i'm the director of the wisconsin book festival. thank you so much for being here tonight. we are absolutely delighted to be hosting larry tye for his book demagogue alongside john nichols that we know from the capital times editor, the nation magazine. we couldn't be more delighted to

be hosting these events for you all spring into summer long here on our crowd accounts to channel and i want to take a moment to say thank you to the madison public library and the madison public library foundation. in support for online cultural events that have been absolutely unwavering, they are -- it's important for these events that has been absolutely unwavering and they've been so dedicated to bringing all their events to all of you whether you are watching in your home in madison, across the country or across the globe we have seen an incredible uptake in our audience of people from all over and it is absolutely wonderful to see the response so thank you to everyone and to the sponsors that have made sure they keep going. without further ado i'd like to bring john and larry to the screen and step away myself.

>> hello, everyone thanks for joining us and larry thanks for coming from massachusetts to be here tonight. >> lary is in cap cape cod as we speak and we have about 100 people or close to 100 people with us and more may join as we go a long. as was explained up front we will take questions. i will ask some questions at the start and then about halfway and we will invite some question from you folks and wherever you want to take if we are excited to go there. let me say a couple of things upfront and first and foremost he is a journalist and his books are journalism at its very best. we live in a time when journalism is on the attack not only by political figures but also the economic forces at the moment in which we live and the

challenges we face. so it is a great honor to be with another journalist and someone who has practiced the craft in some of the most exciting and creative ways. so that is only the beginning of discussing the many talents and contributions. i will also mention that we are talking tonight about a new book thabut he sped off, "demagogue"" which is about joe mccarthy a former senator from wisconsin, but lary has other books worthy of your attention if you haven't read them already. his biography of bobby kennedy was brilliant and took the exploration of the story to some new and exciting places. his biography is a vital contribution to not just sports history, but the history of the evolution of this country in so many fundamental ways. finally, my favorite is "rising

from the rails," which is his story and i'm a huge fan of philip randolph chairman of the man did it go march on washington. they recaptured that brilliantly, so it's my most highly recommended of his books. we are here tonight to talk about a brilliant new book "demagogue." iphone to start by asking i noted in some of your other biographies you have the name of the person, satchel or bobby kennedy. in the case of joe mccarthy, you chose the word, demagogue. why was that? >> guest: i want to say john is one of the many people he interviewed for the book and two things, one, he was the youngest person i interviewed when i was trying to get a sense of people who knew the mccarthy era and

the other he was among the smartest people i interviewed. any of you who were wisconsin readers know his work from the cap times and from the nation and all kinds of other places, so having somebody that is as tuned into not just mccarthy but the context in wisconsin and the nation was extraordinary and the reason i picked a one-word title that wasn't mccarthy's name was because this was a book that is about america's love affair with bullies from our earliest days until today, and i felt the subtitle would capture the sense friend and send her a bit but it was also important to see him in the context. the reason we are here talking about him 70 years after his

beginnings of his crusade is because he was the architect for double your demagogue figure in american history. that's a long-winded explanation and i promise to keep my other answers short. >> we are here to hear what you have to say so long-winded is okay. in the title you used the term "the life and long shadow of joe mccarthy." give us a sense of what you mean by that. is it, you know, the impact of what he did, or is it this broader notion of demagogue? >> guest: he cast the shadow because of the impact he did not just him as joe mccarthy to the orchestrator of this whole movement, and it's also to say that we just can't stop with his death. we have to look at how we influence the demagogues that came after. whether they be david duke,

george wallace or people who are in our political context today. i want to say one other thing. the temptation with a lot of the interviews i've been doing on joe mccarthy is to talk about donald trump, and this is really about joe mccarthy. donald trump's name is only mentioned in the preface and the epilogue, and get his story and the story of other demagogues is faithere in every way in the pas of the books. >> host: as you brought trump up, i'm going to join you in trying to avoid a deep discussion of him. tell me, when you started putting this book together, it was around the start of his presidency, wasn't that? >> guest: a week before the election i signed up to write a different about and that was a biography of barack obama. the day after the election i realized we will not know barack obama's legacy until after the era of trump is over and it also

became apparent the day after the election what i felt was a story of almost ancient history in america in terms of demagoguery is a story of today that we have not outgrown this affair, this attraction to bullies in the way that i hoped we had. >> host: let's get into the book a little bit. there's one interesting element of it which is you take a very casual approach to referring to him. the way to sa to save my guess n you read the book which was a wonderful narrative throughout, just the greatest dream going through it, it's a little bit like being, i don't know, being in front of somebody's house with a couple of lawn chairs by the beach or the end of a bar and if somebody starts to tell a very long story and you kind of come back and it's very human in so many ways.

