impressed he was with ribicoff being the only one to stand up to dail daley at that moment one floor. so, a little bit of context and one more scene from the inauguration and one more thing i will say about this he was attuned to how much they began to change. it didn't work in a tactic earlier so they left the questioning and this injustice was part of it. that went into pat buchanan was watching that event.

it was to show he could control the country when his own party had in chicago. the only other thing in the documentary they read the book on nixon and he basically committed treason before he was elected president for the peace discussions by contacting south vietnam to get a better deal. we both know you did it. you've committed treason but johnson didn't have any cachet with the public.

so he was deeply compromised and he had been a shape shifter who have been able to obtain that they had been locked in this form of injustice because they have done something so absurdly terrible and as a part of watergate you would see they tried to break into the institution and the planning of that was to destroy. beneath the low concrete richard milhouse nixon descended the steps of the capitol's east end of repeated the oath administered to him by the chief justice earl warren taking office president of the united states.

the peace we seek is not victory over any of the people that the peace that comes with healing in its wings as our eyes catch the dimness of the rays of the dawn let us not curse the remaining dark with a scatter the light. the administrations chief speechwriter that helped spearhead the campaign the rebranding effort sought to repackage nixon as a stabilizing unifier america so desperately needed. they been writing for nearly a decade they understood what it was that made this particular politicians are dangerous.

it is the unabashed used-car salesman tenure and somehow mistaken for entirely different trades and ambition. nixon said at the end of the address the government will listen in new ways and then he got into his bulletproof magazine and kicked off the parade from the capital of the white house have taken within a literal stones throw. it's the corner of pennsylvania and 15th street from the bleachers the intersection from the president's vanguard for the turn of passing the vast

securitbasqueactivity court of e house. they were knocking at everyone's high collared coats at the long angled corridor the diagonal that was from one tower to anothecolor toanother and it wae very police motorcycles and secret service agents trotted alongside. the protesters posted up along the parade route three main locations throughout the week they gathered from what was being called the counter inaugural they put together prison sentences in illinois on the conspiracy riot charges and after chicago the mood of the antiwar movement had soured. violence and confrontation are the themes now, he would write in his features.

vicious dissidence style. as the motorcade approached 12 and pennsylvania at the sigh sif the post office and clocktower the first small group was waiting. they were front and back by navy jacket police and national guardsmen as well as an additional contingent from the army's second airborne division, not that it matters as soon as the limousine appeared to be unleashed rocks and sticks. members of the secret service were walking alongside. some in the precipitous arc appeared to be following towards the vehicle carrying mr. indexes mixed and accelerated forcing the agents onto the street and an accompanying run. the next protesters gathered at 14th street and the national theatre on the north side of pennsylvania with the grade routes whitest -- widest spot.

at 2468 organized to smash the state. 1234, we don't want your fucking war. then there was a pain filled christmas ornament against the pavement in a smoking can toss the head of the presidential limousine rolling underneath. national guardsmen surged against the crowd reaching for the assailant but the protesters beat anyone from law enforcement lucky enough to venture too far into their midst. one after charging into the crowd was nearly stripped naked and as a result the hail kept coming down stones, bottles, cans, firecrackers, pennies, rocks, table forks, tomatoes, the newer, they lit on fire the miniature american flags the boy scouts have been passing out and threw them as hard as they could in the general direction of the president. 2:45 p.m.. huntress thomas was stil still w spots across the avenue in the white teachers were the counter

inaugural's leaders who legitimately purchased 200 tickets. protesters were holding up signs like stop the war against black america and nixon is the one, the number one war criminal. war criminal. there were vietcong banners and they passed around a dark sack they kept calling the black flag of anarchy. someone threw a half gallon jug of wine. a newscaster from nbc announced into the microphone here comes the president. from around the corner of the limousine appearethelimousine af hollow it out on wheels he would write a very nasty looking armored car and this is a stench of death brought finality to it. he had been a year of assassinations and police riots and 50 had led for hunter s. le. thompson to the most fun thing about outcome of all richard s. fixings victory march to the white house lawn. the whole concept of peaceful protests died at th of the natil democratic convention he wrote that night.

