enormous amount of mutual respect towards fellow and an understanding that people make their own decisions about how to live their life. we have seen that with vermont passing civil unions in the legislature, and then the legislature passing marriage equality. other states where that happened it was oftentimes a court decision. we have seen it with a very inclusive approach to life in our communities. cities tourr -- our staff recently traveled to burlington, vermont. learn more at c-span.org/citiestour. you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. announcer: coming up next on american history tv, british house of lords michael dobbs, creator of "house of cards" and author of four novels about

winston churchill, gives the keynote address at the international churchill conference in new york city. this is about 40 minutes. laurence: i would like to ask --

we have a guest speaker tonight -- and i would like to ask the very beautiful, talented and brilliant lisa to come up tonight, if you would. lisa is a fantastic journalist. seven years of fox news, publisher's foreign desk, and she has the privilege of -- no, that is wrong -- lord dobbs has the privilege of being introduced by lisa. [laughter] [applause] lisa: good evening. i just realized that i am going to be the only person on this stage tonight who doesn't have a british accent. [laughter] lisa: but i do have an accent, so you have to see if you can detect it at some point. [laughter] lisa: more pertinent to the city we are in. if you would ask him, lord dobbs would tell you that he never had a proper job. yet, it was in his restless search, as he calls it, for this ideal job, that he just happened to stumble upon some of the most wonderful and rewarding experiences that anyone could ever hope to have in a lifetime. ones that honored his presence. ones that called upon him as a crafty and skilled storyteller. ones that demanded his inquisitive mind, and others that rewarded his wondrous creativity and innovation.

it all began in a pub where i met a complete stranger, lord dobbs says about his journey. "i happened to mention to him that i was looking for a job in current affairs. he bought me a drink. a little later i found myself , working for a rather exceptional lady called margaret thatcher." [laughter] lisa: a modest lord dobbs may call it luck, while the rest of us, particularly those of us working in the political and media world, painfully recognize this wonderful trait as perseverance. a job with margaret thatcher and four years later, he would be the first person to tell her that she had become the prime minister. and the next day, he took her first step with her across 10 downing street. it was in this self-described state of joblessness that lord

dobbs also served it as deputy chairman of saatchi & saatchi, worked as a well-regarded abc anchor, was hired as a newspaper columnist working at "the boston globe" throughout the watergate scandal, and was recognized as a global speaker. if only unemployment could be so fruitful for everyone. [laughter] lisa: a prolific author with many acclaimed novels, and of course, like any lazy man's profile would include, doctorates from harvard and tufts. and of course, i saved the best for last. what is lord dobbs known for? >> "house of cards?" lisa: no. sharing a girlfriend with bill clinton. [laughter]

lisa: this is while they were both students at oxford. [laughter] lisa: lord dobbs was always confused as to why she never introduced the two of them. but then he admitted, "it took me many years and an entire presidential scandal to discover why." [laughter] lisa: but you guys are right. 30 years ago, lord dobbs wrote "house of cards," a political thriller based on the life of a politician, later adapted into bbc's highly acclaimed television series and later taken on by netflix as a web-based story telling the story of congressman frank of south carolina's fifth congressional district and house majority whip trying to get himself in a place of power in the political world, starring kevin spacey, as you all know. yes, amazing. [applause] lisa: to date, the series has

earned 33 primetime emmy award nominations and the series , underscored by premises of deceit, manipulation, darkness, power, you know, all of the ingredients of a successful politician, whether in washington or westminster. but all stemming from the genius of a man who is humble, talented, quickwitted, and just plain brilliant. with that, ladies and gentlemen, i am blessed with this amazing honor tonight of presenting to you lord michael dobbs. [applause] lord dobbs: lisa, that was one of the most extraordinary and lovely introductions i ever had. thank you so much. [laughter]

lord dobbs: wow, what an occasion. i thought i was coming to a really serious, intellectual evening. now, i hear my girlfriend and bill clinton have been dragged in. [laughter] lord dobbs: but this is a serious evening. i cannot tell you how honored and privileged i feel to be here in the company of so many particularly david petraeus. honored to be in the same room. [applause] lord dobbs: a great american. and i wanted to thank the churchill family, who do so much to keep winston's flame alive. celia, jenny, randall.