i think if you are writing a biography of somebody, you have to humanize them and make the reader feel like they are getting into the spirit of this person's life and whether the person is somebody you think of those a hero of the fill-in at the end of the book is a very conscious thing the same way bobby kennedy i talked to him generally using the word folly and that was a conscious decision. with this one it's lots of joe, and it varies from mccarthy but to try to get in and see him from the outside. >> host: what did you see when you looked inside? >> guest: on the one hand -- i want to go back actually to a quote that is one of the reasons i had joe mccarthy in the back of my head every since i was doing my research on mccarthy and it's a quote from the one person up to 450 people he interviewed for the bobby

kennedy book that is irreplaceable, a woman named ethel kennedy, bobby's widow. she said something about joe mccarthy but i couldn't get out of my head and it was the joe mccarthy might be a monster to much of america, but to bobby and me, he was just plain, good fun. and the idea of joe mccarthy as good fun was counterintuitive to me a time and i felt there was some sight of him that cost wisconsin to overwhelmingly elect him into different statewide elections that i wanted to understand. so, i came out of this book feeling like on the one hand, joe mccarthy became much more of a human being as opposed to the caricature that we studied in our history books than i had ever realized. he's somebody i would have loved to have gone out with a beer and understood all of his charms and all of his ability to convince

ethel and bobby kennedy that he was a great guy to spend time with. on the other hand, the documents i look that made him seem even more sinister than the history books did. so, the upside was he became more of the human being and the downside was a lot of the political things he did and his motivation in doing them, the more we could see some of the papers that gave a 10 cents off the and made him somebody that if you went out with him at night i would be fine but you sure as heck wouldn't want to be on the witness stand when he was grilling you during the day. >> host: one of the most interesting things about mccarthy was his ability to joke with the people he was about to attack, or actually jokingly attack them. we remember the stories of john patrick hunter, our longtime political reporter, who battled with mccarthy throughout the 40s and throughout the 50s

for sure. when hunter would go to events, he actually started to hide behind polls at the events because he knew that if mccarthy saw him in the crowd, mccarthy would launch into a rather jovial attack, and an attack on hunter, but it wouldn't be so mean spirited. it would almost be for the fun and the joking in the crowd. but i think that was very common. >> guest: that suggests two things about mccarthy. one is that he didn't quite understand how brutal he was being. being there with an angry crowd as a journalist being called up by mccarthy was putting hunter at the risk an risk and i thinks mccarthy didn't quite get that aspect of it but it also was joe mccarthy did see this as a bit of a game and everybody that was

there, journalists, politicians would understand that it was a game and they would understand the rules and they would be able to go out after with him and put it all behind them because after all, it was a game. >> host: i think you're right about that. that comes out in your book in a few ways because you talk about these human relationships that he had along the way. i don't want to take us through, you know, the whole narrative of the story because i do think people should read the book, but i am interested in your thoughts about at the start of his career, he was a new deal democrat or at least relatively liberal character. was that opportunistic or is that where he started and then evolved into something else?

>> guest: you can't talk much about joe mccarthy and leave out the opportunistic element. a liberal that he started us or the ultraconservative he ended up as, and i think that where he started out his where he had the most choice. he wasn't sure what would get him elected. when he ran for district distrit attorney, he ran but just for a new deal loving democrat, but somebody that was fired up enough about that but he really believed that that was what was best for the country, and that was also his irish roots suggested that the party of fdr is where he belonged, and i think the only time he questioned his being a democrat and a liberal is when he realized he couldn't be elected from the area where he grew up, and he was game to do whatever it took to be elected. so, some nights, probably in the middle of the night when no one was looking for h he changed hiy

registration to republican. and as you know the story, it wasn't just that he became a republican. the opening in the republican party cut the progressive wing of the republican party was taken up by robert junior and the opening was a stalwart republicans, the most conservative element to the republican party and was the opening, joe mccarthy was going to take it. that meant changing his ideology, he was going to do that. he was going to do and he did whatever it took and i think that if it was anything that ran throughout his life, it was the theme of whatever it took. >> host: were there people along the way that helped him to make that change? thinking of some of the folks in appleton particularly. >> guest: there were a lot of people that helped him.

