books and authors. finding for c-span2 comes from these television companies in more including wow. >> the world has changed. today the national level internet connection is something no one can live without so wow! is therefore our customers with speed, reliability, value and choice. now more than ever it all starts with great internet. >> wow!. >> wow! along with these television companies supports c-span2 as a public service. >> we are delighted to welcome author michael dobbs. michael has written a wonderful book that has been well received called "king richard." he is also a journalist, formerly with the "washington post" and he has taught at the university of michigan, princeton and georgetown. he is going to speak to us this evening for a little bit about his book and he will answer

questions later in the book, excuse me, later in the program. i do want to alert you to the fact that this coming thursday we have another author, robert guiles, and he's written a book called when truth matters, about the may 4 incident at kent state. and on monday june 7 we have the book kendrick, and on june 10 we have tony who is the author of the book in the wee small hours, his conversations with frank sinatra. but i want to return to ten nights program and author michael dobbs who's going to talk to us about his book "king richard." richard nixon the 37th 37th president and incidents of watergate. michael, what can you tell us about king richard? >> thank you very much. for those of you who haven't seen it, this is a copy of my

book which came out last week here its full title is "king richard: nixon and watergate--an american tragedy." and it has that you can see a rather dark picture of richard nixon on the front cover. i'm going to explain in a little bit the structure of the book, why i chose to call it "king richard," but first of all tell you a little bit about myself and why i i chose to write ths book, which is usually the first question that is aimed at authors, why did you write the book. as you can tell from my accident i originally from the uk, but i am now living in the u.s. i've worked for a long time for the "washington post" for 25 years. and when i was a kid, i don't

know if this is typical of everyone, but to me i used to take these train rides around the uk and it would go through suburbs, past towns and villages, and often the houses were very close to the railway. i used to look inside the people's houses that the train went past, and i was so curious about what was going on inside these houses, what were the conversations around the dinner table, the lunch table, what people arguing with each other, what with the family dynamics inside these anonymous houses. so perhaps it's not surprising that i became a reporter as a profession because it's a profession that allows you to exercise your insatiable curiosity and to pry into other people's lives.

i started covering big political events. i was sent by the "washington post" as a foreign correspondent, first to poland in the middle of the whole communism actually and then later on i i went to russia. when i arrived in russia will system was in the process of collapsing and unraveling. so i wrote, i was a witness to that, witness to the collapse of communism but i understood when i was a reporter that there was a lot i didn't know that was going on behind closed doors. so i was very, again, curious to know what was really happening in the kremlin, as opposed to the part of politics that russian soviet politicians chose

to reveal of themselves. it's sometimes said journalism is a first rough draft of history, but i wanted to, particularly when i left russia i wanted to find out all the things that i hadn't understood or known about when i was reporter in moscow. so i wrote a book called downward big brother which is the narrative history of the collapse of communism which i was able to include because of the release of kremlin documents and interviews with participants in these events, i was able to describe what was happening behind all these closed doors that i was unable to penetrate as a reporter. i always felt like a kind of a little boy trying, you know, with my nose pressed to the class try to figure out what's going on inside places that i

have really got no right to be. first the kremlin and then later here in washington, the white house. and so this gets me to the subject of what i chose to write this book, about nixon and watergate in particularly as his presidency begins to unravel at the beginning of 1973. and the answer is that we will never get as which archival resource, or we will never get as close to any american president as we were able to get, as we are able to get to the 37th president, richard nixon, particularly at this very crucial time of his political career as he was facing the

greatest political crisis imaginable, existential crisis to him that ended up with his own resignation. as you all know, no doubt, nixon taped himself and other presidents had taped themselves before nixon, but they all controlled the recording. they turned it off and turned it on when they wanted to record something. with nixon he was among other characteristics he was rather ham-fisted with technology, and nobody would trust you and you wouldn't trust himself to turn on the recording equipment when he wanted to turn it on. so they invented a system that the recording devices would turn on automatically whenever nixon went into a room or picked up a telephone. so that means that we have got

