andrew pollack -- father of a student killed in parkland, florida -- talks about guns and school safety. that all starts tonight at 7:45 p.m. eastern. check your program guide for more information. >> on our live author call-in program, "in depth," historian lee edwards shared his thoughts on the current state of the conservative movement and reflects on its past. >> guest: well, i think it's a very exciting time. you know, people are a little bit -- some conservatives are a little bit worried. oh, we're fighting too much. we're arguing too much. we're disputing too much. like hatfields and mccoys. and i say that's great, because that means these are signs of vitality, of life, not of a movement that's cracking up or that is on its last legs.

people are fighting and debating and arguing so strenuously because manager of value is -- something of value is concerned here, and that is the conservative movement which is still a a major actor in american politics. at the same time, we have an opportunity to accept change. i think that's apartment of what it means to be a conservative -- part of what it means to be a conservative today. not to be so resistant that we won't allow anything to happen. even edmund burke said that change is inevitable. the it's the question of prudent change. that's what i, as a traditional conservative, am looking for, the right kind of leadership, the right kind of debate is and discussion. so i welcome all that's going on right now, all the various strands, all the various straebss -- strains of conservativism. that's good. coming out of that is going to be a bigger, better and, i think, more relevant conservative movement in the years ahead. >> host: want to read you a

quote. barry would just go absolutely crazy if he were watching this today. he would be yelling at the television. he would think it's embarrassing, this situation we have with donald trump. it's not the republican party or the country that we knew 25 or 30 years ago. that was susan goldwater on march 21st, 2016. >> yeah, right. right. well, i think there's something to be said for that. but at the same time, goldwater was a practical politician. he was not just a man of principle, which he was, the conscience of a conservative, but he was also a practical person. and he would have said, wait a minute now, 63 million people voted for this guy. why? what is he doing? i think that he would begin saying, well, let's see now, supreme court nomination, deregulation, tax cuts, strong

military, national defense being built up, being concerned about trade that is not just free, but fair. i think barry goldwater would have applauded all those things. i'm pretty sure he would have. at the same time, he probably would have said something like, well, why didn't trump's mother wash his mouth out with soap and make him understand that we don't need a potty mouth, except goldwater would not have used the word "potty." >> host: how did you become known as a conservative historian, or the historian of the conservative? [laughter] >> guest: well, i don't think i am. i think the historian of the conservative movement is george nash. wrote a marvelous book many, several years ago now called an inte intellectual history of the conservative movement since 1945, and that's the bible.

that's what we refer to when we want to though what happened '40, '50s, '60s, up into the '70s. george nash is a marvelous, careful, painstaking, brilliant historian, so i i count him as the historian of the conservative movement. it so happens that i've written some books and i've written some biographies and i've written some histories, so maybe i'm sort of coming up maybe from fifth or sixth, maybe i'm making my way up in this race. i didn't start out to be a historian. i really started out all those years ago, as i say in "just right," to be a novelist. that didn't work out so well -- [laughter] i wrote three very bad novels which neff got publish -- which never got published, thankfully, because they would have been an embarrassment. and then i got into political writing which is where i was for 20, 25 years. and then one day i said, well, i'm burned out. i've had it with worrying about

campaigns, all of that. i want to go to the academy, i want to teach, i want to write. so i went back to school, got a ph.d., began teaching, and that's where i've been these last 20 or 30 years. i guess i've also picked up a little bit from churchill, and i love that one line of his in which somebody said, well, what is history going to say about you, mr. churchill? and he said, i know because i'm going to write it. well, i think what i'm trying to do in a small way with my work is to paint a picture of the conservative movement sometimes from the inside, sometimes a little bit from the outside so that people 20, 30, 50 years from now will be able to refer to my books and understand the conservative movement better and in more depth. >> host: one of the books you wrote is "reading the right books: a guide for the intelligent conservative."

what are some of the books that are contained in there? >> guest: oh, gosh, well, there are 109 books, and some of my favorite books are in there. the conscience of a conservative, my own biography goldwater, which i think is a pretty good book. bill buckley's god and man at yale, friedrich hayek's the road to serfdom. we have about eight, is it eight or nine different categories. we took these 109 books and put them into various states, economics, politics, history and so forth. and what we did was to take a book like, say, the road to serfdom, and then to boil it down to just a page or page and a half to try to get people to see what it is, perhaps to spark their interest in it and make

them pick up the whole book and read it. .. a book and then condense it down to three or 400 words. that really it's not easy. that takes an amount of concentration and focus to do that. i couldn't do it for more than a couple of books in any one day. it took us a while. to come up with a hundred and nine books. visit our website a book to be dark. and on the index tab at the top of the page.