next the professor to tell us about lincoln's life and accomplishments including his two trips to the united states in 1842 and in 1867 pretty. >> author jimmy hartley this episode. listen at cspan.org/podcast. or wherever you get the podcasts printed ♪ ♪ ♪♪ >> and we are delighted this evening on a program to welcome michael god. michael dobbs has written a wonderful book called "king richard" and also a journalist formally with the washington post, and is taught at the university of michigan kristin and georgetown. he is going to speak to us this evening for a little bit about his book and we will answer questions later in the book sees me later in the program. i do want to alert you to the

fact that this coming thursday, with another author robert giles and is reasonable call when truth matters but the main fourth incident at penn state and on monday june 7, we have the book kindred said, we have tony with the author of the book in the wee small hours, his conversations with farid sinatra. but i want to return to mention tonight's program into the author michael dobbs. and going to talk to us about his book richard nixon the 37th president and the incidence of watergate printed "king richard". so my but what can you tell us about king return. >> you very much. for those of you have not seen a copy of my book which came out last week, kids full-time old is

"king richard" nixon and watergate an american tragedy that has you can see a rather dark picture of richard nixon on the front cover. i'm going to explain a little bit the structure of the book, why chose to call it "king richard" the first time will tell you little bit about myself and why you chose to write this book. which is usually the first question that is offering my did you read the book. and as can tell from my accent, i'm originally from the uk. funny now and living in the u.s. and it worked for 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 rides on the uk and

do go through suburbs, across towns and villages and often the houses were very close to the railways. and he is to look inside of the people inside of the train would pass i was so curious about was going on inside of these houses. over the conversations around the dinner table for the lunch table. what were people arguing or for the family dynamics inside honey's anonymous house with. so perhaps is not surprising that i became a reporter as a profession because it's a profession that allows you to exercise your insatiable curiosity had to pry into other people's lives. and 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 caps of communism actually then later on i went to russia and when i arrived in russia, the whole system was in the process of collapsing and unraveling. so i wrote, i was witness to that to the collapse of communism but he understood that when i was a reporter that i didn't know what was going on behind closed doors. so i was very again, curious to know what was really happening in the kremlin is supposed to the politics that russian soviet politicians chose to reveal of themselves. and sometimes it said that the first rough draft of history but

i wanted to particularly when i left russia, wanted to find out all the things that i had not understood or known about when i was a reporter in moscow. so read the book called down with big brother. truly narrative history of the collapse of communism. because of the release of kremlin documents and participants in these events. i was able to describe what is happening behind all of these closed doors that i was unable to penetrate as a reporter. so it really felt like a little boy trying to with my nose pressed into the glass trying to figure out what is going on inside of these homes and i've really got no right to be. and so first to kremlin in the

later here in washington the white house. and so this gives me to the subject of why chose to write this book about nixon and watergate. in particularly as his presidency but it begins to unravel. at the beginning of 1973. and long story is you will never get as rich resource although you'll never get it twice rainy american president as we were able to get, as we are able to get to the 47 the president richard nixon particularly at this very crucial time of his political career as he was facing me gravest political crisis imaginable an existential crisis for him and ended up with

his own resignation. and as you will note about in the nixon case himself. and of the presidents take themselves before nixon. they all controlled their reporting and turn it off and turn it on when they wanted to. to record something in with nixon, among other characteristics he was well immersed with technology nobody would trust him and he would not trust himself to turn on the recording when he wanted to turn it on. so they invented a system the recording devices would turn on automatically whenever nixon went into a room picked up a telephone so that means that we have much more recordings of nixon than any other president and i think that lbj, it is

about 700 hours of lbj's telephone conversations in nixon, there are nearly 400,000 hours of tape recordings, not just of his telephone conversations but he had microphones in the oval office, and the room in camp david and then on telephone, including the most private room in the white house where he like to retire at the end of the day. his favorite actually with the lincoln sitting room. and so the end of the day to 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 that happened during the day and in addition to that, his chief of staff kept him and audio