much more recordings of nixon than any other president. i mean, i think with lbj there's about 700 hours of lbj's telephone conversations. with nixon there's nearly 4000 hours of tape recordings, not just of his telephone conversations but he had microphones planted in the oval office, the cabinet room, up in camp david, and then on telephones including the most private room in the white house where he liked to retire at the end of the day, his favorite room in the white house actually, was the lincoln sitting room. at the end of the day he would call people up and talk to them about the events of the day, so you have this entire, you know, record of nixon talking and sounding off about everything it happened during the day.

in addition to that, his chief of staff bob haldeman captain audio diary every night. they are memoirs of, from the white house aides, practically everybody who plays an important role in watergate, hundreds of thousands of documents from the nixon white house. so you end up with the richest treasure trove of information you can imagine for any president. and because no president is ever going to take themselves again, we're never going to get as close of you of which really going on in the white house as we do with richard nixon. even though this was never nixon's intention. nixon regarded these recordings as his private property which intend to use for his memoirs,

and was horrified when the recording started to be publicly released. because he's completely indiscreet in these conversations. so now this sort of wealth of documentation poses both a challenge as both a blessing and a curse for biographers of nixon. because if you're up our -- a biographer trying to describe all of nixon's life to death, just you don't have the space to give, to go into detail about what was occurring day by day minute by minute. it lacks the intimacy these tapes allow. so i instead choosing to write about all nixon's life, now all of watergate, i chose to focus on the most dramatic moments of

all, which i think the reason i will try to explain other 100 days after his second inaugural from january 20, 1973, when he seemed to be at the top of his game, he still had a asphyxian 7% approval rating at that time. he had won reelection by one of the largest margins of the popular vote in american history, if not the largest margin. and he had largely put watergate behind him. he was about to conclude a peace agreement and vietnam. he had various foreign policy triumphs, the opening to china, the détente to rush and so on. he'd really was feeling pretty confident. then within 100 days it all falls apart, and this very disciplined white house, the aides start fighting with each

other. watergate, the cover-up of watergate, the attempted cover-up disintegrates and everybody is running for cover. so the aides start trying to shift the blame onto each other and finally they all start shifting the blame onto the president himself. it's a very traumatic. period, all of which is captured, or most of it is captured, on tape. so you could really if you just focus on that. back, i bring in other, a lot of background, but the narrative of the story is about that 100 days and it really allows me to do something that i don't think has been done before, which is to tell the story in a very intimate way. now, why did i call the book "king richard"? of course king richard is an

allusion to shakespearean tragedy king lear. i see nixon as a tragic figure, but he was told another reason for the title is that his mother who was pious quaker out in california named all her boys after kings of england, and including richard who she named after the crusader king, richard the lion heart. so this title is very apt i feel. so the book begins the opening scene is between, is set in the lincoln sitting room, as i said nixon's favorite room in the white house, on the second floor of the white house in the private quarters, the smallest room in the white house

actually. and nixon would go up there every night to listen to music and to scribble on his yellow legal pads and to phone his cronies. and on the night of january 20, 1973, at 1 in the morning, among other things he had trouble sleeping, he couldn't get to sleep. he called his aid who was also known as his hatchet man and talks about his wish to get even with his enemies and how he's going to wrap up the vietnam war and also how he was going to get even with the "washington post" that was pursuing my former newspaper pics i'm going to play a little extract from that tape and so you can see how rich this material is.

now, he's just come back from the kennedy center. there's an inaugural day concert at the kennedy center, and actually they played tchaikovsky 1812 overture, and the pianist was ben kleiber. so he's pumped up about that, and he doesn't like the washington symphony orchestra because for political reasons. he's brought the philadelphia philharmonic down to play for him. he considers a bit more politically aligned with him, particularly the conductor. so i'm going to play all a bit of that and then he goes on another extract is about his inaugural address that is about to deliver and he shares portions of it with chuck colson. and then he talks about the vietnam war and then he talks

finally about how is going to stick it to the "washington post." so i'm going to try to share this with you, and i will meet you on the other side here. okay. so i think i'm sharing this with you.

