>> watch tv on c-span2 this weekend. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2 every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. booktv on c-span2 created by america's cable-television companies. today we are brought to do today by these television companies who provide booktv to viewers as a public service. >> getting everyone comfortable. thanks for joining us. my name is hilary carr and a map of harvard bookstore i'm pleased to introduce this event with nicholson baker presenting his new book "baseless: my search for secrets in the ruins of the freedom of information act" jointing conversation by

christopher leiden. thanks for joining us tonight through virtual fence tonight harvard bookstore brings authors in the work to our community and our new digital community during these unprecedented times. of the week with the hosting events on consumer account. our events schedule appears on our website at harvard.com where you can sign up for e-mail newsletter. the seedlings discussion will conclude in time for your questions. if you have a question at any time click on the q&a button at the bottom of the screen and would get to as many as time allows. in the chapter i'll be posting a link to purchase the book as well as a link to donate answer for support this series addressed with your purchases and contributions they convince like tennis possible help ensure the future of the landmark independent bookstore. thank you for showing up and tuning in and support of her offers an incredible staff of booksellers at harvard bookstore. we appreciate your support now and always. as you may have experienced in virtual gatherings these last

few weeks, months, technical issues may arise. if they do will do our best to resolve them quickly and we thank you for your patience and understanding. and now i'm so please introduce to nice speakers. nicholson baker is a best-selling author of ten ten novels and numerous works of nonfiction including the apologist, , the mezzanine humas welcome substitute and "new york times" best-selling houseful. when the national critics circle award, the has prized and katherine anne porter what the american academy of arts and letters. tonight you will be joined by journalist and host of wbur's open-source christopher leiden. it will be discussing "baseless" which is described as a colorful engrossing regression of sinister history. a convincing case for opening government archives to public scrutiny and the seals times called it a genre term forming

blood history memo offering behind-the-scenes glimpses of efforts come his home life and his worst fears in his own country. that makes "baseless" assent to reading for you and try to grapple with the role of euros in global affairs since the end of world war ii. we are so happy to have them both your tonight so without further ado the digital podium is yours, christopher and nicholson. >> hillary, thank you. it's almost as much fun as being in harvard bookstore. thank you for inviting me. nicholson baker is a friend and we've had this kind of conversation actually like a number of times before and it's always an education for me. let me just say i don't really need to introduce nicholson baker to this audience but to think of him as really you write three kinds of books. one is what i would call sort of photorealistic prose, minute about small things including

shoelaces, in his opening book but there's also his childlike but very grown-up since but then there's a special category and this book baseless is a masterpiece within it, nonfiction sort of political history in a certain way but history as never written, i will say never, but it's a method of looking at history, how to describe? it is anti-imperial, it is anti-churchillian. it is not the grand scope of how english speaking name shouldn't i do nations took the total universe. its manager, it's intimate, and at the center of it always is is incredibly self-conscious

consciousness, modern consciousness in a nightmarish world. this genre in his world is my favorite, a sort of pacifist history of world war ii, and incredibly moving book both in substance and in the way he went about it. having said all that, speak as you have with me before, nick, as this kind of a detective story, it's a story of a reporters story but also at the highest level are writers diary up there with all the great writers. >> yes. well, first of all i want to say hello to everybody and thank you for tuning in. it's amazing to me that these things can happen and a bunch of people, 60 people are here. i can't see you but i am so

happy that you are here. >> at the harvard bookstore. >> yes, the harvard bookstore is one of those places in my memory, i can remember individual books i bought there. i remember buying edmund goddesses other in son down in the basement there, where, it's just, it's a place that has a particular flavor and i love the bookstore and i'm just happy to be a part of it, even if i'm not in the bookstore. i was trying to write about something that had happened a long time ago in this book, and -- but it just occurred to me that since i i didn't know everything about what happened a long time ago, because the documents were being withheld, that i would write about what was happening while i was trying to write about what happened a