diary every night. in the memoirs of the former white house aide, practically everybody who played an important role in watergate. hundreds of thousands of documents from the nixon white house. so you end up with the richest repository of information and that you could for any president. because many will never take themselves again, would never be able to get as close and view of what is really going on in the white house as we do with richard nixon even though this would never nixon's intention. it tended nixon, in regard to the private property which he intended to use for his memoirs. it was horrified when the recordings started to be

publicly released because he's completely discrete in these conversations. so this sort of wealth of documentation poses both a challenge and a blessing and a curse for the biographers of nixon because if you're trying to describe all of nixon's life from birth to death. just, you don't have the space to give the there to go into it detail about what was preparing day by day and minute by minute so the start of intimacy that these tapes allow. it lacks it so i instead of choosing to write about all of nixon's life, and all of watergate, i chose to buy the dramatic moments of all which i think as i tried to explain of the 100 days after his second

inaugural from january 20th of 1973 when he seemed to be in the top of his game. he still had a 67 percent approval rating at the time. he won reelection by one of the largest margins of the popular vote in american history if not the largest margin. in a largely put watergate behind him and he was about to conclude a peace agreement in vietnam. he had foreign-policy triumphs including the opening to china, and with russia and so on. so he really was feeling sort of pretty confident. and then within 100 days, it all falls apart. in this very disciplined white house, the aids start fighting with each other. watergate cover-up the attempted

cover-up, disintegrates and everybody is running for cover. so the aids start kino trying to shift the blame onto each other and finally, they all start to shift the blame onto the president himself. it's a very traumatic. all of which is captured or most of it is captured on tape. so you can really just focus on that time period, and i bring in other backgrounds the narrative of the story is about that 100 days and it is really allows me to do something for nothing has done before, which is just tell it in a very intimate way. now, why did i call the "king richard", of course "king richard" is as an allusion to shakespearean tragedy.

i see nixon as a tragic figure pretty but he was told in another reason for the title that his mother was a quaker out in california, named all her boys after kings of england. including richard. she named after the crusader king richard the lion heart. so this title is very apt i feel. so the book begins, the opening theme is between, he sitting in lincoln sitting room. that was nixon's favorite room in the white house on the second floor the white house and the private quarters. the smallest room in the white house actually pretty in nixon would go up there every night to listen to the music and scribble

on his yellow legal pad and a phone his cronies. on the night of january 20th, 1973, at 1:00 o'clock in the morning among other things he had trouble sleeping pretty could not get to sleep read he called his aide chuck was also known as a catch man and it talks about the work his wish to get even with his enemies. and now is going to wrap up the vietnam war and also how he was going to get even with the washington post my former newspaper following this investigation into watergate. so i began to have an extract from that tape. and so you can see how rich this material is. now he is just come back from the kennedy center.

the concert from the kennedy center and he actually played tchaikovsky's 1812 overture. and that is the pianist. so his pumped up about that. and he doesn't like that washington symphony orchestra because for physical reasons and he has brought the philadelphia harmonic it down to play for him. he considers the more politically aligned with and particularly the conductor. some going to play a little bit of that and then he goes on in another extract is about his inaugural address that he is about to deliver any shares portion of it with chuck olsen. and then he talks about the venom were in and finally met harry's going to stick it to the washington post. some going to try to share this with you.

and i will meet on the other side here. okay i think i'm sharing this with you. [inaudible]. >> january 20th 1973, president nixon and chuck olson. segment one pretty. >> i think it was that the washington and having nominate the great symphony in washington symphony was a great effort pretty don't have them. and normally. [inaudible]. and a dozen people set their and actually relieved. [inaudible]. they would have that appropriate

site. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. imagine what we would do for others.

[inaudible]. we have lived too long with that too in order them to stop us. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. so people can do more for themselves. in each of us remember that america was built on the great people. they were taking responsibility. in our own lives. not just what will the government be but what can i do for myself. [inaudible]. how can i help.

[inaudible]. [inaudible]. >> segment three. >> the important things to remember. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. [inaudible]. [inaudible].