>> okay, , i'm going to end it there without going into the last thing which was just attacking the "washington post" and expressing pleasure at the campaign to bring down the "washington post." but i think you get the flavor of it, and you see that this allows the rider and hopefully the reader to be flies on the wall to these very intimate

conversations, very frank conversations, and go to places that we -- are normally completely out of bounds to ordinary mortals. now within 100 days of that conversation nixon's life has completely unraveled and his presidency had unraveled, and as i said all his aides were fighting with each other. you heard chuck colson who was incredibly loyal to nixon and was really in charge of the dirty tricks, he was the first to go, and then later on other aides including bob halderman, the chief of staff who was in charge of domestic policy, they were forced to resign as kind of sacrificial, sacrifices to try

to push the blame of watergate onto someone else. so among other things i'm interested in this group of people around nixon and how they started fighting with each other and their different personalities we . we can talk about this more later, but you have colson who was willing to do absolutely anything that makes an even hinted at, and believed that the president orders should be carried out immediately without question. and you had somebody like the chief of staff, bob halderman, who sat as a buffer between nixon and the rest of the white house, and halderman tried to restrain nixon when he was in the mood, when nixon was doing things which halderman felt would be good for the country or wouldn't be good for the presidency. and then you have people like

henry kissinger. kissinger comes across in these tapes and in my book as the arch flatterer and sycophants. he tells nixon, you saved this country, mr. president. the history books will show that what no one will know what watergate means. excuse my bad german accent. the rivalry between nixon and kissinger actually because one of the recent nixon wanted to record his conversations was to show that he, nixon, was the architect of all these foreign policy moods, not henry kissinger. but at the center of this story is the figure of nixon himself, the 37th president, who i a mini other historians, biographers find endlessly fascinating. one of the reasons i wrote this book is i i had a conversation

with a man called stanley keller who has written one of the classical books about watergate in which he goes into every twist and turn in the scandal, most of which don't mean very much to modern day readers or listeners. but i called stanly county up as the reporter for the "washington post" and i surprise when he said to me -- cutler -- in 20 years, this is about ten years ago before his death, nobody will know, nobody will pay much attention to all the other people in the watergate saga but they will pay attention to richard nixon, and nixon will endure forever. i structured this book as asd of shakespearean tragedy, from

hubris in january 1973 when he is about to be re-inaugurated through crisis, catastrophe and then in the end the downfall of the president all setting the stage for the downfall of the president. but as you will see, there's an american twist at the end which i'm not going to reveal now but you'll have to read the book. it's not exactly a shakespearean tragedy. as i said it's an american tragedy or drama that is different from a shakespearean tragedy for one important reason. you are going to have to read the book for that. so the other character in the book, very important, is not a human character. it's these tape recordings which

really kind of developed a life, i a dynamic of their own, become a monster which nixon cannot control. and ultimately lead to his downfall. i don't think nixon would have been forced to resign if it had not been for those tape recordings because there would have been his version of events and it would've been the version of events of his accusers, particularly john dean, his former legal counsel. and it would've been a he said/she said story. it was only because of the existence of the tapes which nixon was finally forced to release, all the smoking gun tapes, on the orders of the supreme court that really sealed nixon state. -- nixon's fate. one of the reasons i see nixon as a tragic figure and, of course, one can argue about this, is that we can see his

suffering and the pain that he felt as he gets involved in a situation from which he cannot extricate himself. his entire career he specialized in getting out of crises, but in watergate he finally met a crisis that he couldn't get out of, and it was also very painful to him to part with people who had worked for him for many years, particularly halderman. donald trump went through four president in four is. sorry, donald trump went through four chief of staff in four years. nixon had the same man as his chief of staff throughout those four years and found it extremely painful to demand his resignation as a scapegoat for watergate in april of 1973.

