offers her guide to reading and understanding the u.s. constitution. in her new book "how to read the constitution and why". >> a question i get a lot on television and regular conversation is, can he do that. can the president do that. my answer is, thus the wrong question. the question is, if he does that, we've had up until now president to not cross certain boundaries, what's the consequence? what are the processes for holding the president accountable? >> watch booktv every weekend on c-span2. good evening everyone. thank you so much for joining us tonight. my name is megan bedstead on behalf of harvard bookstore and very pleased to welcome you to this evening's event with thomas abt discussing his new

book "bleeding out" the devastating consequences of urban violence in a bold new plan for peace in the streets. in conversation with reference of jeffrey l brown. this evening's talk as part of a great lineup of harvard bookstore events happening this summer including upcoming discussions with charles king presenting gods of the upper air. how a circle oregano gate anthropologist reinvented race, sex and gender in the 20th century as well as jeff breaux with his new book white flights. race, fiction, and the american imagination among many others. for details and our full schedule check us out online at www.harvard.com/events are pickup an event flyer as you head out the door this evening. tonight's talk will conclude with time for your questions after which we will have a book signing here at this table. we are pleased to have c-span booktv here today taping the event. when asking questions and q&a please know your questions will be recorded. please wait for the microphone

to make its way over to you for asking a question. we have many copies of "bleeding out" for sale at the register in the next room which is my cue to say thank you for buying books from harvard bookstore. you support our ability to bring amazing authors here and support the future of independent bookstore. thank you. before we start a quick reminder to please silence your cell phones for the talk. >> now i'm very pleased to introduce tonight's speakers. thomas app is a senior research fellow at the harvard kennedy school of government. previously he served as policymaker for barack obama justice department and work for new york governor andrew cuomo overseen by all criminal justice and homeland security agencies in the state. he will be joined in conversation this evening by reverend jeffrey l brown. a nationally recognized leader and expert in violence reduction and the founder of recap, a national initiative organized to assist cities built better partnerships between the faith-based communities government and law enforcement agencies in an effort to reduce gang violence.

>> tonight will be discussing thomas's new book "bleeding out". thomas abt is one of world authorities on urban crime in this fascinating and important book offers many surprises much insight and positive recommendation. we are so pleased to host this event here at harvard bookstore tonight. please join me in welcoming thomas ãthomas abt and reverend jeffrey brown. [applause] >>. >> good evening everyone. let me try this again. good evening everyone. it is a pleasure and an honor to be here and be with my friend thomas abt talking about the release of this extraordinary book called

"bleeding out", the devastating consequences of urban violence in a bold new plan for peace in the streets. that's really applicable to this young man. he has always been someone who was really afraid to look at the very difficult issues we have in our nation and to scour the data in order to find what really works. and not what is politically correct but what works and will work for our nation. i'm glad to be a part of this. and glad to see you here. i've known him since my hair was black. i thought we would have a conversation about the book. it's interesting because your book is sort of laid out in in a way a doctor would look at a

patient with triage, you have diagnosis. he would have treatment and then the prognosis. but in the beginning part of the book you saw with the story is a story of the reverend kim odom and i'd like for you to talk about that because i know reverend odom, she and her husband she and her husband live in boston. it was a tragedy that really led to the focus of her in your book. i like for you to talk about that and talk about why you chose her as a place to start your book. >> sure. excuse me. first of all, thank you to the harvard bookstore for hosting this. thank you to you jeff, you've been a colleague and friend for

a long time. you are going all around the country doing this work so i really appreciate you taking time out to do this. i met kim in 2011. around the same time you and i met in connection with the national forum on youth violence prevention which was something i was helping to coordinate and run for the white house at the time. kim came to the forum and she told the story. she told her own story of grief and loss. kim's son who is stephen who was 13 at the time was coming home from playing basketball and was mistaken for a rival gang member by one of boston's