there had been the assumption however far-fetched but the politicians running the country were capable without perceiving a mass demonstration on something like the war in vietnam in the context of the general political reality. if you were listening we are willing to play by the same set of guidelines the republic agreed upon two centuries earlier even if they disagreed with what they heard. the 1960s were full of examples of powerful men changing their mind on heavy issues, he would write years later. the pinnacle being lyndon johnson shocking decision to recognize the failure and preemptively forgo the second term. this is why the current reality felt so devastating. with agnew and nixon and mitchell coming into power, he explained that there was simply no point in yelling at the fuckers, they were born death and stupid. the people you were hoping to reach were incapable of hearing what you hav you have to say. it continued s. thompson and he watched her turn to the white house and it disappeared behind the trees.

sidekick and in the damned and no protesters are fighting among themselves. there's a long ribbon of debris. overhead and enormous helicopter. the city spelled of the vehicle weighs dozen winter like dust and freezing rain and yellow stock and water. he said because of his jacket and marched south around in the statues and memorials reveal themselves haphazardly like relics and the individual meetings. mr. dickson city a monument to the office he finally won. [applause] thank you, everyone. this is awkward. there's one more page.

i just like it when people clap a lot. i will just read these us to to print directly to paragraphs and then take questions. i'm very vain. [laughter] shout out. my baseball team is here -- and break the tension. okay let's see. so the last two paragraphs for thompson. from the mall you can see the arlington cemetery with the landscape with even more graves than he could count. athis part of the monument. across the river bobby kennedy laid in a coffin only a few feet from his older brother. they were forced to adorn and death and silence the sinister spectacle of the president. the only thing for the triumphant evil is for good men to do nothing bobby kennedy said before he was assassinated a quote his brother attributed to edmund burke. he would never forget hearing this line on a day as haunting as this one it could be hurt to

mean something different so we are driven into silence of the most characteristics of our nature to finally flourish. suddenly hunter thompson both disgusted and disillusioned and that loss. overhead the sky was about to break. he went back to his hotel. what a fantastic monument, he later writes, to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like richard nixon. [laughter] not awkward. [laughter] now if anybody has any questions. i graduated from college in 1969. talk a little bit about hunter thompson. i wasn't really aware of him

than, even though when i got to law school in 1969, there was the moratorium and the mobilization and all that. what was his background in how w is he different than the more familiar, but doing that would hunter thompson is mostly from doonesbury. >> it was fascinating to me because he started on a normal journalistic root in the 1960s and he was a correspondent throughout south america for the national observer and she was writing articles to the new york publishing short little articles that were not voiced in the same way we would see his work take on and they often dealt with extreme issues like the death of democracy in peru where there is one of a british foreign legion ambassador hitting golf balls from his patio down into the

slum's and he's asking for more gin and tonics. he was very attuned to the justice and growing up in louisville, he had friends when he was 18 who were accused of a robbery he didn't commit and they were able to get off because others were wealthy and he went to jail for 30 days and joined the air force after words and was honorably discharged after that. that was in the mid to late 50s so he was a journalist who then ended up going west because he thought that the movement with originators and he was present for the free speech movement which morphed into the moratorium and he was present when the 12,000 person march tried to break through from berkeley and began to beat the protesters and police had to beat the angels and he was at the center of that. there's an angry motorcycle gang

but it's also about the west and about the limitations and promises of the counterculture said he was very in tuned with the bat and stylistically pushing to move beyond the standard approach of objectivity so when the new journalistic wave of writing came about, he understood that there was more space through subjectivity and essays to comment to write about america and the political experience of america at the time such finish up the questin one thing he did really well there is a review of the campaign book and in comparison to theodore white come he's the guy who would follow just like woodward basically that kind of work and kind of knew everybody was chummy with everybody and then norman mailer is problematic and would come in for a week or two and writes

these songs for america. thompson was at the middle and writing something larger than what was happening but also spending the time to be a reporter on the trail and so the experience of spending every day waking up with a candidate and striving to articulate something bigger than him article has given him in my opinion a beautiful place when it comes to writing about the american democracy and how the promises and limitations failed repeatedly when we see abuses of power at the national level. >> and then after 1972 or 1968 what happened to him? >> he went home and cried for two weeks after he was hit in the head, like i cried for two weeks. i didn't leave my room. it was terrifying to see that so

he got involved in local politics and it was the fiction writer he wrote a campaign in aspen and also ran for sheriff it was after he ran for sheriff on the platform he wanted to be an ombudsman and he was also very liberal but long story short he was reenergized and realize you can work in the democratic system instead of having to tear it down. somebody like his good friend as the civil righta civil rights as angeles was a different situation. the police were killing him and his friends and he didn't have the same positions so he was more revolutionary and rightly so and then after that he went back out on the campaign trail to the national politics.