his best friend and probably see just advisor. he helped steer him. the people at the newspaper at appleton helped steer him. he had lots of people who ended up being his enablers and benefactors and guide. he was willing to take advice from anybody that was willing to serve the ends of joe mccarthy. >> host: and they liked that, that made him appealing. >> guest: it was an extraordinary character. and i think that from comments that he made over the years to everybody from journalists to authors to his children, they suggest that van truly adored joe mccarthy and understood mccarthy's flaws and shortcomings as well as anybody did, but he was a loyal friend in the stuck with him and never publicly repudiated mccarthy, even when he's temptation was to

do that and even when he was telling his kid that's mccarthy had gone off the rails again. i think that was a lot of people have a lot of loyalty to joe mccarthy, including somebody who's entire family was representing the iconic liberal first family of america, the kennedys, and bobby kennedy remained loyal enough to joe mccarthy that he not only never publicly questioned him, but what did he do when his brother said to stay away from mccarthy's funeral in appleton in 1957, bobby said thank you, jack, that's interesting advice. he flew in with all of his congressional republican people and on the one hand, he went up in the choir loft so no one could see him at the funeral. at the graveside service, he stood off to decide where nobody could see him. after the funeral, he begged the journalists who were there not to put his name in the stories

and not get him in trouble with his big brother, jack, but until the very end and until today for a full, the kennedys generally and bobby specifically stayed very loyal to him for mccarthy for all of his flaws was a guy that inspired on a personal level that kind of enormous loyalty. >> host: and it's also notable that john kennedy really danced around mccarthy rather than standing up to him. >> guest: john kennedy had a different relationship. bob kennedy wa is a more straightforward, less plodding than john kennedy. john kennedy was always thinking of his next step. i'm convinced that the day he was born he started applauding his presidential campaign. his father to death but jack picked up. in 1952 when john kennedy was a relatively unknown and

unaccomplished congressman from massachusetts running against a very powerful senator, henry cabot lodge, to try to take the seat away from the republicans and launch, joe kennedy at one bid request for joe mccarthy, which was stay the heck out of massachusetts. joe kennedy had given enough money to joe mccarthy, that whatever he asked, mccarthy was likely to say yes. joe kennedy was smart enough to know joe mccarthy came to massachusetts and campaigned for the republican launch. lots of irish catholic voters loved joe mccarthy, whether they were republicans or more likely they were democrats, would do what he said to do. jack kennedy ended up winning that senate seat by three percentage points in the year and eisenhower landslide where eisenhower won by nine-point. i think joe kennedy and jackie kennedy were right. if mccarthy staying out of

massachusetts insured that he won that seat and jack kennedy for the rest of his life had a certain kind of loyalty for mccarthy. when mccarthy was censured, the only senator in the senate at that time who not only didn't show up to vote, but we don't know how they would have voted was jack kennedy, not exactly the kind of profiling the courage jack kennedy was famous for talking about. >> host: i thought you were going to take after that term right there. so, you know, you are from massachusetts and we've already spoken far too much about massachusetts, so let's talk about wisconsin. in the 1946 campaign that brought mccarthy to the u.s. senate, you took on senator robert junior who had come back into the republican party after having been out of it for a dozen years as a leading figure with his brother in the progressive party. mccarthy was making an

opportunistic run. he had the backing of the party establishment, but he was a figure in the state and it appears that at least early on, he didn't take mccarthy seriously or didn't take him seriously enough. >> guest: you just captured the through line. his opponents seldom took him seriously. tom coleman who was the dean of the republicans in the states never taken seriouslstatenever e guide to kerry and against. tom coleman's dream i'm convinced kept him up at night for somehow beating him. mccarthy would be his vehicle for doing it. it's something he didn't accept until he watched mccarthy and he watched mccarthy go out and hustle all of the republican activists and especially young republicans in a way that

finally he became convinced that this was a guy so determined to win and that he ought to get behind. the way i think joe mccarthy beat him is partly what you were suggesting that he beat himself. it was almost like he was surrendering. i think that he was getting older. he'd been in office long enough. his health wasn't great and i am not convinced that he was assured he wanted another term or not enough to fight hard and fight dirty like he was going to have to do to beat a guy like joe mccarthy. so mccarthy raised legitimate issues in the campaign, like whether he had been captured by the republican establishment, whether he still had the kind of rooted in wisconsin that the voters in any state want to see when they are electing somebody that he also fought dirty and raised issues like the fact that he owned a home in virginia and