[inaudible]. [inaudible]. >> okay, i am going to end it there without going into the last thing which was just attacking the washington post and expressing pleasure in the campaign to bring down the washington post. but i think you get the flavor of this. and you see this allows the writer and hopefully the reader to be placed on the wall to these very intimate conversations very frank conversations and normally

completely these places are completely out of bounds to mortals. so, now within 100 days of that conversation, nixon's life had completely unraveled his presidency had unraveled and i said that all of his days were fighting with each other. and you heard that chuck olson who was an incredibly loyal to nixon and was really in charge of the dirty tricks. he was the first to go in the later on, under aids including bob and the chief of staff in charge of domestic policy, they were forced to resign and and a sacrificial or sacrifices to try to push the blame of watergate on to someone else.

i'm interested in this group of people around the nixon and how they started to fight with each other and the different personalities. we can talk about this later but you have told some willing to do absolutely anything the nixon even hinted at. and believe that the presence orders should be carried out immediately without question. and you had so many like the chief of staff bob who served as a butler between nixon and the rest of the white house and holderman tried to you know, restraint nixon when he was in the mood and nixon was doing good things with the help. it would not be good for the country or for the presidency. then you have people like henry kissinger and kissinger comes across in the states and in my book, as the flatterer and he

tells nixon, you saved this country. in history books will show that no one will know what watergate means. excuse my bad german accent. but there's a rivalry between nixon and kissinger actually because one of the reasons nixon wanted to record his conversations was to show that he nixon was the architect of all these foreign policy move this. then hit not hit me kissinger. but at the center of the story, is the figure of the 37 president nixon himself and who i am many others historians and biographers find endlessly fascinating and many of the reasons that i wrote this book was a conversation with a man called stanley cutler who has written like one of the

classical books about watergate in which he goes into every twist and turn and the scandal. most of which does not mean very much to the monday leaders for listeners. but i called stanley a lot as a reporter for the washington post and i was surprised when he said to me, that in 20 years, this about ten years ago before his death. nobody will know or nobody will pay much attention to all of the other people in the water watergate saga but they will pay attention to richard nixon and e will endure forever. and i structured this book has a kind of shakespearean tragedy from in 1973 when is about to be re- inaugurated to the to the

crisis and catastrophes and then in the end, the downfall by the president for setting the stage for the downfall of the president. but as you will see, there is an american twist at the end which i am not going to reveal now but you have to the book. this was not exactly a shakespearean tragedy. as i said, it is an american tragedy for drama that is different from a shakespearean tragedy for one important reason pretty will have to read the book for that. so the other character in the book, very important. it's only human character, it is these recordings. these tape recordings which really kind of develop life in a dynamic of their own, become a monster that nixon cannot

control. and ultimately lead to his downfall and i don't think that nixon would've been forced to resign had it not be in for those tape recordings because there would've been his advance and then there would be the events particularly john dean, his former legal counsel and it would've been as he said, she said story. ... ... that fueled expense fate. one of the reasons i see nixon as a tragic figure and one can argue about this is that we can suffering and the pain he felt, he gets involved in a situation from which he cannot extricate

himself. he specialized getting out of crisis but he finally met the crisis he couldn't get out of it was very painful to him to part with people who work from him for many years particularly bob, trump went through four presidents in four years. nixon -- donald trump went through four chiefs of staff and four years. nixon had the same man throughout the four years and found it extremely painful to demand the resignation as a scapegoat for watergate in april of 1973. the time he

talks to him, he's already put back a few whiskeys you can hear that in his voice. he talks about holderman as, you're going to hear my brother, 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 forced, he's thinking of tragedy that happened to him when he was a young man, two of his brothers died protect tuberculosis but one in particular so i am going

to share the screen again and then we can talk on the other side of this last little recording going to play for you. >> april 28, 1933, president nixon and john -- >> sorry, that's the wrong one. just before that. april 30, 1973, president nixon. >> hi, you've got --

[inaudible] well, i -- [inaudible] you're taking your steps, your getting -- [inaudible] [inaudible] who had to rely on -- [inaudible] before we give note, but let me tell you --

[inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] >> i don't think we can but i'll

try. [inaudible] [inaudible] >> that may be why you haven't gotten a note. >> okay. >> i will. >> all right. >> okay, that was the end of this 30 day period, i actually go a little beyond that but this is the main part of the narrative. if there are any questions, i would love to respond but thank

you for bearing with me. there is little audio extracts about any trouble, i'm happy to answer any questions. >> thank you, michael. we do have questions but first, can you talk to me about how you access tapes and about how many hours of tapes there are? >> total of 3700, only a small fraction of which were released while nixon was still president on the orders of the supreme court so most of the standard nixon watergate books do not include $3700 hours of tapes which only released in the last ten years or so. so they are all up on the nixon

website, it takes a bit of navigating but anybody can go listen to them and you can also listen to some of the extracts on my website, at least some of the tapes are using the, micro books.com, if you go there, you'll find some of the tapes i've taken from including the ones i've played this evening. >> thank you. why do you think they are so fascinating with the 37th president? >> partly it's the important nature of his presidency and i think this was the turn for america, the end of the 60s. is the combination of the vietnam war, important news in foreign policy including china, living with the implications of that now but mainly it nixon's own personality, this man who

brought himself up from nothing and he was born for quite quaker family in california and often compared to trump but trump was third base. nixon was, had everything he achieved, he did through his own efforts and then throw it away because of the flaws in his character, particularly his paranoia and mistrust and determination to fight for everything he achieved, that sort of became his fatal flaw. determination to get even with his evidence m&ms enemies but he has a great vision, he worked extremely hard and i would say is an ordinary american but has

all of the virtues and flaws ofe average american. he worked harder than anybody else, he hated people with greater intensity than anybody else so he took everything to the extreme and for me, fed us a fascinating character study. >> interested in the makeup of the supreme court at the time, if nixon had any vision of this ever ending up at the supreme court? >> he chose to keep the tapes and i and the book in july, august of 1973 after one of his aides revealed the president has been taping himself so then nixon, when he hears about this,

he is in hospital suffering from pneumonia in the same naval hospital where i live just outside washington, same hospital president trump taken to with covid a few months ago nixon is there and he's giving terrible, his mind is kind of crowded because he's on heavy painkillers and he has to make a decision on what many of his aides are urging him to have a bonfire on the white house lawn and he strike the tapes but he still thinks he's in control of the tapes and the tapes will be his ally in this fight with john dean and others he can release selected portions of the conversations that will bolster his defense and it's a terrible

miscalculation, obviously we know that now but at the time, it would seem logical to nixon. as for the supreme court, it was probably equal numbers of liberal and conservative justices on the supreme court but when it came to the question whether the tape should be released, there was unanimous decisions among all the justices including conservative once to order nixon to release those tapes that's shared by whether crimes happen omitted in the white house. >> did the supreme court require transcripts of the tapes or did they require making the tapes publicly accessible? >> yes, there was a long argument over how exactly he would release tapes i didn't

deal with this in the book myself but kind of what happens "afterwards" becomes a political argument from a personal psychodrama i described in the book so initially nixon says i won't release the tapes, i will release transcripts and he released doctored transcripts. people of my age will remember he released the transcripts every other sentence was deleted so it was suspected he wasn't really releasing all the incriminating stuff on the tapes so finally the supreme court said, transcripts aren't good enough, you have to release the tapes themselves. >> you talk about nixon in the beginning of your book, can you

expand a little bit about that that nixon has? >> i approached the man you heard at the beginning who says that became the mark of the nixon man because hubris was the quality nixon admired most. hubris is the greek word that means excessive pride presumption or arrogance. in greek tragedy, the hero is always brought down by his arrogance or pride so i think this pretty much sums up nixon in january 1973 and everything is going right for him and he's coasting after his reelection and he thinks he can stick it

through, he uses more colorful line which the best but i am turning it down here. things he can stick it to his enemies so he's setting himself up to fall later but that's what hubris means and there is 20 of evidence of it in the early scenes i described in my book. >> michael, it's been said mr. hickson have the language of a drunken sailor and certainly sometimes he had very objectionable language and tone. are there conversations, and with whom do you find in the report that some of these, most surprising? he was horrible with swearing, or do you find most surprising as a reporter?