more notorious gains and was shot and killed. kim told the story courageously in front of hundreds of people and it really moved me and it really sort of reminded me it's one of the most powerful stories but there's been lots along the way when you do this work since i was a young prosecutor almost 20 years ago these people come to your life, these stories come to your life and you want to honor them in some way. i think that in many ways those stories were the emotional genesis for the book and really kim was a great place to start. as you know, she is an incredibly wonderful person and compassionate person. i go into her story in more detail than many of the others. the way she processed what

happened to her son and her family is extraordinary. that was really why we started there. >> thought it was interesting because this was a typical working-class family in boston. they have four children.the father was letter carrier. they were just good people. in this tragedy happened and it happens a lot. more often than many people realize. a lot of the violence is random. it was so unfortunate for that to happen. and you have communities of

color for their playgroup boots which leads me to the second question that i had which is, you would it make a bold statement in your book, i would say it's bold. it's provocative because you are saying that in order to help urban poor the top priority must be stopping the violence. i thought that was interesting because with all of the other structural weaknesses in urban community and particularly in the urban poor he talk about housing and housing policies and education and healthcare and drugs, with all of those structural weaknesses you say the number one priority would be to stop the violence. could you talk a little bit more about that? >> sure. i want to give a qualification

then tell you how i came to that personally and then i will talk a little bit about it. the first qualification is this is sort of a tough needles thread. the argument that i am making is that you need to put urban violence first. when you are thinking about how to help communities of color that are suffering from unusually high rates of violence. ...

when you look at the research you see that all of these subjects or all of these issues are interlinked and one of the things i point out is that urban violence is not just a symptom, all of these root causes and structural factors, but it's playing a key role in perpetuating things. they've been wonderful research on this and one of the statements talk about a bold statement, one of them is he says exposure to violence particularly early exposure to violence if the central mechanism keeping poor children for today and the way it works iis they are exposed to violence

in their home often in the community and often at school and it creates trauma and it makes it hard to concentrate and harder to sleep. it makes it harder to control impulsive behavior and one of those things creating changes impact educational performance so when kids don't perform well at school that affects their future so this is a sort of key empirical finding. i'm telling you that you already know this because you've been in a situation 100 time when you go and have these community meetings with teachers or policymakers or police officers.

the first thing we've got to do is get rid of all the guns were the first thing we've got to do is get everybody a job. or the first thing we have to do is eliminate racism, poverty, eliminate inequality and it's a very difficult challenge to get people back on board and focus and say yes to those things are absolutely critical and essential nobody should be satisfied with a country that is poor, unequal and safe. but you have to be able to juggle these in your mind at the same time because people need of relief right now and deserve safety and there are concrete solutions i laid out in public c that can have an impact right now while we make this longer generational struggles.

>> in all the work i've done across the country in going to a high school for example and i will ask the question how many of you have a relative that has been taken through in gun violence. when you talk about the focus of students that a small group of youth that are involved in violence that have a disproportionate effect you can ask a student how many teachers do you have and maybe what were the teachers names last year

because it is a focal point violence seems to be their top priority, so i fully agree with that. >> when you move to the triage at the beginning of the diagnosis, you talk about the stickiness of crime and i would like for you to talk about that and when you talk about that for 13th straight game and cartel and if you can use that to frame your comments about how we need to be focused on these places and people and circumstances.

>> sure. one of the most consistent findings, and this is played out study after study, decade after decade and studies if you look at the violence that is how intensely concentrated it is and so urban violence clusters together among the surprisingly small groups of people. what we think of as a problem that is striking out everywhere is actually surprisingly focused more than 60% of all encounters involve the timing network that is less than 1% about 5% of the

cities were in cambridge in boston 5% of the geography accounts for more than 50% of all of the shootings so there's a few things that are important about that. number one, it creates this enormous opportunity for efficiency. you don't have to work with everyone and be everywhere. only the places that matter mo most. we've been stigmatized entire groups of people and communities with this overbroad label of violins and in fact in the most dangerous communities the vast majority of people and blocks are not dangerous and if you lived in one of those communities, you know that. you know to go down this street and not fat.