long time ago. i ended up instead of having one timeline, which is a timeline of the early cold war, harry truman, korea, china, i gathering since of suspicion and paranoia. i also i wanted to write about my own life as i was trying to make sense of the early period the amazingly and wonderfully that my wife and i got two rescue docs and the day before -- toxins, it was like a clapper, start the scene, so i started the book but it happened that we've gotten two very difficult but very lovable dogs the day before. they kind of accompanied me to it and into the very important to the story. so it's a book about trying to

write a book about what happened a long time ago. >> a lot of stuff. i did know or had forgotten george kennan at the famous ex-letter to find the cold war was deep in this story. allen dulles seemed to have put one of the main players, frank wisner senior into the job, to think up new weapons harry truman was more involved than he suggested later. who are the main players? there's a lot of people including henry cabot lodge later but i think vannevar bush, famous monster site is confusion figure, president at mit. i can see mother cover of mit campus of indicator something but this cast of characters postwar, we have not -- postwar

by entering formally consciously and loan cold war with russia. set us back there. >> vannevar bush was one of the more heinous and fascinating characters at the time. life for somebody said he looked like ichabod crane. he kind at a shopping hair, a very intense guy picky like to carve pipes and give them -- hev carved pipes to allen dulles. to the people who really admired he would give a pipe. he was a tremendously powerful figure at mit and he was in charge of the atom bomb project in world war ii but is also in charge of the biological warfare project and that's what i'll begin was in world war ii. it just happened after the war was over he stayed on in the government and he started, because he was deeply, deeply suspicious and unhappy about the russians, he decided that what

was important to do was to wrap up the germ warfare program in the united states in order to triumph over the numerical superiority of the russian army with germs. and that was his solution to the cold war was to make russian plants sick and russian people sick, and it was a really bad idea actually. >> was he ever really explicit that we can't beat them on the ground in human force, we have to have something else? >> that was refrain that was repeated over and over the secretaries of defense, by all the people in the pentagon. they were unaware every minute of every day that if we try to fight the chinese armies and the russian armies and the east german armies, that we were going to lose and, therefore, we have to come up with a smarter solution, a new kind of weapon

because i 1949 the russian sent to develop an atomic bomb so there was parity there. so what were we going to do? how would we win this war that seemed to be in the offing come is going to be happening in 1950 the new rescheduled for 1954. but it especially became a worry some when the korean war it self-starter. it was a war that was not called a war by harry truman but because there is been an artificial line drawn across the country of korea by two functionaries meeting in the pentagon, the north became communist and the south became an ally of united states and, therefore, there was a sort of polarization. it became, and the united states became involved in the civil war

in korea. as soon as that happened it was as if the was an electric shock that went through washington, and everything that had just been plans and schemes and worries in a general way about the evil empire of russia suddenly became very specific and especially when the united states started losing. there was a feeling that, well, the russian tanks are better than the american tanks, for instance, in things like very concrete things, question started asked if the main question was, what do we have come what we have in our arsenal that will win this apocalyptic war that is just around the corner? >> there are two i would say two very specific questions that you ask in this search, and one is did they actually put all these bugs and chemical agents together?

renew date invested for with but did actually have it? secondly, the smoking gun question, , did they ever use i? they had never come but they nr quite denied that they wanted to find something and it they were working on it. they were commissioning scientists to build it. they have always denied that they never used it. chief of the government in north korea, also china eventually, accuse the united states of planting smallpox during that war. get to that fundamental question. question. did we are didn't we? did we have ended we use it? >> unfortunately i think the answer, the short answer is yes. the chinese and the north koreans were very serious when you brought these charges. they sent a cable to the united

nations. it wasn't something they just did casually one day and thought this would be a nice thing to say. it was a very serious set of charges, and what they said initiative was that in november 1950 when the americans fled to the south of korea after a massive defeat after the chinese counter attacked, that the americans had left behind diseases. and then the american said that's ridiculous, it's silly, and, of course, we didn't do that. several months later a mysterious new disease appeared in north korea called korea hemorrhagic fever, and it existed in in a series of litte dots along the belt of korea, along the 30th parallel which mystified the american epidemiologists. so that i think actually happened. then there was a second, a massive propaganda battle

between the communists and the anti-communists, the americans and the british and the french, and that battle was hinged on whether the americans had flown over individual airplanes and dropped mysterious insect bombs, if you can believe it, in the snow of the very rural areas of china near the korean border. and that i think is has a slightly different answer, and it hinges on the books title. the books title is "baseless." the reason it is called "baseless" because operation baseless was the name of a a secret, top secret air force program aimed to perfect biological and chemical weapons at the earliest possible date.