mccarthy was suggesting that was a mansion and a place that he considered home and not wisconsin and if anybody shouldn't have had to show that they have deep roots in the state of wisconsin when somebody whose family had given up as much and have served the state not just for a long time, but really well. at the time that he came back and started campaigning hard, the campaign was essentially over and mccarthy won by i was hustling his opponent in a way that he had realized at the end. and it was about 3,000 votes. it was a very close election. it was an unlikely election to be able to depose what followe e toughest he would ever face. beating the democrats after he beat the republican nomination.

so when mccarthy shows up in washington in early 1947, he shows up there arguably as one of the biggest surprises in the new class of senators, arguably the least qualified new senator to be taking a seat like that, but also from his earliest days he gave an indication that if anybody had been paying attention, he was somebody to be reckoned with. he was throwing bottles before he was even seat in the senate essentially saying that the striking miners, we ought to think about using a death penalty. whether he really thought that nobody will ever know, but i don't think he did. he just knew instinctively how to get the journalists like you and me to pay attention and that was partly by being outrageous and by offering them without having to say it but he would put them on page one, and was

partly by charming them. he was charming. >> host: before we get into that i want to do one thing to close the circle. i think that one of the interesting things was mccarthy may well have one that 46 primary because of the rise of the modern democratic party because the democratic party actually in 46 after having been on the sidelines through most of the 30s and 40s in wisconsin had genuine candidates in the general debate could genuine competition. the mayor of milwaukee had come over to run for governor and was a good candidate for the senate and have primaries for congressional seats and suddenly some of that energy has gone on to this other place. >> host: >> guest: if you are right and the cliché story that is told is that he was elected with the support of communist it wasn't just an irony.

much more important was the fact that there really was a democratic alternative and a lot of progressives who would have been tempted to go into the republican party and stick with them their independence to the voting of the democratic primary and he hadn't counted on the democrats offering a real alternative the first time in an election like that in wisconsin and that was just one more miscalculation on his part that made mccarthy's role as a kingmaker easier than it might have been otherwise. >> host: absolutely. so i think mccarthy of little surprising and washington he didn't find his mark right away >> guest: he tried lots of issues.

some were legitimate like housing for returning servicemen, solicitors from world war ii and may have suggested an element of the semitism by mccarthy, the perpetrators of some of the deadliest massacres of u.s. troops during world war ii. the famous massacre defending the nazi perpetrators they couldn't be objective about it because they were jews and after all this was the victor's justice and he tried just about everything in terms of the issues to grab onto and it wasn't until february but he found one that turned out to be magical because he was outrageous and a bit bumbling and because the democratic party starting to get their act together mccarthy was starting

to get a little scared that he might be vulnerable. he wanted to make a name. he was getting a little desperate >> guest: if you are looking like a patsy and ambitious democrat because they look so weak and ill defined, he was desperate, he was desperate because it would have been an embarrassment to lose the battle. holding onto power whether or not he knew what he was going to do with it was one of the things that is most vital to joe mccarthy. he made it at a young age to the point that i think only in his wildest dreams that he conceived he would mak make a tube into te idea of having it taken away

from anything desperate which is why he was willing to give anything to find the issue to latch onto at that point. he went to west virginia with two speeches. we are talking about february, 1950 on the one day of the year republicans across the country they use that as a way to rally the party and raise money if you are a prominent u.s. senator you get invited to places like milwaukee or boston, washington or new york. he shows up that night as you suggest with two speeches in his

briefcase. it's something he knew a bit about and care about and how they picked that the speech, 70 years later you and i wouldn't be talking about him because he would be the one term senator we were talking about. instead, he pulls out of his briefcase a speech but i'm convinced they read when he was delivering it at night. he was written by various staffers to did the editing on it and he holds up in his hand papers as part of the speech he says i have in my hand a list of 205 spies at the u.s. state department. people true then should have known about and he was doing this at a moment in history when we were scared to death about the soviet threat, and it wasn't