and hang out with this person, not that so this is something i sort of wanted to get across because i think it's important because only is there a lot of confusion about the urban violence but there is a deep sense of pessimism which is unless we solve all of the problems of the world, we can't get to this and that isn't what the evidence says. >> when i think about the focus piece of data, it is very true with a lot of the work i did it was those groups who were actively involved in violence and if i was able to do debate coupled relationships i would also have the attention of all of the others in favor so all of that is very true.

you asked about the metaphor. one of the things if i'm sitting down with a mayor, police chief, policy maker of the lower level, i want to make it very concrete for them about how to tackle this problem so i would say we need to understand three things. who the key people are and be as little as two, three, 400 people. there's usually a few dozen hot spots and the need to understand the key behaviors then you create policies focused on those people, places and things and at the way that plays out is you take the killer cartel and 13th street and these are made-up names by the way.

i didn't want to give actual names in the book, so you've got these and they are made-up a bunch of young men who grew up together and they may be involved in various types of activities and they may be associated in violence, but this played out again and again and i spoke with a lot of former members who confirmed this. something that's very important to keep in mind in this hypothetical is played out at a

nightclub and they were not in this neighborhood nearby and in the nightclub was quickl that we called a hotspot so a constant theme of the site, stabbings and shootings. both are going to the nightclub having a good time then you get not just your hot place and people but your key behaviors and what is that? both managed to sneak a gun into the club so now you have a legal gun carrying, one of the key behaviors. another that may be surprising to some a few from the literature isn't hard drug use but alcohol usage.

and of course they are all affiliated. so what you have is people, place and behavior risk and that reaches some kind of an invisible tipping point if there's athereis an argument int leads to a fight and that leads to the shooting in the killing g and then what happens it's going to play out for weeks, months or even generations and we are playing catch-up. >> let me turn our focus to balance because back in the '90s when i was an active part of what was happening and anti-violent activities, i remember the first call i did with david kennedy. i remembered you have the ball anthe wallenforcement folks andl

workers, teachers, a mother, young man who had been killed. you have a balance of wall enforcement and community. i called a friend of mine at new york city said this is interesting. there were a lot of cops and sweeps by officers, very different approach. just wanted you to talk a little bit more about balance as you outlined in your book. i should be asking you questions here just to back up a little bit, he was involvecommittee wae

boston gun project is widely credited for reducing youth homicides in boston by 60%, a sort of central part of the boston miracle story. david kennedy was the creator of the boston gun project. it's a strategy that i talk about in detail in the book. but going back to this principle of balance to back up further there is focus which we just talked about, balance and fairness which we will talk about in a moment. if you look at the evidence, and if you just think about comments and, it is very clear when you look at the entire spectrum of policies there are heavy strategies that have been demonstrated to reduce violence and there's also some very

preventative treatment oriented strategies that have been proven to prevent violence. there is no skewing of the evidence and then when you back uyou backup and look at the citw of no american city that has substantially reduced violence either justified trying to arrest their way out of it or trying to help and treat their way out of it and this reinforces what we know. we don't raise our children just with positive incentives. we are using a carrot and a stick to try to change people's behavior all the time so that is a sort of )-close-paren of pulling the buck and this is very challenging because people come here with very strong prior so you are often in these

meetings talking with the wall enforcement community to get them to understand that plays a role that it needs to be very targeted and it isn't the solution to every problem. then you are going to meet with advocates and activists who don't believe in working with law enforcement at all and are just uncomfortable with any type of enforcement no matter how serious the criminal activity so that is challenging in practice but that's what happened in the past with most successful intervention they have the theme of balance. >> why was there backlash happening in cities all across the country? boston had huge margins, tens of

thousands of people talking about police. in terms of the motif of fairness, talk a little bit more about why that is an important piece in the diagnosis of all of this. >> is a critical piece. for me i left the governor's office just after the unrest in ferguson began so i had to spend a lot of time in government and when you are working in government you are not free to just publicly opine on this issue or that. there was a communication point and at the poin the point is scd all these things.