and it was a project that was on an emergency basis as the korean war got bigger and, well, everything got worse in korea. so project baseless was and what was interesting about the words is that it has denial built into it because the state department was famous for saying this thia baseless accusation. these are baseless charges, and the expectation was that these particular weapons, if they were used, one of their advantages, this was written about, one of the advantages of biological weapons is that it's very hard to determine whether these things happened spontaneously because they are diseases didn't to a country whether they happen because some other foreign

airplane has dropped feathers with various diseases. >> let me just say -- >> i decided -- >> i want to quote your man tom kennedy because i didn't, we didn't get in the podcast we did on this book. but it's very striking. chinese government of course denied they had planted this hemorrhagic fever. no less -- "new york times" wrote a story saying there's a evidence for this charge at all. but he spoke to an ex-marine em kennedy who had been there. must've been an old man. you talk in manhattan and he said that he had been told, you know, must've been -- that he had a new disease, hemorrhagic fever that was carried by a tick on a rat. what he said to you was, among

other things, there was no history of hemorrhagic fever in korea until its use as a germ weapon. this is an autobiographical note, 25 euros ago. he said i was one of those american service members exposed to the secret crime against humanity. that's pretty close to the horse's mouth. how do we way that? >> well, he's a guy who will come up with a one day in korea and he was medevac out on helicopter and he was, and he was put in a m*a s*h unit, like in the tv show. he said there are three quonset huts, three, two, and and one. if you go into number three you will die. number two you have a chance and number one you are okay. he went to number three andy worked his way through andy miraculously survived and then

he was discharged with completely false diagnosis. hemorrhagic fever was something that just spontaneously happened. i think he's trying his best to explain to himself something amends that happened to him as a young man in korea -- immense per capita number within and they were americans who died. the bizarre thing is that hemorrhagic fever is still a problem in korea and it was a problem that was studied by japanese germ experts during the second world war, was purified and intensified by then and then the americans hired these same germ warfare experts in the miraculously somehow this fever appears pics i think there's a very strong case to be made that a small, very evil program

happened somewhere around november of 1950 in which the americans decided to use japanese know how to infect people along the belt in korea. i do think that is to add a think one of the victims was tom kennedy. >> can add a a bit of the japae background which happened in all the because of wonderfully marvelously writer, dear friend of open-source and of all good people, gene gillerman, wrote ,a book about basically about the tokyo wartime, tokyo trials of war crimes that never took place. we all know about the nuremberg trials, the germans can sort of matching pair of trials in tokyo which were come we were bluffed out of it in some fashion because we would've been called on the carpet about the nuclear weapons that we drop on nagasaki

and hiroshima. but there was no question, and gene gillerman documented marvelously in his book that the japanese had trumped all kinds of evil bugs on china in the '30s before pearl harbor before the world war at the japanese were, they were the world leader in this technology. part of the story you were revealing or confirm is that the united states caught onto this and were using the japanese in some fashion in the so project. have i got it right? this is a monstrous story. >> gene gillerman really did a beautiful job telling the story and it's an absolutely indispensable book, and i'm sorry that she is gone and -- >> heartbroken. she would be an incredible witness in this covid moment. >> she was the wife of matthew who's also a major figure in

this book. i quote both of them in the book because they are both so important to it. but what she chronicled was the fact am something of the people talked about, but she did the best of it was that there was a desperate attempt to get as many of the japanese germ warfare experts as possible and get them away from the russians and get them into the american orbit and then hide them from view. what happened was the russians decided that the war crimes trial should take place and they had a few japanese germ experts. so they held the own war crimes trial, and there's a full transcript of these trials and is an appalling book because there's no question that everything people are saying in that book is absolutely, it's an