we owe you so much for the work that you do, and you make our joy of winston so much fun. and we heard so many thanks today from michael bishop and lawrence who thanks everybody, but they have not thanked are themselves. we owe them a huge debt of thanks, michael and lawrence. [applause] lord dobbs: for having made our society and our love of winston so much fun and incredibly successful. i cannot tell you how -- you know, these things don't happen by accident. they happen through a great deal of work. and michael, lawrence, it has largely been your work. so thank you very much indeed for that. you were talking earlier about who is going to say no to a

churchill, and i was delighted to discover that you have never said no to a churchill. you and jenny are going to be a proper couple very soon, and i can't tell you how delighted i am about that. [applause] lord dobbs: wow. do you ever feel you have arrived at the wrong party? i kind of feel like that. i'm a writer of fiction. i'm here to be surrounded by some of the finest historians of our age, and the most imminent on the planet. i simply write works of fiction. and of course, writing novels is not a proper job. it was of course, all the fault of margaret thatcher. you may remember her.

a man said, i met this woman and she has the lips of marilyn monroe, and the eyes of caligula. [laughter] lord dobbs: well, 30 years ago, i was her chief of staff for the conservative party. it was fair to say we had a tremendous falling out. it happens. there is nothing unique about falling out with margaret. she rather insisted on it. [laughter] lord dobbs: i remember a few weeks later after the election in 1987 when i was sitting beside the swimming pool on holiday, thinking that perhaps i should find myself a new job, that margaret rather insisted, and i was sitting beside the swimming pool wanting to fill time. i decided to write a book for no better reason than that i had spare time. that book became "house of cards." john major was kind enough to

say that it did to his job what "dracula" had done for babysitting. [laughter] lord dobbs: and it spawned two fu 1 and fu 2, as i call them. [applause] lord dobbs: well, it was a hell of a row with margaret. me believingt stop she was probably the greatest peacetime prime minister of the 20th century. [applause] lord dobbs: she led, i bled. so what? but the book that i wrote, it seems to have gotten around a bit. about 18 months ago, i was privileged enough to have a meeting with president xi of china when he visited. he looked

-- he visited. i decided to give him a signed edition of the original hardback. a frown looked up and creased his face, and he said, hou --ve 'hours -- you have cards'in thise of country too?" [laughter] lord dobbs: i have written 20 novels over the years. but the novels, honestly, the ones i have most enjoyed writing have been those four novels i have written about winston churchill. my relationship with winston, and i regard it as a relationship, i regard him as a friend, as somebody who is very much a part of my life, it began as so many with his funeral.

i was sitting there watching it, watching it with my mother. i remember those fuzzy black-and-white images that we had on television. i was sitting there watching it with my mother. and i remember those images. the gun carriage, the barge, the train, and that extraordinary moment we all remember when the cranes of london dock bowed their heads in respect. what an extraordinary moment. in my mother throughout the entire time was weeping silent tears. and i asked myself, why is my mother weeping, so emotional about a man she had never met? and her tears began a time of inquiry and questioning, which led me to a fascination about winston churchill. not particularly the statesman, the politician, but the man, the flesh and blood man. eventually, i decided i wanted to write out about him.

i had to say, how dare i, a novelist, write about the greatest man in english history when he has been written about by so many eminent historians over the years. winston himself provided me the answer. when neville chamberlain, his rival, predecessor, and colleague died, winston made a wonderfully beautiful eulogy for his old rival, in which he said this. "history, with its flickering lamp, stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams of passions of former days." in other words, no matter how hard they tried, historians and history can never offer you the

full picture. which made me think that perhaps, i as a novelist, starting from a very different perspectives, from the inside out maybe a novelist can fill in , some of the gaps and try to and blood man.sh the passions, the private moments, the triumphs, and yes, the fears, too. so, i started to think of winston as a real person, not just a cardboard cutout. a real person. winston is an old man. i dived into something, an international society publication. i don't know if we still publish it. it was an extraordinary exposition of the hangups that winston had, even as an old man, about his father. i wanted to know about winston

