c-span brings you an unfiltered view of government. scan the qr code at the right bottom to sign up for this e-mail and stay up-to-date on everything happening in washington each day. subscribe today using the qr code. >>. >> sits on the land of the people. it's a pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation about boyle's new book, the shattering. before we begin, i would like to tell you about two programs coming up on our youtube

channel, "watching darkness fall" is a book that talks about the rise before the fall in germany. and on tuesday, february 1st, at 1:00 p.m., we will hear from sarah pollack that would discuss her book, "fdr." she analyzed roosevelt as a cultural icon. historical leader who carefully and intentionally built his public interest. kevin boyle begins his book in the 1960s for the fourth of july. boyle is inspired by a photograph of cahill.

history is not the simply unfolding of the events. boyle introduces us to the people who prau poled changes. in "the shattering," boyle introduces us to the people that propelled the changes, and "the washington post" said boyle has a gift of empathetic storytelling. his previous book "arc of

justice," and he is the co-author of "muddy books and ragged aprons." his essays appear in the detroit free press. suzanne e. smith is a professor of american history, and teaches cultural history, history of death in america, and american popular music and african american religious history, and she's the author of "dancing in the street." now let's hear from kevin boyle and suzanne e. smith. thank you for joining us today. >> let me begin today simply by letting you know that professor smith was not able to join us. at the last minute there were complications that made it impossible for her to join us, and i am very sorry she's not

here and i'm not sharing this afternoon with her, and i would like to be sharing this afternoon with her, but i am honored to share this afternoon with you, and i appreciate the national archives giving me the opportunity to talk with you today. i want to thank susan clifton for putting together today's program. i want to start today by doing one of those things that i think you are not supposed to do when talking about your book. i want to start with somebody else's book, and what i want to do is start with a book by a woman who has been in the news a bit lately because of her passing. i want to start with joan's second book of essays, "the white album", and i want to read the start of it. it's a famous start. this is the start, the very

essay of the white album which is a collection of essays she wrote in the early 1960s and '70s. she said we tell ourselves story in order to live. we live it entirely by the imposition of a narrative line on desperate images by the ideas with which we have learned to freeze the shifting fan gora, which is our experience, or at least we do for a while. such a beautiful and elegant way of describing what historians actually do. what we do as historians is we take all the fragments, the complicated pieces of the past and we try and shape them into a coherent story. then over time we start to wonder whether the story that we

shaped is really the best way of telling the events of the past, and so we start to think the way didian did, whether we need a new story, and that's what "the shattering" is. it's my attempt to take the fantasmagoria of the 1960s, this sprawl of events, and to reshape them into a new story of the 1960s. and a lot of that story centers on powerful figures of the 1960s. the book deals to a considerable extent with the presidents of the 1960s, john kennedy and lyndon johnson and richard nixon and to my surprise, really, dwight eisenhower. it deals with those people that tried to become president, barry goldwater, bobby kennedy, george

wallace. it runs through so much of the 1960s. it talks about the supreme court justices and talks about a general or two. and it talks about the towering abg activist that we associate with the 1960s, martin luther king, jr. and malcolm x.ctivist the 1960s, martin luther king, jr. and malcolm x. i also really believe that ordinary people are central to history, too. ordinary people, who we don't know, help us understand the names we never heard of help us understand the past in a new way, and ordinary people in american past changed this nation. alongside all those famous people who run through "the shattering," what i also try to do is tell the stories of ordinary people.

what i want to do today, i just want to tell you more stories. and this is the first one. this is the fourth of july, 1961, on the 6100 block of west eddie street in the northwest corner of chicago. the day before, cahill and his neighbor draped the block in 38 flags, and that's a lot of flags given that there are only 36 houses on the entire block. and ed, being ed, written to the "chicago tribune" to announce what they had done, and the trib decided they would send a photographer out to take a

picture of the block, and so the neighbors gathered on the lawn right next to ed cahill's house. again, that's ed right there and that's clarence right there. two of ed's kids -- he had three children, and two of his kids got in the picture, too. that's his son, terry standing at attention up at the top of the steps. that's his daughter, katie, way in the back, right back there. you can barely see her, that's ed's wife, stella cahill, smile smiling into the 60s.