absolute transcript of what people actually said and the japanese scientists said i am so, i so regret what i did. it's just an amazing book actually, an amazing book. but what the result was that the russians were upset, worried, frightened of the united states plans and the united states meanwhile had teams of expert interviewing all these japanese savants of biological weaponry, and figuring out how best to take what they had learned using confidence experiments on humans so it was priceless to their way of thinking, and pull those things back to camp dietrich and see if these particular suite of diseases could be further perfected and intensified so

that we could then apply them in a hostile manner to the russians. so that was the flow. >> here we are trump calling coronavirus that china virus. china every once in while mumbles under its breadth maybe this is an american bio weapon come maybe this is all politics. what is possible in the manipulation of the coronavirus, even now since you finished your book? >> well, i think the history of germ warfare in the united states, and history of american scientists getting sick from the own weapons. lab accidents are just a constant. in this book there is national institute of health, there's a man decides he's going to study

a fever and study it because it's a very, very dangerous and very worrisome disease and is going to weapon isis. so it he takes it to the natiol institute of health and immediately people start getting sick there. a person dies. this is a refrain of, in the history of american laboratory science, that diseases get out of laboratories. the first thing, just if there's a murder in a couple, the first thing you want to ask is did the husband do it? the first thing you want to ask always if there is an unexplained exotic disease that breaks out in a certain place, you always want to look to see if there's a laboratory there. so i think, i do not think the chinese are involved in some sort of evil plan to cook up a germ weapon. they are like the americans very

concerned about getting a lucrative vaccine for various viruses. all of the american laboratories were doing the same kind of work, the national institutes of health was paying the chinese to do this kind of work. the fact is that it may be something happen in a laboratory but the first thing you want to do is ask the people who are in charge of the laboratory to open their freezers and the notebooks and explain what happened. and that hasn't happened. >> i'm going to degrasse, nick, because as you were saying at the outset this is a historical inquiry -- digress -- we love nick baker, there's a lot of nick baker in it we just read a paragraph and i will bet you will find it in, i think it

is page 225. what you're talking about your method, your house, your wandering confidants, your wife, your weather. there you are, but why do you write these books? >> the book, this chapter, the title of the check is april 15, 2019 come monday. each chapter is titled by a day of the week and i just had gotten very want up. i i sort have revealed my theory about what happened with these mysterious 700 pollsters drop from the sky and stuck i ran out of steam. everyday i tried to write something and then i would get exhausted and be done pics of the next day starts, the edges of old secrets are blurred in the middle is spongy and there are frangible bits of record

truth spread about in secrets like pieces in ceramic. it's raining on tax day. i had been awake thinking about japan's rice crop and then have a few other fragments and then i go upstairs, come back downstairs and then i make -- >> you do some of your best work on the staircase, nick. [laughing] >> that's so nice of you, chris. upstairs i thought, what do i really want from a book? i want true in every paragraph. i want surprises. i want a sense that everything is not hopeless, that we can do better here, , what this incidet like is a complicated mixture of emotions and inconsistencies. life is a sandwich. i want to include or simulate the pleasure of eating a sandwich. and then i finally say, i've got to get to this because the dogs

are so important to me. when i woke up whenever it was, hours ago now i guess, i reached out with my hands and found that cedric one of the two dachshund, was elongated sleeping between him and me. my and found his pocket i held him for a while and felt the joy of his pop ads. >> nick, this is wonderful. i have to acknowledge come nasty critics out there who can't imagine why you write that sort of stuff in sears book. it to me is we grab all of us at 4:00 in the morning, puzzled, just offbeat. i mean, off the message come really concerned there's so much we know and are so vastly much more we haven't the foggiest way of getting her arms round for our heads around.