just the soviets. we have watched the national china turn into red china and the atomic rosenbergs be arrested, tried and convicted. we were about to teach our children something younger listeners today won't believe, but it was a so-called duck and cover strategy which is when the atomic bomb comes, you put your hand under over your head and that is the petrified fever. joe mccarthy understood those fears better than just about anybody. rather than just saying if we name and intent are the traitors that is the way to capture america's imaginations he also understood something that i think was the ultimate cynicism which is if yo you delivered a

bombshell of a speech like that in washington, the journalists who were listening would have known who to call instantaneously at the state department for comment. had he delivered it in the afternoon, the journalist on a deadline would have had plenty of time to call their colleagu colleagues. he delivered a speech a the spet with only two reporters mattered one from the local newspaper and the local ap reporter within two days he was on page one of every newspaper in america. this was the birth of joe mccarthy and this was the birth that i think of mccarthy's. >> host: i would agree and the interesting part about it is that it was seat-of-the-pants.

it changed all the time. if went back and forth a to the conduct of the most with 205 in his personal and professional papers this wonderful stash of material into various versions of the speech that was 205 and that was crossed out the other members he kept coming back to was 57. the i don't believe it and on the other hand, i think that given how such was the number 205 was it could have come from

anywhere. there were not 205 names in the papers. this is where it gets interesting because as you say it's something that could have easily been checked out and challenged. the numbers were not steady. the reality didn't line up with what he was saying. yet in relatively short order, he was chairing national hearings and speaking to the whole country being paid an immense amount of attention and at least for a pure coudert a lot of people that should have gotten in history or should have slowed him down, didn't. the media as well as the political class gave him space to operate so on the one hand i want to agree with you. one of the newspapers do this

right from almost the very beginning was the capital times and a lot of people attacked, but the truth is even when people called him out at the beginning it looked like he had a free ride but he was called out very early on by a senator from maryland. that spring the report comes out calling him the hoax. they are having recruited a republican to run against him

and having gotten his wealthy texas benefactors to back this republican, having lent mccarthy's bag of dirty tricks and having beaten an incredible titan of politics the same way he took down bob in wisconsin and that sent a shockwave through the senate. the message was sent old. take on joe mccarthy and be where the bulldozer. i just have to say a word about margaret because she is a favorite of mine. the only woman in the senate, senator from maine took on joe mccarthy early on even though mccarthy in his classic charming side promised margaret smithy with her name up for whoever got

the nomination in 1952. and margaret smith had enough convictions that she offered what was called a declaration of conscience condemning mccarthy for his un-american activities and a way he grilled witnesses anhave ignored their rights and the way that he, everything that his campaign was offensive to her. he dubbed her snow white and the seven dwarfs, fellow senators, then he took canadian and tried to beat her and smith was strong enough as a candidate but he couldn't do one thing that we

remember about her today, the one thing we remember about her is that she had the courage to stand up at the time when almost nobody was. and that should be encouraging to people who find that over the years there generally aren't many of them. >> host: margaret's speech calling mccarthy out for what was then an incredibly destructive approach and use of his platform came full circle during the hearings

>> guest: susan collins is somebody that was incredibly helpful and somebody i interviewed and was hopeful by agreeing she held the same gavel in the permanent subcommittee on investigations that gives us the sense and i said are you intending to take this too hard in terms of what you do as a senator and it is very clear she adores margaret smith and sees herself as a model of following in margaret smith's footsteps. her opponent in the senate race doesn't do that and everybody is using the model

>> host: i think the documents -- >> guest: you know that it is charming in terms of the wonderful titles is an incredible ally and the

wonderful tv personality. they were extraordinary in helping me make up those documents and i think that they were as surprised as i was that i got the access to. they are now back under lock and key again. >> host: but you wrote the hell out of them. >> guest: i appreciat >> guest: i appreciate you saying that. thank you. >> host: looking at the hearings i know we could go through chapter and verse. what was the most striking thing that we learned looking at the documents? >> guest: normally be expected with position to be more outrageous when the cameras are there watching what they are doing and when they go in closed session nobody's watching so you

can be reasonable. joe mccarthy flipped the script. he was more reasonable than his public hearings, which is a sign since he wasn't especially reasonable bear of how and hinged he became in the private hearings. and i think that he did a couple of things. one was any notion of witnesses having their rights without the window and they were presumed guilty from the start. second, he held in the violation of the senate tradition one-man hearings and when the one-man joe mccarthy was gone he turned the hearings over to staffers like lloyd cohen to do the grilling and a violation of people's rights on his behalf. the other thing was i think that he used those hearings as a test run for the witnesses that would stand up to him and were eloquent.