>> i'm wondering what you think about the portrayal of thompson in the way that we knew him as a kooky eccentric unstable genius. we need to be careful that we don't become caricatures of ourselves so this book tries to focus on the negative aspects of that caricature some things don't hold up well in the stre street. one thing brinkley says, the presidential historian and person in charge is for this decade thompson was taking a stimulant to work and later he would take them to escape work in this decade he was so overwhelmed and intend on trying to report on the american

condition that he was much busier than he ever dreamt of being on the page and so the version we now get, somebody dressed up on holocene and that kind of masculine careless perspective that was part of the persona he created on the page and in his own experience that when he was creating the persona that was the moment trying to show himself acting humorously into the distance between the past assault even if it were two or three days earlier he traumatized as bewilderment very well to being lost and confused. for the last line of the book is the worst thing of all is the eulogy that you never get to write just for yourself.

you have to be careful the narrative that you create will be out of your hands o when you become a caricature of it so i find that version to be especially today not as compelling as a serious artist and journalist. i don't have a journalistic background. i've been in creative classes but thompson was a serious working professional and understood everything he was doing and what rules he was breaking. he began as a serious journalist writing the way a journalist would write about a baseball game or political rally and then choose to navigate from that and it's different people start at an experimental and informal place and we've got to remember he spent a lot of years sending those back to new york and having them cut in half to get money out of them and having what he thought was the most important aspect thrown aside.

>> ask questions. don't be shy. we are all going to play ping-pong later and it will be lovely. >> can you tell me about the process and how you took that into writing? >> it nearly killed me. it's a good question. an excellent writer from george mason. i wanted the book to feel like a novel but i wanted everything to be true and accounted for so the book is about 250 pages of narrative which is all i would want any reader to read it and it has 100 pages were 50,000 words and notes and those note account for every sight, smell, sound, thought, quote that

happens and it was all in this space to have me on the page, so if i say san francisco spelled like near the bay of machine oil for the scene is taking place i would say i grew up going to this spot in san francisco, i know this spot and so i want the reader to see where i started with the information and how he write it into a narrative possessive as we make it into a narrative we are changing reality as soon as we apply or put into the details it is a narrative we are moving away from it objectively happened. that being said, i want them to know what versions of the story i was looking at and why the one i chose to tell what's true and why all the note are filled with where the information came from and building off of that they were filled with me thinking about why these choices are being made and then as a final

note, when you write about another writer you can't sound like them it would never work and so hunter thompson's prose i enjoyed it can be like a magnet and i want to make sure that they never sounded like his writing so i was reading certain writers at the tim of the time r direction by james or joe gideon and so i will put if i have an image in a text with the shadow was thrown out across the water i will have a line where in thee signs and symbols the grandfather takes the teeth out of his mouth into their saliva a connecting it to his mouth so i have that passage because with nonfiction mike said, you can use what you want subparagraphs of editing and put it in the back which is what i did. if you look at the notes, there's tons of paragraphs of michael and john and other

writers. i would walk bleary-eyed in and out as i if in a fault because i was getting maybe four hours of sleep and drink 14 hours of research or 16 hours of writing but it's nothing i will does again but it's worth it i guess. [laughter] why not. part of why i wrote the book at night, i was approaching rapidly for a three-month i would get about four or 5 p.m., stay up all night until about 10 p.m. and stay up during the days of there was no e-mail, no news, no errands to run, i was able to spend time with my family in the morning and the evening but i was gone from the world and from the media of the world which was the only way to live in this past that i was writing about. >> were you inspired to write this because you saw the relevance of hunter s. thompson in the political situation?