ferguson had basically been responsible for a massive uptake in crime because people were criticizing the police and then the police were simply stepping back. i didn't believe that to be the case and as i sort of dug into the research, i found a different phenomenon going on and it's this phenomenon called legal cynicism and what it explores anthought itexplores an verified through a number of studies is a concept that if people don't believe in the criminal justice system, they won't use it and that means they

won't provide information to the police investigators and they won't serve as jurors. it means they won't show up as what it says but perhaps more importantly, it means they will not turn to the criminal justice system to resolve potentially violent disputes. if your cousin gets beat up, you don't call 911, you call your other cousin nancy and all your business and that creates a cycle of violent retribution so one of the things we need to understand is the toxic instances of police corruption and brutality sends a message to people who are already struggling and if the if they wa dark place before now they are even further and you also have

to remember that this further activates all of their prior prs about the whole history of segregation, discrimination, persecution and slavery and so this iservices all of the piece. i remember in a conference right after ferguson a lot of police leaders were talking about this and saying if you were a white man in this area and you are working in law enforcement if someone calls the racist you can't just walk away from the table, you have to stay involved in that conversation because even if you know in your heart that you are not, the processiot

perception is not crazy for them and you have to work through that so that is a critical component basically if you want to reduce crime sustainably, you have to do that i it in a way ts perceived legitimate by the impact of communities. any police chief will talk you you can't just for the neighborhood with offices, make a lot of low-level technical arrests and you will temporarily drive crime down. the cost will be an honest, moral, economic, social. it's unsustainable. six months later you will be dealing with the same problem with less resources and so that is sort of my broader point if you are going to do this over the long run it has to be perceived as legitimate.

>> the plan is if we follow through with the plan nationally we will see the reduction by 50% in eight years. essentially what i'm proposing, i'm not in the book and i don't mandate one strategy or say you have to use this or that particular strategy, but i identify ten or 11 that have been proven by multiple experimental studies again and again to provide concrete

anticrime and anti-violence benefits cities are important strategies and what i argue is you need to pair up two, three or four of the strategies and focus on the people, places and behaviors and basically, i am making a very conservative estimate which is most of the strategies in the book are capable of providing a 10% reduction in homicide by themselves and i assume three or four together can produce the same 10% annual reduction. if you multiply that over eight years, you get a 50% reduction and that is how it can happen. 50% sounds impossible, but reducing by 10%, that is achievable and i think that's

important this is any complicated problem tha with ise first thing you do? you break it down and disaggregated and then it gets easier and easier. urban violence is no different so that is the way you do it and i think the other important thing is i also cost this out here in boston adopting the strategies would have required a few million dollars per year in a larger city it might cost as much as 20 million it would cost about 180 million in the first year. some of you may know the famous washington, d.c. term as a billion here and a billion there and all of a sudden you're talking about real money. i have to tell you after two decades in government, federal state and local, this isn't a

lot of money. this is easily you can find these levels are fun us -- fun funds. you might ask how can this be so affordable and again it is because the problem is so concentrated. you only have to work with those few hundred people in those few dozen places so that is how i get to that number. >> and it sounds fantastic. let's talk about the political realities around that and you talk about that in your book, the progress of development

intel to characterize. can you speak about not only those things that may be a way in which we can run through that? >> one of the chapters in the book says basically i lead out all the strategies and they all seem to make sense. so then i go through the central issues when we talk about a problem and impacting how we think we can solve it and then i think that how we are talking about the problem politically creates challenges that are laid out in the book. and then also the extraordinary challenge of explaining what the science and evidence beans in the communities and making

science explainable and then translating it into practice is one of the reasons that it's now focused deterrence or operation cease-fire has been implemented in two dozen cities and not 200 cities is because it doesn't reinforce the fires of any political base. it's not entirely prevention oriented us a lot of progressives go this is a little bit tough on crime and a lot of them say wait a second you are going to be giving handouts to people. and that is true of a lot of the strategies and when you are

grouping the strategies. it's to solve a very important problem and part of the reason i broke iwrote it for an audiencee this i had success in my own career before this but it was limited, and i had all the access to you would want. i've been to the white house, i think the statehouse statehousee briefed many mayors and often the response would not be able to trust your evidence or we don't have the money. with just the i don't know if we can settle this. i don't know who is going to get excited about this. and so, i sort of the reason i

wrote the book for a broad audience is because if a broad audience believed in the strategies, they would demand it and it would make the advocacy easier to i want to make sure we have enough time for folks to ask questions. i have a question on the issue of race and how it intermediates your buck. i want people to know he makes a strong argument around making sure that we address head on the issues around race in the cities and violence.