is trump going to rebound? like, you are groping for all of us and i love it. there's another piece above you -- i would love you to read from, and that is simply, you are revealing this grotesque machine in american life, american government, to kill people. the more the better. this incredible science of mass killing and destruction. at the same time, like a lot of us you were kind of madly in love with this country. amazingly fun, interesting, lively, changeable, endlessly delightful fun. read one of those passages where you talk about the context of all this craziness. >> well, i thank you for asking me to do that and i would have to find one.

i just -- >> i could give you -- >> while you find the page number i just want to say, i guess the thing that excited me, the idea that some people it is a bad review out there and it's very painful and i'm sorry it is there, but it is there. i'm trying to do something a little bit new here, for gosh sakes. i'm trying to say there are plenty of novels that look at the past but then have the person who is researching the past eating peanut butter sandwich, and i've done that and i like doing that. but this is trying to chronicle an actual life with all of its minor, trivial and downs as it is mapping itself onto the quest to find out momentous world historical events from 70 years ago, and the two timelines kind of blur and merge recombinantly

and separate and come back into focus again. that was i thought the contribution that the book was making, was to add a little bit of genuine truth, real felt reality and moved to the historical quester historians are not robots. i am not a professional historian that i have now written a couple of books of history, and i happen to know that there are times when you feel you're on top of it, he fueled you are the world expert on some tiny income and there's times when you feel completely out of your debts and also winter so many facts swarming in your mind that you cannot possibly find your way through them. those moods, all those moods of confusion and of grief and

frustration, when secrets are withheld, , are all part of the process. so we have to i think have that kind of soundtrack of the actual historians voice as well as the larger band of the account of what happened. >> well said. 3:31 -- 331 and 330 do you go from this nightmare to the dreamscape starting with jfk and then comes kennedy. we were in vietnam. kerry on onto page 332. >> okay. i was talking about kennedy and kissinger and things that we know about a little bit. sometimes, and i worked myself up -- >> i love the paragraph before, and then comes kennedy. >> and then comes kennedy who approves defoliation and for

denial and operation mongoose. india . henry cabot lodge to be ambassador to vietnam. ambassador nagy becomes filled with murderers sort of petulance in saigon and rights to robert backed a in june 1964. 1964. would help. and possibly mao and thailand if their screens north vietnam at the event hit. that was the number of different ways to make thin screen. he mentions rockets employed on the pretext or returning fire. one method he offers is redacted. lodge uses the word scream four times in one telegram. then comes the gulf of tonkin incident and rolling thunder. the war is in a new phase angst to the president's great decisions, lodge road to clifford, the light about the bombing. more thunder, and was under big anything that flies on anything that moves, said kissinger,

relaying nixon's orders. incomes of space break, good -- think it is. sometimes it don't live in history of the trinity when i say that i am not saying as a general rule everyday of my life every hour of every day, but i don't believe that this place deserves to have any sort of moral standing in the world as a country. it is then the source of incalculable disruption. i understand what americans individually have done, paintings, sitcoms, cars, songs, toasted, locomotives, buildings, billboards, sunglasses, topiary, dance steps, casseroles, no-hitters, corn mazes, speeches, ad campaigns, youtube videos, the new yorker of the catholic and eb white era is a

great american achievement, no question. i always go back to the midcentury and new yorker. there's john singer sargent, operations thinks, this homegrown american plan to kill 5 million human beings in the space of weeks, almost all of them civilians? just too awful to think about. you have to read the book to see what operation stinks was. >> thank you. thank you for no-hitters on that by the way -- operation stinks. i don't even fully understand baseball but when you get into that so and your far into again and the sound of the baseball hitting the glove is, there's so much conviction, it's so american. >> how to reconcile these things? really we don't. i'm always come with it's only good conversation over the years

and a lot of them have this, it's not simple mike in at least but appreciative come very grateful. i was listening to one in which you talk about the character paul was a lot of things in common with you but you are talking about first and what the hell is wrong with this courts e but also lead to the point that and you suggested what you just said, but is anything more glorious, even in poetry and the american songs in in the centu? was there ever in our real life times a more moving poet than lawrence hart, , very hard as yu know who wrote songs with richard rogers. but also holds the carmichael. we were speaking of his songs he wrote music to skyline. over george gershwin. i am a gershwin.