>> a lot of anti-semitic generally racist remarks but he indulges of course he wasn't doing this in public, these are private tapes, it's not like trump's tweets, these are private that he never intended to be made public. probably you need to be there to him if we were tape-recorded or many of us, who would say things that were embarrassing that we wouldn't want the general public everybody in the world to be listening to our private conversations so you've got to cut some slack for that but there's also, he did swear i think more than the average person and he's got this very colorful phrase and one of the things you see from even from a completely different background,

they're trying to compete with each other to swear like nixon so partly you asked what surprised me, i guess it's that dynamic of all the people, all the aides trying to compete of us to gain the end internal dynamic going on who try to describe that competition among the aides, then, i the age? >> that's a good question he.

well be a short e unraveling been the burglars who broke into the watergate in 1972v, were caught red-handed on trial. the administration tries to put off easy responsibly burglars immediately he saw there put on trial trial starts the same time i began the narrative and the man had of the committee to reelect the president, he goes for the judge permits perjury, the prosecutor asked him if he gave any instructions to the breaking of the watergate or democratic national committee and young to robert looking,

very ambitious aid in his 30, he said no, nothing to do with him he was acting without any authorization at all. in fact himself was authorized but one of the burglars, james mccourt listens to this and he thinks, why should i and the rest of us take responsibly for this when we know the people who gave the orders are getting off scott free while we are about to be sent to this horrible jail, washington d.c. jail? so mccourt decides he's not going to put up with it writes a letter to the judge and that's

really when the cover-up starts unraveling because mccourt says perjury has been committed and the trial, presents legal counsel realized the white house is being blackmailed, he's afraid quickly implicated, he will be sent to prison, is not about, he's not willing to be sent to prison for the crimes of other people so he turns on nixon or first of all, he turns on mcgruder and tries to get him to show responsibility so there's the inside between mcgruder and dean as nixon put it, since aides are kissing on each other and then on the president to be crude about which is what nixon was so once

it's been broken, there's just one person, james mccourt is not willing to go along the cover-up and start blowing the whistle on a. then this whole "house of cards" begins to fall apart. >> aren't they mostly attorneys and lawyers? it seems that nixon was white the law student and several aides were law students, did they not -- >> right, that's one of the points john dean makes actually. at one time he writes up a list of everybody involved in the watergate and the white house are committee and he puts all

lawyers and most of them are lawyers himself though whole legal question of obstruction of justice and conspiracy is a specialized branch so they weren't necessarily terminal lawyers but some of them were smarter than others legal realizing the legal jeopardy they were in. in that respect, he realized he could be to prison for many years and that was one reason he blew the whistle on the whole conspiracy but they were lawyers, they should have known better but as nixon says at one time, if the president does it than that means legal so he thinks the president ordered the breaking, he could claim 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 legal at all. it became a constitutional crisis cicely for that reason. >> carol wants to know about his enemies and who was nixon out to get? >> he was out to get anybody, a long list of enemies beginning with the kennedys because if you recall, nixon lost an election to jack kennedy in 1960 and here is a modern-day echo as we think about the events of the past few months, the 1960 election was extremely close, much closer from the last election and it

was determined by a few thousand in illinois and texas including disputed folks in the county controlled by matt daley of chicago so nixon had a much more legitimate basis challenging the results of the election than donald trump did, in my view in the last election but he did not challenge the results of the election. he decided for the good of the future in the country, he went except the results of the election but he had 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 political intelligence when he came to the 1972 election, he was determined

not to be, just describing what's going on in his mind, he is determined not to allow the kennedys to cheat on the election again, it wasn't so much the kennedys but it was the democrats and that was one of the democrats political intelligence is one of the sources of watergate but as far as the enemies are concerned, they range from the kennedys to journalists, the eastern foreign policy establishment, the elites in general, he drew up a long enemies list and there are some humorous enemies for example, he had a dispute with the dean of the washington cathedral. lbj dies in the middle of all this they are deciding whether

to have a memorial service president johnson in the nachman national computer in washington but nixon, one of his enemies is the dean of the cathedral is a big leader of the antiwar movement so nixon goes on a raid against the dean of the cathedral and is not going to allow a funeral to take place in the cathedral and if it does, he's not going to attend and so on so all of this, you get a kind of insight into the depths of his hatred of the other side which is revealing. >> kathy wants to know about the environment during that time. from what you know about that? >> i started working for the post office but i do know bob woodward and bernstein, of