i would like for you to follow up on this because you've dealt with the same problem that i have com, maybe even more so. race is everywhere in this work. it's why he got here and why we haven't made more progress. you have to account for it and acknowledge it and if you make this problem all about race, it is often hard to move forward. what i see is a key thing that has to happen in order for this to move forward is that there has to be some kind of reconciliation between impacted communities and the state, the government, law enforcement not just law enforcement.

and the conversation about race can be so toxic on one side or the other that either delays ths the reconciliation or prevented entirely. we have a president who is consistently using violent crime and immigration and tipper for some to divide us and demagogue the issue. we have people that are passionate about social justice which is a good thing and i'm a strong proponent of criminal justice reform but sometimes they stepped over the line and use language that suggests everyone in law enforcement is racist or that the entire system is so infected with racial bias

that they have to be discarded entirely that poor peopl for pet are impacted by this issue need law enforcement and if you speak to them directly, you have a much more balanced view you don't like how they are often being treated by police but they don't want the police to leave. accounting for this crucial issue of race in a way that promotes reconciliation is critical. >> that resonates with me i know the arguments such as black wives matter who often advocate for the abolition of the police force and then any conservatives on the other side who blame just about everything on the backs of black people not even thinking about the history of and it's in

treating for me because when you are on the ground and working with the youth on the street, the dynamics are important. talking about the political nature of working they are not really paying attention to the politics on the left or right and if we get more peopl have mo would concentrate on that, then maybe we would get somewhere. i want you to end on a hopeful note because one of the fascinating things about the book is stories of ordinary everyday people and he talks about how the resiliency of these individuals shine through even in th the minutes of the

struggles they have in their everyday lives so if you would talk abouwere totalk about thatd again on how she was able to move forward. >> it's hard to get across that i hope i do a decent job. this work is extremely difficult and it can be very dark but it can also be extraordinarily gratifying and beautiful. you get to meet people along the way that come back from things that you just cannot imagine. heartland alliance is on the cutting edge of a helping young

men turned their lives around. i think that he did 18 years for murder and came out of prison and immediately said he threw himself into service. ten years later, he has a college degree, masters running this organization he is making a difference. so, there's people like that and so many people who have been deeply impacted managed to turn

it around and engage. a pretty calm and story in the work is police officers and former gang members who used to run around after each other, mocking each other up, long histories sitting at meeting tables how to prevent the next shooting so there's these beautiful moments. even after kim told her story again and again to audiences and turned her sorrow into service, i describe describe in the closg section of the book of the last interview where we were sitting which i didn't really realize until we were there only about a

block away from her house it was really close and we sat there and she said you know, i need for this to mean something, to not just be about my loss and suffering. i thought about it and said you know, i'm not sure i would have written the book without you. you gave me hope. we sat for a long time, just sat there so i do think that the book is deeply sad at times but i hope that it ends on a note of optimism because we can save lives. this isn't a problem everybody believes it to be.

[applause] i'm going to take up by offering since i am a baptist minister. i saw a question in the back and a hand right here. you have a microphone coming to you. years ago there was a project called it different september and [inaudible] adding to that as you say you would like to add your strategy, i forget who said the example but my question is i think that

concept was picked up nationwide and i was so touched by your frustration in trying to get it further and also so fascinated by the fact that you spotted or found a way to spot the small sections that are the most important. has anybody thought about or included in the strategies -- i have not read the book yet, to start early with stories or things that would directly target the behaviors that you are trying to protect people against or to arm them against? >> such a good question. so, thank you for that question. yes, the book does go into the evidencgoing to theevidence of , things like early appearance

training and partnerships and a lot of family-based programming and family functional therapy. the things that have been demonstrated through strong studies to reduce risk in children and adolescents not just young adults but i also want to point out something that's important there is particularly in the progressive circles a somewhat fatalistic notion that unless the reach of children early, unless we can connect with them in childhood that they are somehow lost its contrary to my own experience, people change. so thanso take that question. they gave me the opportunity to point that out.