did you start before and can change ththenchange the directik when you saw what was happening on the political scale? >> i think all of us whatever our political after 2016 and everything that's happened since it is hard to see america no matter where we start from it'ss hard to see people across the aisle in the same way. i've been trying to write about justice and how it had gone from east los angeles writing about how members of the movement were being murdered by police and how he was a brilliant news broadcaster killed during a police riot like chicago. after, to get a sense of his experiences were, i went to the 2016 national convention in cleveland and philadelphia and after on election night being at the hotel where i get a text

from my wife that shows the image on "the new york times" probability measurement going from 90% to 10% and i'm watching on tv as everybody is coming to celebrate chump to an incredible cheer because it's 9 p.m. and all the states are going for donald trump and against hillary and i'm looking back at moments like the kennedy assassination and how thompson was affected by that and looking back at the convention where barry goldwater said extremism and defense of liberty is no vice and thompson was on the floor and cried a guard and thompson looks around and everybody is beaming in their chairs and screaming and he feels this form of political violence and that any moment this can become not political enthusiasm of political violence, say yes to answer your question it's impossible to not look at the events and see them

through that lens which began storytelling is all about the present. that is what we put on. we will never be objective, so you are right that version is going to be pinned to what's happened and i do believe that what he has to say about the republican justice and unjust leaders and extremism on both sides is as relevant now than ever. >> i have two questions you can only answer one and then choose which one you want to answer. which of his books was your favorite and why and second, do you see the continuation to be a generation of writers and if so, in what context? >> it to 20,000 word narrative account where he goes to east

los angeles and reports on abuse with the lapd and is being attacked or is disliked by members of the brown berets movement and for good cause because he's from santa fe don't know if they can trust him they are right to be suspicious and the cops don't want him question to be asking questions so as a character in that, he plays sort of a backseat role to that, that's going on and that is a nice place for these interactions and also the campaign trails. the whole generation he was a part of this stock in between the beads of the hippie generation and this is neal cassidy who was a member of the beach so neal cassidy is in the book and they were both friends with thompson, and i think that

he understood to be aesthetics and promises and limitations and be deeply affected his disillusionment in the antiwar movement and with conscious expansion to make everything better. he believed this is how you get better. living and learning is how to improve your perspective you can't take lsd and suddenly see through time and space and everyone will get along. that is his perspective is that you burn wisdom said his relationship is instrumental in this perspective. >> first game. i'm curious what lessons you took out of writing this book in terms of the craft of writing.

>> that is an excellent question. writing is never fun is basically his comment and test you don't realize you are doing it. those eight hours or six hours or ten hours you look back and things are crooning and also it's not as solitary and act as we tend to think it is a corroborative artform. i was so close to my deadline like editing my chapters before the other chapters were done and getting these fantastic edits like staying up past ten. let's may be right, logically that's a good idea. what do whatever you want. dramatize, move around like in chicago i go up and there's

these politicians watching it. do whatever you want in the notes. wander around. so he was very helpful. i don't think without that i could have got it done and the same amount of pressure i hoped to. so the idea of collaboration and also of perseverance and money in the bank are on key. maybe next time i'm not going to research so heavily in a project doesn't do that. >> can you tell us about his time on espn as well as his essay on 9/11? >> he was problematic later on in his life. i think his body and his mind suffered from how much he pushed

himself earlier in life and so i have not researched that. a great book to read is the stories i tell myself which is a memoir about growing up of hunter thompson and it covers the time to go into starts with it being very hard when they were young and then it becomes beautiful because they got close to the end of his life and became close friends. but to answer your question he started as a sports writer and when he got out of louisville in thlouisvilleand joined the air s on edwards air force base he basically worked his way into the journalism department at the air force and growth sports articles and was a great sports journalists that he writes about it where all you need is like a thesaurus and describe a tackle in a different way but he also understood sports in american culture and how football especially in the 60s and

70s and nixon's relationship with football was integral to understanding what was going on. the only time he ever got to spend time with mixing was 1968 in the new hampshire primary where they are like come here. get in the back of the car and mixing is in the back of the car and they have to drive for 30 minutes to the airport in new hampshire and thompson not knowing what to ask and knowing that he gets the same answer to any question regarding politics asks him about football and mixing just opens up. miami, super bowl two and basically he had read about this many times in his life but i liked his writing about it and he says it was the only time in his life basically that he knew richard nixon wasn't lying. and he blew up the plane he was

smoking that that is another story. how are we doing on time click delete? other questions. >> was there anything you found in your research, whether it's about hunter s. thompson or just the political atmosphere of the 70s. there's an investigation by lbj that the crew would an enormous amount of personal testimony about chicago 68 go through all the scenes that i was describing. and it doesn't dramatize it in