as the child, so i went to his first school, and discovered extraordinary and a horrid stories at his school with an appalling headmaster. a man who was intent on breaking winston. winston at st. george's was abused in so many ways. he was abused intellectually, he was abused physically, emotionally, and quite probably, in other ways, too. winston, being a naughty boy, -- and he was a --ghty boy, a pain as a kid was discovered with a stolen packet of sugar from the pantry. for the crime, he was taken to the headmaster's study, where he was held, he was stripped naked, held naked across a beating

block, and thrashed. and he was thrashed and he was thrashed and he was thrashed and he was thrashed not until he was black and blue, but until there was blood on that poor boy's body. winston i think came very close to being broken at that school. he was removed from that school, thank goodness, by his nanny, mrs. everest. holiday --k from came back on holiday from his school and she discovered the terrible wounds on his body and insisted to his parents that he be removed from that school. he did suffer terribly from the headmaster, but remember that winston was not like most of the rest of us. if i had been treated like that, i would have held my hands up, and said, look, just tell me what to do to stop this treatment. but that was not winston's idea.

the next occasion he had after that beating when he was able to , find the headmaster away from the school, he broke into the headmaster's study, crept to the back of the door where the headmaster kept his prized hat that he wore on official occasions, his symbol of authority, and winston stole that prized straw boater. he took it down to the woods from the school, and he kicked the crap out of it. not bad for an eight-year-old boy who had just been so cruelly abused. winston was an extraordinary individual, even as a young boy. but then, i wanted to know about winston the father. now imagine winston sitting at

his dining table on the seventh of december, 1941, an awesome date. he was there with his his daughters sarah and mary and his daughter-in-law pamela. he was also sitting around that dining table with an admiral, the extraordinarily powerful residential envoy -- presidential envoy, and the superb american ambassador filling the shoes of the departed joe kennedy. around the table that evening were the elements in those american friends of britain's salvation. the elements of extraordinary, they were alsothe elements of extraordinary, personal pain.

because during the dinner, the intrepid valet, frank sawyers, came into the room and brought with him a portable radio, and said listen to the news. and that is when winston and the others first heard the news of pearl harbor, the japanese attack on america. statesman,n as a this was everything he had been hoping for. at last he was ablet to broaden out the war and get america involved. but can you imagine the collision of feelings that he must've had when he embraced his american friends? because they were great, great friends, and great allies. but the austere, and i think harriman wasogant,

also the lover of pamela. he was helping to tear her marriage to randolph apart. and the other was in love with sarah. it was to be an unfulfilled love which caused them both great misery, and i think eventually contributed to wynan's suicide a few years later. while winston was rejoicing at the good fortune -- and it was good fortune -- of the events of that day, he must also as a father have wept. his triumph was wrapped up in torment. and that was the flesh and blood side of winston churchill. so much pain, and that man experienced so much private pain throughout his life, and that is one reason why i think he of kbo.that policy kbo.

just get on with it. on, keep buggering as we heard from that wonderful film. i will get on with that in a minute. joe, you make this wonderful film, and it was a real privilege to be able to see an early sighting of it. look, to come and present that film in front of this audience, man, that took courage. [laughter] lord dobbs: but it also brought me huge personal enjoyment because not only did i love the film as a work of art, it reminded me that you were a historical consultant with my old professor of almost 40 years ago. it reminded me of elizabeth leighton. i knew her. what an extraordinary woman she was.

she was very kind with the help she gave me. and it got me thinking about how very long it took to make one stop on the london underground in those days. [laughter] lord dobbs: but this is an era today of kbo. just like it was then. so, how did winston respond? we saw that in your film, joe. we saw him making what was perhaps one of the greatest speeches ever made in the american language -- and i am not going to do it all because -- "wethat last night shall go on to the end. not to victory. not to success. but go on to the end." because he did not know what the outcome would be.