george's lyricist, a sunday he will come along and then i love. believe me, wonderful poetry, and again that's the boy nick baker in all of us is not at least simpleminded but conflicted, shall we say. i want to hear more about you. more about nick baker. >> well, i think the reason sometimes i want to write the book, first of all, yes to all that you saying about song lyrics and poetry in the american inventiveness and the comedic playfulness of internal rhyming which carries on now in hip-hop. there's tremendous ingenuity that is being displayed, kind of sleight of mouth that is happening. it's very characteristic of this

real american originality of inventiveness, of rhine and metrical sophistication and all. it continues. it's not as if we're looking back at -- >> right, right. >> it's all happening. were in the middle of the. >> and wrap. there's no into these lyrics. a dance of words in good wrap. >> but as far as what i like to do is i of course want to write about happy people and i want to write books that are evidence for why life is worth living in good. but there are these kind of chasms that open up in history and their unpleasant and unfortunate. they are not just unfortunate. they are terrifying and one of them was world war ii, , then te cold war that immediately

followed it. i just sometimes think it's my job to write about those things and try to figure out the way to heal over them or to make them, by understanding them, make them less distracting so that i can get back to writing about why straws float or whatever little tiny things that are actually part of the delicate texture of ongoing existence, which is what i really, i've always been drawn to. i was taught that. is gossamer fabric of lived life, that's what's really important. but sometimes there's a crack, a fissure that opens front of you and it's like a disaster movie, you know. and what is it? it's a piece of history that is

so awful that you cannot ignore it, and so i sometimes write a book about that in order to sort of get past that thing and make a bridge beyond it. >> could i remind people who are listening and watching your inviting to submit your own questions for nick baker to answer. >> if you want to submit the answers, , too, that would be vy helpful. [laughing] >> you get royalties for that, too. here's two questions. one serious and one not so much. first, what part of you, nick baker, do you think about you to write books to slow down time and action so extremely, sin the mezzanine? and now the serious question. your protagonist in the anthologist, he likes to sing a song, i'm in the barn, i mean

the barn, i mean the barn in the afternoon. it's been bothering me for years. what is the tune? how does the song go? mq. >> that is a friendly question. i'm in the barn, i'm in the barn ♪ i'm in the barn, the afternoon. that's the way it was in the barn. that's the answer to the second question. the first question, how do you write books that slow down time? i think that everybody who's writing a book is trying to slow down time somehow or other. any time you take something and lift it up into the four years of your own intention, attention, think about and turn it around, it's a momentary parenthesis that has been built around that object for that social moment, with there for it is, that transaction.

and so it is a slowing down a time. a sentence has these wonderful little marks, semicolons, dashes in them and all of those kind of machinery of huffing and puffing are all basically ways of taking your overly eager mind and putting it on a track in saying just think your way along this with me now slowly. it's almost inevitable, if you write a sequence of words that other people have to follow, they are slowed down because we actually are very good at parallel processing. i think i'm just doing what everybody wants to do but it feels so good that i may be

doable to more and also dispense with the other stuff somewhat. i sometimes get rid of the larger spine of the plot in just leave the slowed down worm trails of the thoughts that i've had. >> you are teaching us something. who taught you? who does that -- thinking actually how we think and how multilevel it really is? >> well, the person who first did it for me, i took, i audited a class when i was in high school, one of the stories that was in the textbook in the class was -- it had, i don't know, practically every paragraph at

this moment where the paragraph come to be going along at a a normal rate of speed and then, and it's just as if you were in this described world. it's a surreal, it's so realized normalcy is what it is. it was very excited and i thought this guy is doing something that none of the science fiction writers, none of suspense was that i'd read was able to do. -- [inaudible] but he has thoughts. he was arrogant. he was just, his most vulnerable self was when he would just be writing about a rainstorm reaching a certain tree or he

wrote, well, there were people who followed from him. i think updike and learned a huge affirming. there's a long tradition of it, but the 20 century, one of the beautiful things about the 20th century is that it's the century of observation and improvisation, but these two things, and it seems mysteriously to have happened most in the united states. ..