that way, but i was shocked by the level of violence in these cultural moments that i'd known about historically. growing up, i knew about that inauguration. i had no idea that they were throwing paint filled christmas ornaments. and it is this old video that you see role under the car and d there's this incredible moment have been speeding up and running and the anger. i wasn't shocked that i found ft terrifying it fascinating and i think that he was good at savaging do much of the left as he was at the right. he was just as hard on lbj as he was on nixon and as much as a certain republican official. when i see how the left was

acting and the ride was acting as if today we have a chance to witness them putting as much pressure on both sides of the aisle and it's hard to do that because it is different. >> to that point how do you think hunter s. thompson would fit into this media for twitter? >> it would have been terrible. that is another good question. i think that he would have pushed back against the cable news aspect of talking heads and celebrities and having a career through articulating the point and that celebrity culture of looking like a newscaster or an

expert. i think that he would have pushed back against extremism that we are seeing now where we believe in america that rhetoric can be divorced from the islands and obviously we know that it's not true that we have seen it so much recently and it would push back against the way they try to manipulate the press that often gets stuck. they become complicit in the terrible aspects of the trump administration they don't mean to but that is the border between it now has the ability to lie to the public and overwhelmed the press and that's why i think michelle wolfs white house correspondents talk where she made everybody uncomfortable bite calling trum trump a racist she did is right in the new yorker and call out the press for saying they can have access to these figures who are deeply

hurting america and at the same time write about them in a clear and just way and that isn't working right now. you have to give them access for correctness and for being just and right and i think he would have been willing to give up access even for someone following the campaign who would have stayed true to his perspective of the justice. there is a lot now whose essays are more cultural critics but thompson was on the campaign trail every day and has written letters that were strictly filing information about what had happened and he saw the way they manipulated the reality of closed-circuit television and basically allow mixing to get out the version nixon wanted the end it took so much effort to get around that he had ceased to dithe spaceto do that so he dran having to go to these terrible

public-relations staff being that they would put them on the stage an and show how awful it s but it took so much to dramatize it in a way that it's being given to you an in having a comt on it. i think that it wore him down on the campaign trail but that is what he articulates their. one more question may be. >> it comes from three quotes. he's under surveillance from naval intelligence and the fbi and this is a part of the lapd

the special operations for conspiracy, it was the actual title of it they would infiltrate the civil rights groups and attacked police so they could use deadly force so he's like we can't talk we need to get a convertible into go to las vegas. so they go and basically take a plane and leaves him with a giant gun and a ton of marijuana which is like 20 years in prison he has to drive it to la and he becomes panic and wants to get back to los angeles so badly and describes it as safety and obscurity to be on the hollywood freeway to be another freak kingdom to be anonymous again and not in las vegas which was a very conservative town which is

sinatra's tow town comes pure wagner, richard nixon's town and on the campaign trail that 72, ed muskie had been a politician who supported the vietnam war. he was doing a tour on the train and thompson leaves at 3 a.m., very large and drunk man who had known everybody thompson knew and sent them. the name was peter sheridan and he was like i'm going to hitchhike down to miami. come with me and take my trespass so he sends the elevator down and thompson is like they will lead me on, i write. the next day they drank 15

martinis, go up and down the whole trip and then at the end they grabbed his leg and ask if he's giving a speech from underneath the. thompson describes the sheraton is a true aristocrat. where it really comes from is the debate in 68 he basically says it is the epigraph to this book and i'm not insulted by the word to deviate from the unjust government is what we are asked to do and i find it an honor and a testing should switch is where the power came from.

[inaudible conversations] august 9, 1974. your mother said in her memoir that this was the saddest day of her life. why do you think that is? >> for two reasons, she was very

sad as many of us were to see a sitting president, richard nixon, have to redesign. it would be a more intimate life and she felt like this was just ramping it up to another level. the good news is that she came to realize as first lady she was only a few hundred yards from his office.

you go into the oval office and have a family portrait taken and then your dad goes to work first day of work and then the family goes back to their house in alexandria because the nixon's left so suddenly there was no inaugural ball, the white house wasn't ready for you to move into so the family goes back to the house while president ford has his first day in office you are having a little party it's

not everyda every day that youra becomes president. so he comes in later that evening and was pulling a lasagna out of the oven. [laughter] >> you are president of the united states and i am working in the kitchen. something is wrong with this picture. [laughter] >> i don't think she cooked much after that.