"we shall fight, whatever the cost may be. we shall never surrender." it is the ultimate expression, at that time, of kbo. but it was not simply an expression of blind stubbornness. it was an example of winston never losing sight of the longer term, even at a time when he was surrounded by chaos. never lost sight of the longer-term or the deeper game. i think people call it the vision because he went on to say this -- and we saw that last night, too, in the closing words "even if this-- island, or a large part of of it, was subjugated and starving,

then our empire beyond the seas would carry on the struggle until, in god's good time, the new world, with all of its power and might, sets forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old." he knew what it was about. he never lost sight of what he was fighting for. and what was he fighting for? he was fighting for the survival of our values, western values, values we shared at the time of -- at that time with the new world. and you know, even at the time going through all of those perils, winston won. today, we are back here in a world of uncertainty and confusion. you know, politics. politics, they say it is the world's second oldest

profession. [laughter] lord dobbs: it takes most of its rules from the first. [laughter] lord dobbs: but i really do think winston would be really distressed at what politics has become at this moment. it seems to be all about volume and venom. how distressed he would be at the lack of magnanimity which we see in modern politics. right now we are whether -- we are rather like a man bent over, examining his shoelaces, because they happened to be untied. and being obsessed by the fact your shoelaces are untied -- and yes of course we have problems -- but while you are bending over, you expose your vulnerable parts to the rest of the world, and that is what we seem to be doing. [laughter] lord dobbs: kbo does not mean to keep bending over. [laughter] lord dobbs: now, winston probably couldn't have seen his

shoelaces and he would never have bent down to tie them himself. he would have raised himself to his full 5'5" inches, and was -- and would have stood on the corpses of his political adversaries, and would have looked around him and ahead. he would have looked to the future as he always did, even during those dark days of 1941. and he would have seen, even today, a western world, which still, at its full height, when it stands up tall, towers above the rest. and i don't mean to be unkind to any other culture or part of the world, but i think it is an objective fact that is still here in the west, we are -- well let me put it this way. i'm a realist.

i have to be. i have four kids. [laughter] lord dobbs: but i am also an optimist, and i have to be because i have four kids. but i cannot think of any other part of the planet where i would have more wanted to have brought up my children, and watched them bring up their children, than in this part of the world. [applause] lord dobbs: you know, for the last 300 years, this part of the world, the western world, has had the most decisive innovations. we have had the most world-changing inventions. we have been so much of the inspiration and produced so much of the culture that has marked the progress of humanity. let's not say 300 years. let's say 1000 years. why have we been so successful? it is not because we have the best politicians, no.

but because we have the finest universities. we have the most vibrant culture. we have the rule of law. we have freedom of association, tolerance evens, in this awkward age of social media, which allows us to move forward together. now, of course, we have in that time experienced some terrible setbacks. but the march of progress over all of those centuries has been inexorable, and we have to put those setbacks into context. we are right now in a kbo moment, i think.

the way ahead seems to be lost in the mist around us. in america, there is more political division then then i think there has ever been in my lifetime. in germany, it is supposed to be the strongest part of europe. we have a chancellor who has been humbled recently, but now is much weaker and faces a very difficult time ahead. in britain, we have mrs. may, who may not. [laughter] lord dobbs: and that gives me no pleasure to say so. and so much of the rest of europe is in freefall. spain this week, greece this ce next year, italy every other year it is a very , difficult time. and brexit. look, everybody mentions brexit, so i will not miss my chance. i am going to impose upon your patience. winston said he only required three things of an audience, that they be well educated, well-intentioned, and well-oiled. i hope i'm onto a winner this

evening, particularly with the well-oiled. it has been so often mentioned, so i'm going to ask you to take a look beyond kbo in the short term and today's headlines. what side would winston have been on? every side in the debate always claims winston. they grab a quote, probably out of context, to say winston would've thought this or thought that. winston had a political life of 65 years. i think he probably said almost everything several times over and the idea we could be clear about what winston would have said or would have thought is nonsense. but, i do believe he saw europe in its broadest sense. he saw its history, he valued its cultures, its values, not