1973. so i'm going to end it before taking any questions just by playing you one little extract of a conversation between nixon and halderman after nixon has announced halderman's resignation. and it's so painful to him that nixon starts drinking, and by the time he talks to halderman he is quite already, has put back a few whiskeys and so you can hear that in his voice. he talks about halderman as, you're going to hear, my brother and i think this is a reference to nixon's own brother, one of his brothers who died from tuberculosis when nixon was a young man. so when he's forced to part company with halderman he's thinking of this tragedy that happened to him when he was a

young man with actually to back of his brothers died of tuberculosis but there was one in particular to whom he was very close. so i'm just going to share the screen again and then we can talk on the other side of this last the recording that i'm going to play for you. can't david april 28, 1973, president nixon and -- >> sorry, that's the wrong one. just before that. >> lincoln sitting room, april 30, 1973, president, president nixon and bob halderman.

[inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible]

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> okay, so that was the end of this. it actually goes a little bit on that but this is the main arc of the narrative.

so if there any questions i would love to respond, but thank you for bearing with me. i hope you could all here those little audio extracts without any trouble. happy to answer any questions. >> thank you, michael. we do have questions. but first and foremost can you talk to me a little bit about how you accessed these tapes and about how many hours of tapes there are? >> well, there's a total of 3700 hours, only a, only a small fraction of which were released back while nixon was still president on the orders of the supreme court. answer most of the standard nixon watergate books do not include this 3700 hours. most of these 3070 hours of tapes which were only released

in the last ten years or so. so they are actually up on the nixon library website. it takes a bit of navigating that anybody can go and listen to them. you can also listen to some of the extracts on my website, at least the tapes, some of the tapes i use in the book. michael dobbs book.com. if you go there you can find some of the tapes that i've quoted from including the ones that i just played this evening. >> thank you. why do you think we're still fascinated with the 37th president? >> well, partly it's the important nature of his presidency and to think this was the turning point for america at the end of the '60s. it was the culmination of the vietnam war, important moves in foreign policy including the opening to china which were labeled with the implications of

that now. but mainly it's nixon's own personality, this man who really brought himself up from nothing. he was born to a dirt poor quaker family out in california. he's often compared to trump but trump was born on third base. nixon had come everything he achieved he did to his own efforts and then he threw it away because of the flaws in his character. particularly his sort of paranoia and his mistrust in his determination to fight for everything he achieved. that sort of became also his fatal flaw. to get even with his enemies and so on. but he's a contradictory character. he's a man of great talent, great vision. he worked extremely hard.

i say he's a kind of ordinary american but only more so. he has all the virtues and all the flaws of the average american. he sort of worked harder than anybody else. he hated people with greater intensity than anybody else so he just took everything to an extreme. that for me at least is a fascinating character study. >> carroll is interested in the makeup of the supreme court at the time and if nixon had any vision of this ever ending up at the supreme court? >> he chose to keep the tapes and actually i in the book with the scene, actually it in july, august of 1973 after one of his aides alexander butterfield has revealed that the president has

been taping himself. so then nixon when he hears about this he's actually in hospital suffering from pneumonia in the same naval hospital actually where i live just outside washington in bethesda, same hospital that president trump was taken to with covid a few months ago. nixon is there and he's feeling terrible, so is mine is a bit kind of clouded because he's on heavy painkillers and so on. and he has to take a decision on what many of his aides are urging him to have a bonfire on the white house lawn and destroy the tapes. but he still thinks he can control the tapes and the tapes will be his ally in this fight with john dean and others, that he will be able to release selected portions of the

conversations that will bolster his version of events, and it's a terrible miscalculation obviously we know that now but at the time it seemed logical to nixon. as for the supreme court, it was actually the probably equal number of liberals and conservative justice of the supreme court but when it came to the question of whether the tape should be released the was a unanimous decision among all the justices including the conservative ones to release, to order nixon to release those tapes that would shed light on whether crimes had been committed in the white house. >> did the supreme court require transcripts of those tapes, or did they require making those