he got to run these wonderful test runs and any propriety went out the window because nobody was there to keep him in check. >> host: not only when he did those public hearings was he giving senate hearings but he ended up on television and i think that is what we want to bring out as we read the book you do a very good job of talking about are helping us understand this intersection of modern media and the demagogue. >> host: it was a lawyer from boston who in the middle of the hearings when they attached the associate, welch defended him by saying do you have no sense of

decency and that is the moment that turned everything around. welch was as good an actor as he was a lawyer and he had been lying ready to go knowing mccarthy would step over the propriety whether it's attacking his associate or doing something so he was ready to go and the other is what brought mccarthy down in my mind is the public scene with day after day televised testimony is to downloain-storedownload believis not like the town bully. in the course of the hearings he went from the gallup polls telling us that he was starting out with a 50% favored ability which meant as a popular public figure in america the only when he trailed was dwight eisenhow eisenhower. by the end of the hearings he was down to 34%. that is when the fellow senators

developed a backbone and were willing to take him on. a demagogue looks great when they are at 50%. they start looking portable than the numbers fade and enablers stop enabling. >> host: let's go to the questions from some of the audience. the question they boast one thing to ask is about why roy cohn. what does that tell us about our current president because of course this is the intersection between the two. >> guest: if there's anybody that doesn't know who he is, he was a brilliant in every employer with a record of successfully prosecuting communists that joe mccarthy brought in a 1953 when he took over the permanent subcommittee on investigations. he was his alter ego and i think

reinforced every death instinct. he was the first choice for the job but if we were doing a what if we would say why didn't he hired the second choice because the first choice was kennedy and he'd been a different joe mccarthy, it was the one-day liberal icon bobby kennedy. but we fast forward from being mccarthy's enabler and he helped bring down mccarthy by having ticked off a lot of the controversy that gave the hearings. fast forward 50 years. he is now not so young and still brilliant and arrogant and then donald trump is hindering the cutthroat world of real estate, his dad and he recognized he needed somebody to advise and instruct him they had a deal

with the cutthroat environment. he passed on his lessons to trump and trump has said repeatedly during his presidency when he gets into trouble i wish i had roy cohn by my site to help me out with this and i think that what he's saying is that with the unpolitical to say that i wish i had a joe mccarthy of my site told me how to deal with this. >> host:. you are in the circumstance here of having done biography is a spokesman. let's get in bobby kennedy's head for a minute here and figure out how much did bobby kennedy agree with joe mccarthy. how much did he --

>> guest: if there's anybody -- you don't often see it because you see the story in the newspaper afterwards but these are really -- i've done a lot of these things and they are terrific questions. to go to bobby kennedy and joe mccarthy, they were on the opposite trajectory. bobby kennedy starts out as a bath just a joe mccarthy staffer but h. reliever. he believes joe mccarthy and anti-communism and cold war era were righteous. he started out his life as a cold war commission as a democrat but a cold war guy and is on his way to becoming the iconic liberal figure in modern day american history. joe mccarthy starts out his life as this liberal bobby kennedy

becomes one day and he's on hiss way to becoming the iconic cold war conservative but even 70 years later he remains an icon to much of the conservative movement in america. the idea that the intersect at once for a single reason we talk about early on. for different joe kennedy did for ask for he did and whether he has the joe mccarthy for he saw a union. i think joe kennedy who was a classic machiavellian kind of political figure understood that he would be tutored by the master and ironically the same feeling that i think had trump bringing in roy cohn years later and they both felt that their son ought to know how to fight

in dirty politics with everyone to call it. and i think a lot of the lesson is taught me into using later on behalf of liberal causes. >> host: in the questions from the crowd here tonight, you -- one of the questions raised at a historical society here in wisconsin, did you find materials that were of interest and was there any material in particular that stood out? >> guest: there were wonderful materials and i don't want to think too much about this because there is a piece that is out soon that i did the edits on last night. i can't remember, i'm terrible at nameat things, the name of te wisconsin society magazine, what is it called wisconsin history

maybe. whatever that is, some of the material will be there but let me say to understand the context of the wisconsin politics and the staff at the society an of e documents were almost as good as sitting down with sean and dave. so, people come in knowing something about the kennedys but what about the wisconsin politics and anything that i got right i would attribute it to people like john and anything i got wrong about the politics is on me. the idea of having two sets of archives like marquette and who is as an author and historian. >> host: they are particularly well done. i did an article for the