course journalists like those two, they were young reporters at the time, this was the story perhaps they dreamt of the post was under great pressure from the administration, it was just begun going public so there is pressure to restrain the reporters but she sided with the reporters so the post was breaking all of this news and it was extremely exciting and then you had a whole generation of reporters who wanted to model themselves from. reporter: , that is another story but i guess a lot of reporters like myself were into journalism in part because the whole story of woodward and

bernstein and watergate. >> i hate to take you back but i want to ask, there is a tremendous amount of hate and you focused on these. you said were the most passionate, the most critical perhaps, did you listen to them all? >> i couldn't listen to them all but i listened to the coupons. some of them, it depends, some of it tapes are better quality than others. those that i played were recorded on the telephone so they are fairly easy to understand and some papers were pretty much impossible. professional archivists job it was to listen to the tapes and make transcripts, they calculated that you needed to listen for 100 hours in order to

get one hour of transcript so if you multiply that by 3700 hours of tapes, you can see that it would take several lifetimes for somebody to listen to all of the tapes and decipher them all. they are completely unintelligible so i have to confess that i did not listen to them all. >> are there portions missing, something very famous about them? >> the famous 17 minutes, this is one of the first tapes after the watergate break-in when nixon is talking to his aid so obviously there is conversations about watergate and it. there's a lot of conspiracy theory about what is in the missing 17 minutes. month doesn't actually reveal that nixon ordered the breaking

of 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 trying to start to listen to these tapes, he started pressing all these buttons on the tape recorder and wanted to get rid of some that were compromising to him but they are not anymore compromising other things on the tapes. that's what most historians, including maple leaf but you could argue that. >> what you think we've learned from all this? >> nixon kept on saying the problem wasn't the original crime, it was the cover up what

he experienced himself unraveling a cover-up an affair when he was a young congressman so he shows whatever you else you do, don't product because the cover and watergate came worse than the original crime. he could have blamed watergate on various things but covering up, covering it up, obstruction of justice was what brought him down so arm a larger level, it is the kind of, at least my book has insight into this introverted world, an american version and fair are all of them around the president and the

president in the white house becomes extremely isolated. it's an echo chamber in which everybody is telling the president what they think he wants to hear and that is a dangerous situation, not just for nixon but for all presidents that after a bit they become isolated, distant from reality and particularly a problem second term. first time in reality and often anybody living in that pressurized fishbowl type of environment, you have to be a very sane person to remain grounded in common sense and some degree of humility. you need somebody, what does has

astute and the family best, they keep the president sort of rounded but it's a disease of any president and some president doctor from it more than others. >> thank you for your discussion this evening for doing the research and for appearing tonight via zoom. we greatly appreciate it. i would encourage people to stick up book, king richard, it's available on amazon and most stores now as i understand and i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you enjoy the book. >> thank you very much, 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 you all a good evening, thank you for joining us. good night. ♪♪

>> weekends on c-span2 aren't intellectual see, every saturday will find out what start our nation's pass on american history tv. on sundays, book tv brings the latest in nonfiction books and authors, television for serious readers. ♪♪ learn, discover, explore. weekends on c-span2. ♪♪ >> sunday c-span series january 6, use from the house continues three more members of congress share stories of what they saw, heard and experienced that day including democrat dean phillips of minnesota. >> at that very moment when the capitol police officer announced we should take cover, i stood up at the back of the gallery on the second level, representative from arizona was objecting arizona doctors and at that

moment i simply shouted out at the top of my lungs, this is because if you, i screamed. >> this is because of you! and i think i was represented four years of angst and anxiety and anger, many saw this coming from a mile away, i think i represented probably millions of americans who felt the same way and that moment the entire country, including myself recognize the fragility of our democracy. i have great appreciation for the geriatricians and congressmen want, i do not like it violated but i do not regret it because it was when i was feeling, four years of pent up anxiety about was transparent slight front of our eyes. >> you will hear from jamie kraska of american, african of