tapes publicly assessable ? >> there's a long argument over exactly how you would release the tapes. i didn't deal with this in the book myself but this is what happens afterwards, it becomes a legal political argument from being a a personal psychodrama that i describe in the book. so initially nixon says well, i won't release the tapes. i will release transcripts. so he released sort of doctored transcripts here i mean, people at my age will remember he released these transcripts with every other sentence was deleted, and so it was suspected he wasn't releasing all the incriminating stuff on the tapes. so finally the supreme court said no, transcripts are not good enough. you have to actually release the

tapes themselves. >> you talked talk aboute very beginning of your book in hubris. can you expound a load bit about that hubris that nixon has? >> actually i quote chuck colson, the man you are at the beginning, says that hubris became the mark of the nixon man. man. because hubris was the quality that nixon admired most. hubris is a greek word which means excessive pride, presumption or arrogance. in greek tragedy, you know, the hero is always brought down by his sort of arrogance or pride. so i think this pretty much sums up nixon in january of 1973, that everything is going right

for him and he's kind of coasting after his reelection. he thinks he can stick it to his enemies. he uses more colorful language than this often, but i am toning it down here. he thinks he will stick it to his enemies, and so he's a really setting himself up for the fall later. that's what hubris means and there's plenty of evidence of it in those early scenes that i described in my book. >> michael, it's been said that mr. nixon at the language of a drunken sailor. certainly sometimes he had very objectionable language and tone. are there conversations and with whom do you find as a reporter that some of these were more

surprising? he was horribly bad about swearing. what do you find most surprising as a reporter? >> sort of somatic generally racist remarks that he indulges in. of course he wasn't doing this in public and these are private tapes, not like trump's tweets. these are private that he never intended for them to be made public. probably to be fair to him if we were working recorded or many of us we would say things that are embarrassing that we wouldn't want the general public, let alone everybody in the world, to listen in to our private conversations. you have got to cut him some slack for that, but there's also, he did swear more than the average person and he has got this very colorful phrase.

one of the things you see is that someone like kissinger who comes a completely different background, german jew, is trying, all the major tried to compete with each other to swear like nixon. so partly you asked what surprised me. i guess it's this dynamic of all the people, all the aides, it's rather like a roll of court in which all are trying to compete against each other to gain the attention and the benevolence of the king. so it was a very interesting internal dynamic that is going on that i tried to describe. >> lets speak a little bit about that competition among the aides here what then really prompts

the defection i suppose of the aides? >> that's a good question. well, it really starts unraveling when the burglars who broke into the watergate back in 1972, they were caught red-handed and their put on trial. the administration tries to cut off responsibility at the level of the burglars and their immediate boss, gordon liddy. so they are put on trial in the trial actually starts the same time i begin the narrative. a man called jeb gruber whose ahead of the committee to reelect the president, he goes before the judge and commits perjury. the prosecutor asks mcgruder is he gave any instructions for the breaking of the watergate or the taping of democratic national

committee and magruder his this young eight in his 30s, he says no, this and nothing to do with them, and lady was acting without any authorization at all. in fact, magruder himself was authorized the break-in. but one of the burglars, a man named james mccourt listens to this and he thinks why should ii and the rest of us take responsibility for this when we know that the real, the people who gave the orders, including jeff magruder, are getting off scot-free while we are about to be sent to this horrible jail, the washington d.c. jail.