magazine is the rise of the party that intersected with a lot of this and it's an incredibly valuable resource. one thing authors depend on as they can learn from all of the biographers have come before them and there's lots of good biographers the idea that people buy thomas reads left his papers to the historical society, those that are long gone and read what i've quoted and that is from somebody that reads the note from the interviews. they all have the responsibility to do that so we can build every biography for a bit more material and get it is rare for

people to do that by this lucky that it was sitting there at the wisconsin historical society >> host: this gets to the questions. it is brave to take on somebody that has had a lot of books written about them. it probably ought to be phrased like that they made the first biography of mccarthy and partly is facing something different. partly i almost walked the plank

and fell off of it and exactly a week after i told my publisher and my wife i wasn't going to get access to the marquette archives and all the papers from the bethesda naval hospital that i was counting on to understand the whole situation that i think was critical to what ended up happening to him. i was shocked that they have been in it was lucky for me that it happened. i did have the transcripts of the hearings. they had been out for a while. some people ended up for reasons saying yes on those. >> host: this book is getting a lot of attention right now. they've interviewed in the times

the other day and i'm wondering whether you think as much as you move the ball downfield and the state adde add to our understang of mccarthy that it would be getting the attention that it is if barack obama was still pres president of the united states or there were a different person in the white house. >> guest: short answer: no, longer answer, i wouldn't have written a book if there were a different person in the white house. it's part of a matter of timing on any book getting attention especially on just what figure that we have seen so much of in the past. >> host: a question about the impact of mccarthy and i'm a big fan of the use of the term in your subtitle. one thing going after communists

and travelers and people he accused he targeted a lot of african-americans and particularly not just him, but the whole target of coleman young and others that have been involved in the civil rights movement. do you think they slowed down or had an impact on the rise of civil rights? >> guest: it is the one that we know him for which is the anti-communist movement and i think that right away, he did as much damage as he did to communists, but i think there were three other movements that remain in portland today that mccarthy jumped in on and did some inexplicable things. there's evidence that he might have been an anti-semite. number two, he was clearly one

of the orchestrators of what was called and the other is the whole issue of race and he was on the wrong side. it was by everybody for the people they don't like. it should have -- and i think that that was, i don't know whether at his height he was a racist or anti-gay or anti-semitic but as an opportunist he was willing to play what he thought was going to work. ironically more than anything, he was anti-elite in his notion of what they were as anti-east coaswas anti-eastcoast and antid wall street and that was playing to be a lot of sympathies.

the reason i use the word demagogue rather than populist is i don't think that he was a populist. to me, populism has a lot of upside to it. he was a demagogue and there's not a lot of upside. >> host: that is an awfully good place to circle around. i will make the mistake of asking one last question rather than letting you leave him a perfect point and that is to ask you for it in so many powerful books. are you working on something else now? >> guest: i have a deadline for this next book and it's my reward to myself and my publishers reward to me for having spent three years on joe mccarthy and it's a book called the jazz band and the subtitle does the job explaining it. it's how duke ellington, armstrong and tom casey

transformed america. there are another three that are people you could spend time with and i think there's is an incredibly uplifting story about how they changed the racial horizon and sets the table for the civil rights movement. >> host: what a way to deal with the mccarthy thing. >> guest: thank you. i hope so. >> host: this has been fabulous. we got quite a few questions from folks and had a wonderful crowd of about 100. i want to thank the book festival folks, the library folks, all the other people that helped put this together. i want to remind people it is in fact the wisconsin magazine of history that you and i have both written for and you have an article coming out very soon and i think with that we will turn back to our host.

>> guest: i want to thank joh john. you are wonderful in assembling the program into dealing with my e-mails. >> i'm only here to say thank you to john and larry thank you both so much. this is wonderful and the kind of conversation the book festival exists to have and i appreciate you making this time in the beautiful they -- middle of a beautiful medicine july evening and from all of you gathering in the country to watch this, thank you as well. ..

>> i want to support your bookstore make an offer maybe nobody will find attractive but if you put in your book order and wanted personalized are signed normally we do the book signing just indicate that when you put in your order i will send a signature plate personalized to you. and one last thank you to fred

the person we don't see on the screen he was supportive of me and bobby kennedy book thank you all.