>> i want to add a tiny personal note. i live in a square and for years have been friends with a person that lives down the street. i was blindsided about him on and a half ago when my friend came up to me and was extremely physically ill. i was on my way to some thing i thought at the moment was important. i didn't know anything about beyond what this person had done to find medical help or anything about the particular issues. i did everything on the spot and carry on with my own life and i suffered for a month and a half

remembering the story that i learned when i was little about. it's for one story stayed with d arguably motivated by concern. >> thank you. thank you. >> i have a question i wasn't expecting it to come to me as i read the interview that you gave and something that was important even though the communities are isolated that are being affected by violence, the production spread out to every american and i want you not to talk so much about that cost about to use your imagination and explain to us what are some benefits that everybody even those that are not affected by urban violence that we could see in the u.s. is

less plagued by gun violence? >> i didn't plan to these questions i want to point out, so you know, the cost of urban violence is invisible to most people that they ar but they art and range from increased taxes and insurance premiums and decreased property values just to name a few things when we talk about urban violence. there've been some studies talking about what would happen even a modest reduction in homicide can yield a huge peace dividend when increased property

rates go up, you get more tax revenue and tax revenue can then then be reinvested into communities. they are not necessarily reinvested in communities. that's something that politically we have to make sure happens. so it is important to understand that the social, the total social cost of homicide, the conservative estimate range about 10 million per homicide. that leads conservative but still credible about 19 million per homicide. so just avoiding a few creates enormous social values are thank you for the question. >> way back in the back. >> you mentioned the ten strategies and i wonder if you can just kind of give a couple examples of those so we know what makes the book so notable and in particular how a couple of those kind of synergize together to amplify the positive effects. >> sure. so, very briefly i will talk

about the intervention that has the strongest evidence according to a recent systematic review in the focus deterrence, and it's recently been done in oakland and what it looks like on the ground is community members, social service providers and law enforcement get together and study the problem and identify the people and places in it and then engage those people and have a series of small group meetings and they speak to these young men almost exclusively young men directly and say we know that it's you doing the shooting. the shooting has to stop. if it stops, we are here to help

you and if it doesn't stop, we are here to stop you and then they follow up on those promises. and educational training and other services but they also follow up with targeted enforcement for those that persist in violence so that is an example. i also think that there is enforcement getting ahead of the problem engaging in the clinical approach to work with kids while their behavior is simply unruly before it becomes violent. so during the 1990s, there

were in fact dramatic reductions in crime in many american cities and new york state and new york city was the poster child for that. do you think those efforts have stalled out in more recent years were just a lot more that can be done beyond what they've done? >> i think it is a great question. it depends on the frame of reference if you look where we are in relation to where we were 25 years ago, the story is one of tremendous progress. if you go back 50 years ago where essentially we are standing in the same place with no progress made whatsoever andn the homicide rate that is five times higher than the rate of any other high income nation. so to the question about how that impacts the work today,

it's interesting because it is a central challenge that we have shrunk in the problem down to where it is really impacting a small group of people, the most disenfranchised and disadvantaged people among us but for them, nothing has changed. the violence seems to be as bad as ever and that is one of the things we need. in 1991, you didn't need to convince anyone that it was important because everybody felt personally impacted were at risk. but today this is abstract for many of us. what i'm asking is for people to make a small leap in terms of empathy and imagination to sort of push that reality that most of us are living with and make

that a reality for some of the least advantaged among us. >> two things, one, i was appreciating your balancing criticism of the far right and progressives because at times we find it so strong that we are losing some of the ability to collaborate in a way that things like that do. but i have a question about drugs that as a sustaining factor leading to violence at times it feels like a wall is going to be hard to pick apart. >> i do cover it in the buck and