so mcchord decide to second to put up with this and writes letters to the judge. that's really when the whole cover-up starts unraveling, because mcchord says perjury has been committed in the trial. the president legal counsel john dean realizes that the white house has been blackmailed. he's afraid he can be implicated. he will be sent to prison. he's not about -- he's not willing to be sent to prison for the crimes as he sees fit of other people. so he turns on nixon, or first of all he turned on magruder and tries to get magruder to show responsibility. it's kind of this infighting between magruder and dean. as nixon puts it in his aides are passing on each other and then they start pissing off

president, to be crude about it, which is what nixon was. so once the taboo has been broken that there's just one person, james mccord, is not willing to go along with this the cover-up and starts blowing the whistle on it. then this whole sort of house of cards begins to fall apart. >> art they mostly attorneys and lawyers? from my memory it seems that nixon was quite the law student and several of the aides were law students. did they not -- >> right. that's one of the points that john dean makes actually. at one point he writes up a list

of everybody who was involved in the white house, in the watergate, either in the white house or the committee to reelect the president and he was -- most of them are lawyers including nixon himself. of course the whole legal question of obstruction of justice and conspiracy is a specialized branch of the law so they were not necessarily criminal lawyers, some of them were smarter than others and realizing the jeopardy they were in. i would say dean was the smartest picky relay seek to be sent to prison for years and that was one reason why he blew the whistle on the whole conspiracy. but yes, they were lawyers. they should have known better. but as nixon says at one point, if the president does it, then that means it's illegal. so we thanks that if the

president ordered a break-in, he can claim that he's justified for national security reasons, and this was the whole political, legal dispute of watergate, that in the end they decided just because the president orders it doesn't mean it's a legal at all. it became a constitutional crisis precisely for that reason. >> carroll once to know about his enemies, and who was nixon out to get? >> well, he was to get anybody who, i mean, there's a long list of enemies beginning with the kennedys. he comes if you recall nixon had lost an election to jack kennedy in 1960, and here's there's a modern-day echo as we think about the events of the past few

months, that actually in 1960 election it was extremely close, much closer than the last election. it was determined by a few thousand votes in illinois and texas, including disputed votes in cook county that were controlled by mayor daley of chicago. so nixon had a much more legitimate basis for challenging the results of the election than certainly donald trump did, in my view, in the last election. but he did not challenge the results of the election. he decided that for the good of the country he would accept the results of the election, but he bore a lasting grudge against the kennedys and he was determined that he would never again allow himself to be cheated, so this explains in

part his first -- his thirst for political intelligence. when it came to the election, i'm describe what's going on in his mind, he's determined not to allow the kennedys to cheated of an election again, i wasn't so much the kennedys but it was the democrats. and that was one of -- that thirst for political intelligence is one of the sources of watergate but as far as the enemies are concerned, they range from the kennedys to journalists, to the entire eastern foreign policy establishment, the elites in general. he'd you up a long enemies list, and there's some quite humorous enemies and for example, he had

a dispute with the dean of the washington cathedral. lbj dies in the middle of all this and they're deciding whether to bury or to have a memorial service for president johnson in the national cathedral in washington, but nixon, one of his enemies is the dean of the cathedral who's a a big leader of the antiwar movement. so nixon goes off on a tirade against the dean of the cathedral and says he's not going to allow any funeral to take place in the cathedral and if it does he's not going to attend, and so on and so forth. so all of this you get kind of an insight into the depth of his hatred of the other side, which is very revealing. >> kathy wants to know about the environment in the newsroom at the post during that time. what do you know about that? >> right.

well, i started working for the post after this time but it you know somebody actors involved including bob woodward and carl bernstein. of course for journalists like those two, they were were very young reporters at the time this was the kind of story that perhaps they dreamt of, and the post was under great pressure from the administration. it was just begun going public, so there's pressure on the proprietor, katharine graham, to restrain the reporters but she signed with the reporters. so the post was breaking all ale stairs and it was extremely exciting and it had a whole generation of reporters who wanted to model themselves on earns ten woodward. that's another story but it was really, i mean i guess a lot of

cub reporters like myself went into journalism in part because the whole story of woodward and bernstein and watergate. >> i hate to take you back to the taste but it want to ask you, there's a tremendous amount of tapes and you focus on these months, these periods that you said with the most passionate, the most critical perhaps. ..