>> host: that is a good question. the campaign was unsuccessful even though every single village and city was burned, not just bombed but burned. it was an attempt to burn the entire country. it did not succeed because the north koreans escaped by living in caves so they spend years in caves and so the idea was the chinese were assisting them and we didn't want that. the final effort was to frighten the chinese and make them go away by dropping very traditional looking bombs that were leaflet bombs but they were filled with insects and the chinese made very detailed accounts of these different insects. my suspicion is that actually

happened but the chinese charged those insects were dose with diseases was falsified, it attacks what the americans call the deception operation and it was baseless, a deniable effort. they wanted to discourage, terrify, cause unhappiness in the area of china that was on the border of korea where these events supposedly happened. that, what did happen -- >> host: a message from steve painters saluting your work, he wrote on fort dietrich, not making it up, under douglas macarthur's purview, japanese know how in warfare, where

these horrors develop and describe that. and the name of steve's book is assassin in chief or something. >> guest: i want to say something about steve kinzer. i could not have written this book without him. this guy is a great explainer. it is impossible to describe how difficult it is to deal with something as complicated as the cold war and make it clear. this is what stephen kinzer has done in a bunch of books, one after another. the dulles brothers. one book after another.

he is a master quote or, that is another talents, i don't think people understand how important it is, things you can quote, you can make a point with 87 different things but if you choose the right quote the paragraph sits, the mind is moved along but comforted that some learning has happened and he does that. >> host: dale evans. as in will rogers, maybe. asks the question why is henry kissinger still alive? aaron lori asks -- or says, i am so glad those plastic straws started going away. the paper straw and soda in a can and the pizza package. how are you liking the new breed?

>> guest: funny about slowing time down which i tried to do in the footnotes and huge paragraphs of description and wonders in footnote about floating straws. some straws flows, some do not. has to do with plastic or paper. i really nailed this one like the hot air blower in restrooms. really? that is it. nothing more to be said about this but time marches on and suddenly there is a political element, what do i think about the floating straws of today, basically very little experience. i don't know much about the

current straws. obviously got to do some serious research but it is hard to go to a restaurant and straws are completely unnecessary but they are joyful, a miracle, whatever liquid you are drinking, in an elevator. >> host: an answer as you go. you look at this fascinating range of books you have written and all of them, something hilariously funny, to your deep mystery, and to your shall we

say trivia but your microscopic examination of small things. who is this guy who would have -- if he had one% more talent. >> guest: 40% more talent. i could say that one thing i think is important is to write every day. every day if you ask your self what is the best moment of the day new things, arising, but the theme if i was going to be grand about it was rescue.

i like to rescue every day life from the neglect of every day, i like to rescue the idea there's nothing more over talked about than 6. this book, the rescue in this book, a book about this, such wounded men because of this process, they had written a good and useful book, it was to rescue them as one of them died before i finished the book and while i was writing the book, always i want to bring

something, some aspect, wildflower of noticed life. put a frame around that and talk about that for a moment. >> host: all part of making a case. >> guest: what i found with sandwich, the only discussion the last couple years, you can make a sandwich out of anything because all you need is the crunch, the mixture of cold and warm, and a few different kind of incompatible layers and you have a sandwich joy. you don't need me. my sandwiches don't have meat anymore. you need some sprouts or things but i had potato sandwiches today.