you have great answers on many of these issues i have a chapter in the book called guns, gangs and drugs where i basically piece by piece kind of take apart the approaches in the conventional wisdom on these subjects in particular in relation to drugs in the late '80s and the early '90s a lot of urban violence was driven by drug activity. there was intense violent competition but that isn't where we are today. there's been a really profound sort of decoupling of illegal drug activity and that sparks violence one of the things we often see is there is a violent incidents between two drug

dealers so we assume it's about drugs and you talk to people and do further investigation and its over a girl or insults on social media or something like that and we have a massive drug epidemic killing thousands and thousands of people and it horrible and tragic. it's surprisingly nonviolent so that is one of those sort of counterintuitive notions we assume it must be driven by some elusive criminal activity that a lot of that is not. a lot of it is just these disputes that go back and forth. >> you talk about reconciliation. what does that look like? >> i think that is a great question and it's a hard

question that i think that it works from the inside out, and i think it is hard to do when we think about it in the broadest terms. it's hard to sort of reconciled a nation that is divided against itself. it's much easier to bring two people together or two dozen people together and what ia i se is in the cities are making a difference they are not changing the dynamic that they are creating a safe place for a small select group of law enforcement service providers and this is the sort of

transformative power if you get a few dozen of those people together and they are on the same page and one of them is the mayor and the other is the police chief, if you are a key player, you can deliver a tremendous amount of safety to the city. one of the things i want to sort of urge people is don't look at this from the outside in. if you really want to understand, get your feet wet. you will be surprisingly welcome and start engaging on these issues. that's how you reconcile a person and work on it from the inside out, not the site and, in my view. >> thank you all again. [applause]

"after words" the federalist mollie hemingway and judicial crisis network examined the confirmation of supreme court justice and offer their thoughts on the future of the court. also this weekend at "the new york times" carl discusses his reporting on the process to kill thdelete justices supreme court seat and cbs news legal analyst talks about her guide to reading and understanding the u.s. constitution. all this weekend on booktv. check your cable guide or visit the website for more information.

the 13th nixon biography. there are a lot of them i was -- this is going to kind of sound conceited, i represent the east coast establishment. my politics are moderate or i'm not sure i have any. i went to harvard, i am a type. mixing hated people like me, not me personally but people like me. it would be interesting to try to reverse engineer this in a sympathetic way how did he see me or see us or the establishment or the "washington post" company for which i work

worked. i made the best effort i could. this was the impetus of the book and the best part of the book really is sympathetic about the moment he had where they treated him typically and you begin to understand why he was resentful and let this stuff get out of control. he was treated badly by my kind because of stupidity. there is a scene in the 60s

they were at a garden party in georgetown and the year olds sucking up to jack kennedy and there's something vaguely offensive about it in the kind of aren't we better looking and better dressed, just better and of course he would know about all that and feel put down. there was an arrogance to it that he was right but also cleverly played off of. some of our politics today is a descendent of richard nixon figuring out you can get votes by running against these people, this establishment. this can work for you.

he's not very popular over likable but, the issue was dancing and he runs on the pro- dancing ticket. he couldn't dance himself but rumsfeld and realizes the rich kids can go dancing and go to clubs in la and country clubs and all that. it's poor kids can't. there's more poor than rich and nixon wins in a landslide. it's rich against poor but that's being sensitive to the needs. there was a fraternity kind of a little man's party.

there were more of them, just smart politics. richard nixon claimed the word, not a speechwriter for richard nixon, the silent majority. he happened to win after the next one and he won with more votes than any president in history and a greater percenta percentage. but lbj in 64 was about a hair better.

up next on "after words" the federalist mollie hemingway and judicial crisis network examined the confirmation of supreme court justice brett kavanaugh and future of the court court interview today "los angeles times" and david savage. this is a weekly interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest works. last summer washington saul a particularly fierce political fight over president of trump's nomination of judge kavanaugh to succeed justice antonin kennedy on the supreme court. not always an edifying