they calculated that you needed to listen for 100 hours in order to get one hour of transcript. if you multiply that by 3,700 hours of tapes, you can see that it would take several lifetimes for somebody to listen to all the tapes and decipher them all. there are parts of it that are completely unintelligible, so i have to confess i didn't listen to them all. >> aren't there portions that are missing? there's something very famous about these missing minutes? >> yes, the famous missing 17 minutes which probably this is one of the first tapes after the watergate break-in, when nixon is talking to his aides, so obviously there's conversations about watergate in it. i don't -- there's been a lot of conspiracy theories about what's in those missing 17 minutes.

you know, does it actually reveal that nixon ordered the break-in at the watergate? i don't think it does because you have to sort of triangulate with other sources of information including the diaries, so we know pretty much what was in those 17 minutes. i think it's just nixon being hand fisted, and he started listening to these tapes. he started pressing all these buttons on his tape recorder. he probably wanted to get rid of some bits that were, you know, compromising to him, but actually they are not any more compromising than a whole lot of other things on the tapes. that's what most historians including me believe, but, you know, you can argue about that. >> what do you think we have learned from all of this? >> well, i mean, nixon, he kept on saying well, you shouldn't --

the problem wasn't the original crime. it was the cover-up. and he had experienced himself of unravelling a cover-up with the affair of [inaudible] when he was a young congressman, so he, you know, chose that whatever else you do, don't cover it up because the cover-up in watergate became worse than the original crime. he could have blamed watergate on various subordinates and underlings, but covering it up, ie, obstruction of justice was what really brought him down, but on a larger level, i'd said, you know, it's a kind of -- at least my book is an insight into this very introverted world.

it's a kind of quote american version of a royal court. there's all these courtiers around the president, and the president in that white house becomes extremely isolated. it's the kind of echo chamber in which everybody is telling the president what they think he wants to hear, and that's a dangerous situation, not just for nixon, but for all presidents, that after a bit they become isolated, you know, distant from reality, and there's particularly a problem of, you know, the second term. i mean, the first term they are sort of [inaudible] in reality, and then anybody who is living in that very sort of pressurized fishbowl type of environment, you have to be a very sane person to, you know, remain

grounded in common sense and some degree of humility. you need somebody to -- people say traditionally that is what the spouses do, you know, and the family does, they keep the president sort of grounded, but it's a disease of any president, and some presidents suffer from it more than others. >> thank you for your discussion this evening and for doing the research and for appearing tonight via zoom. we greatly appreciate it. i would encourage people to pick up this book "king richard". it is available in amazon and most bookstores now as i understand. i hope you enjoyed it. i hope you enjoy the book. >> thank you very much. it's been great to be with you, and i hope you are encouraged to go out and buy the book, or at least borrow it from the library. thank you very much. >> thank you. and i wish all of you a good

evening. thank you for joining us. good night. >> weekends on c-span 2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story, and on sunday, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for c-span 2 comes from these television companies and more, including comcast. >> do you think this is just a community center? no, it is way more than that. >> comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers to create wifi enabled [inaudible] so students can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast along with these television companies supports c-span 2 as a public service. c-span shop.org is c-span's on-line store. there's a collection of c-span products. browse to see what's new. your purchase will support our nonprofit operations, and you

still have time to order the congressional directory with contact information from members of congress and the biden administration. go to c-span shop.org. in this week's center for public affairs virtual event, we bring you a conversation with the washington post national politics columnist, who is joining us in conversation for her brand-new book, the triumph of nancy reagan. in addition to working at the washington post, she has worked at time magazine and the los angeles times and is the recipient of many awards including a prize for excellence in political reporting. asked four years ago by simon & schuster to write this biography, the book is being published tomorrow on april 13, 2021. it's been called an exhaustive biography which chronicles the private life of the political influence of nancy reagan. it draws on interviews with cabinet members, friends and family members and shares how she became one