and i will a it out here, two spinach sandwiches. i put them in a bun and put some mustard on, you take a bite of that, the complete sandwich experience. >> host: deanna.has a serious question that is part of the book. can you please speak how the freedom of information act plate into your process using a process to further transparency but protecting heinous secrets. a serious call is political impulse in your book. everything older than 170 years can be released unmarked, unquestioned, just put it out. >> guest: the word redaction, you say i begin to shiver, it is a euphemism, a terrible thing. there should be - i have a more radical view which is all

documents older than 50 years are to be completely and totally declassified with no redactions. they have entered the world of history and are no longer state secrets. they are historical bits of richness we can think about and if there are mistakes we can learn from those mistakes. >> host: why didn't the f o will have a get it done? >> guest: it is a good law and took a long time to get it passed, 10 years i think. lyndon johnson signed into law and almost immediately began to dislodge secrets that began exploding out of agencies like the air force and central intelligence agency. the knowledge of what happened in the cold war, during the reagan era it's contracted,

rules changed, we are living in a time, several important switches, were shut off. go back and enforce the law, and let's learn what is there. it is a 400 page book, eight 10 years, i was waiting for a set of documents that were released. >> host: it needs to be done in a hurry. gary hart, former senator from colorado talking about he and walter mondale were the last surviving of the committee but they unearthed a lot of assassinations in -- it is

going to be put out. at the moment we are in donald trump likes to say i have hours nobody knows about, you don't know about. i can declare a national emergency. gary hart said we damn well better find out and talk about it. what are those secret powers? we are running out of time. alexander thoreau told me you want to see a real writer, go get nicholson baker and i did. i rejoiced in all of your books and getting to know you. 10 more of these interviews and we will get to know each other. >> guest: i have learned a huge amount from you and every time

we talk i feel i'm getting closer to understanding myself and the outside world so thank you. i want to say one thing, one tiny victory is here is a redacted document that i dealt with for ten years and it is a very important document from 1949, a plan how to dc of somebody but it all blacked out. here's the document that mysteriously appeared in the mail, the same documents without a single redaction two weeks before the book went to press, the national archives somehow got the pentagon to release this thing and is the beginning of the biological weapons arms race between the americans and the soviet union because it says the americans will deceive the soviet union into thinking the americans come up with a toxic germ weapon and once they do that the russians are going to waste

their efforts trying to build the same weapon. they did waste their efforts, they did build the weapon and we had a whole huge mess of an arms race because of this plan from 1949. you write a whole book and there are all these frustrations in it and documents that aren't released and mysteriously because the book exists, one crucial document gets tried out at the end. it is all worth it. >> guest: that is news. it is important. >> guest: it is important. i will post it on twitter. if it is important you have to post it on twitter. >> nick baker, thank you to the harvard bookstore and our host is back, say good night. >> thank you so much. >> always a joy. >> thank you, truly lovely.

thank you both and thanks to all of you for spending the evening with us. you can find out more, "baseless: my search for secrets in the ruins of the freedom of information act" on harvard.com. on behalf of public bookstores thank you both and have a good night. keep reading and please be well. >> thank you so much, take care. >> you are watching c-span2, your unfiltered view of government. c-span2 was created by america's cable television companies and brought to you by these television companies who provide c-span2 to viewers as a public service. >> coming up tonight at 8:00 pm on c-span the federalist society hears from attorneys from the biden and trump

campaigns on the future of election law. on c-span2 the senate is back at noon eastern continuing debate on the veto override of the 2021 defense policy bill. on c-span 3 the white house conference on american history looks at how american history is taught in us schools. >> on tuesday the balance of power in the senate will be decided by the winners of the two georgia runoffs. david purdue and kelly leffler are defending their seat and the gop control of the chamber. the democratic challengers are john ossoff n and rafael war c warnock. live coverage on c-span, c-span.org and the c-span radio apps. >> stay with c-span for continuing coverage of the transition of power as president-elect joe biden moves

closer to the presidency. with the electoral college votes cast from states across the country join us on january 6th live at 1:00 pm eastern for the joint session of congress to count the votes and declared the winner for president and vice president and at noon on january 20th the inauguration of the 40 sixth president of the united states. our live coverage begins at 7 am eastern from the statehouse to congress to the white house, watch it all live on c-span. on the go, c-span.org or listen using the free c-span radio apps. >> good evening. i am harold holzer and i'm director of the roosevelt house. on behalf of jennifer rabb i welcome you to another online roosevelt house presentation. during this dramatic period in our country, it is especially troubling that we can't gather