just its institutions. institutions come, they change, and they go. i think he would have enjoyed the diversity of europe. how can i put this to a polite audience? let me tell you a story. imagine you are in a railway carriage and a young couple sits opposite you. as they are sitting there, they start making love. as a frenchman, you would start applauding. [laughter] lord dobbs: as a german you would sit and take detailed statistical analyses. [laughter] lord dobbs: as an italian you would get up and join in. [laughter] lord dobbs: if you are an

englishman, you would stare stoically out the window as if nothing was going on. [laughter] france.bs: vive le if you came from brussels you would get out a big manual of rules and regulations to make sure they were doing it properly. that is another matter. [laughter] lord dobbs: the differences that we have in europe, the differences in cultures and objective have caused much , tension and torment over the centuries. but those differences have also been a source of an endless outpouring of a wonderful culture, of music, of literature, of art, of drama, of medicine, of architecture, and political thinking. that was europe's great role until young america came along

and showed us there were other ways to do things. i want to leave a thought in your minds over the future of europe. it may have you reaching for your glasses. i see my dear colleague. we have different views on this matter, you will have to indulge me this evening. the differences in europe have caused tension and turmoil. the greatest turmoil and tragedy, i suggest, has been caused not by competing nationalism in europe but by the attempt of one authority or ideology or autocracy or bureaucracy to bring about one system in europe. that has been true since the days of napoleon.

they have all failed. the west has found such great strength in its diversity, not in its uniformity. what side of the brexit issue would winston have taken? according to joe -- i watched it last night very closely. i learned something. you talked about learning something from making the film, and i learned something from watching your film. i think winston would have said, as he did in your film, do not trust establishments, do not trust elites, trust the people. take a trip on the train, as he did. i don't expect you all to agree with that, but i will ask you to think about it, at least. we have so many reasons to be optimistic, if only we could

raise our eyes from our shoelaces and remember how good we are. remember the berlin wall, how it was pulled down. it wasn't destroyed by military might. it was pulled down by the bare hands of millions of ordinary men and women who wanted to be part of us, to share with us what we have. yes, economic advantages, but it was so much more than that. it was our freedoms, our values, our dreams. i started with winston's beautiful eulogy to his predecessor, neville chamberlain, about history's flickering lamp. but that is not all he said this afternoon. he went on to say this, words as relevant today as they ever were. "the only guide to a man is his conscience. the only shield his memory is

the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. it is very imprudent to walk through life without the shield because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations, but with the shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor." winston was a man of honor, a man who never bothered to look at his shoelaces. he was a man of vision, he was a man of dreams, dreams that inspired the world and went on to save it for us. thank you for listening this evening, and may your dreams go with you. [applause]

announcer: you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. to join the conversation, like us on facebook at c-span history. announcer: this weekend on the alexander the bruder talks about the jfk assassination. here is a preview. things that made this story very difficult for me to take on was that there was a moral dilemma at the heart of it that my grandmother -- my grandfather was very much aware that kind of

reverberated through our family even though we didn't talk about it. that was the obvious thing, how does one ultimately financially profit from a national tragedy like this without taking a moral hit? this was something that plagued my grandfather over the weekend of the assassination. what to do, what to do. it also represented a financial opportunity. the truth is that he grew up incredibly poor and russia. i think anyone can understand how hard it would have been to walk away from that in that moment. and yet, it felt wrong. it felt like there was something about it that was deeply unpalatable to him, and even perhaps contrary to his values. he struggled enormous lyon mislead over those days, trying to figure out what to do. enormously over those days,

trying to figure out what to do. you can stop and imagine for a moment a contract with a major magazine that requires the time that ever happened. would defend the copyright, prevent the film from being exploited or sensationalized, or being widely distributed in even go copies. most of all, he decided to donate some of the money he got to the widow of jamie tencent, who was shot in the theater. >> watch the entire program on the presidency, sunday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern. this is american history tv, only on c-3.