stella had good reason to be smiling. stella was born a couple days after christmas in 1916 deep in the polish ghetto of chicago where she -- where her parents lived on what her father, who was a tailor, managed to bring hem from his trade. she had an older brother chester, and the four of them lived in a tenement deep inside the ghetto. just about two years after her birth, her father died, killed by the spanish flu that was raging through the poorest neighborhoods of american cities, and her mother with two young children to raise faced the prospect of tumbling into the worst forms of poverty. she tried to break the family's fall by getting married again in 1920. she married another polish

immigrant. this time a man did not even have the trade that her now deceased husband had. he made his living on the power of his back, a power that tended to dissipate, it turned out, by drinking he could not control. all through the 1920s, stella, her brother and her mother and now stepfather lived on the edge of poverty. there's no clearer sign of that than the fact that they moved every single year. every single year all the way through the '20s they lived in this part of town, and then they moved to that part of town and then that part of town, the way poor people do. and then in 1929, the economy collapsed around them. by the spring of 1930, stella's stepfather was unemployed. the family was getting by on whatever money her mother could

bring home from her job boxing candies in the candy factory. wasn't enough. within the year or so stella's older brother left school to take a factory job that he was lucky to get. that brought in just enough money that they could keep stella in school through the two years of a commercial course she was taking in one of chicago's public schools. the minute that course was over they pulled her out and sent her off to work, too. she was 15. stella met ed cahill on a blind date in 1938. the cahill family were hardly wealthy, but in the working class world of chicago, they were a step above stella's

family, considerably a step above. ed's father was immigrant parents, and his father worked as a foreman for a construction company that did roadwork for the city of chicago. what that meant in the 1920s is the work was steady, in a way it had never been for stella's family. with that steady work he earned enough, ed's father earned enough that in the late 20s he was able to buy a house on the 6100 block of west eddie street, the block you are looking at now, but in those days it was a half finished brand-new development going up way on the outskirts of town. it was a completely white neighborhood. much of the new developments that were going up in chicago in the 1920s were wrapped in restrictive covenants, the

little clauses developments put on their deeds that said this property could never be sold to a negro and often times to a jewish american. but i have no evidence, whatsoever, that when ed's family bought that house on eddie's street they thought at all about race. chances are they took it natural, as a natural thing that neighborhoods were going to be segregated. that's how deeply that racial discrimination was written into the fabric of american society. what they saw was that they were buying a 900 square foot house of living space. it was an unfinished attic up above that they could finish off where the boys could have a place to sleep. what they saw was that they were buying a house with a little backyard and a little front

yard, set in a half finished neighborhood six blocks away from a brand-new catholic parish that they could join, and it was such a new parish that it didn't have a church yet but it had a parochial school where ed and his brother could go, as part of the deep commitment to the cahill family to catholicism. that's where ed grew up. ed and stella got married in may of 1940. 1942, they had their first child, a baby girl they named judy. in november of 1943, when judy was about a year old, ed got drafted.

he was gone for 2 1/2 years. most of that time he spent in europe. in the signal corps, trailing behind the front troops as they marched towards berlin in the end of the war. stella stayed home with the newborn. now stella knew on some level that ed was safe. she knew that, of course, from the letters he wrote home, the sweet personal letters he sent as often as he possibly could. but you have to stop for just one second and think about this young woman in chicago in 1943, in 1944, in 1945, living surrounded by war, surrounded by death, by the gold stars she would see in the window as she walked the baby along the streets.

for the prayers for those boys who had gone missing, the prayers at sunday mass for the boys that had gone missing from that parish that she was part of. and you got to believe, and i believe with all my heart, that deep in the night that fear came creeping up to her, too, that it would have been impossible for her not to imagine, the western union messenger coming to her door with that notice, and if that were to happen that she would become her mother in 1918, a too young widow with a toddler at her skirts and her life collapsing around her. it's not what happened. ed got through the war just

fine. he came home in the spring of 1946 as part of the massive demobilization of that year. within a few months, to no one's surprise, stella was pregnant again. ed decided with the new baby he couldn't afford to take advantage of the benefits the gi was providing, he would just go get a job. he did, he got a job as a clerk in the front office of the vacuum can of chicago, and it made industrial strength coffee urns. one of their major clients was the united states military. the u.s. navy really liked their coffee erns, as did the army. in 1948, this now young family,

ed, stella and their two kids moved into his father's bungalow out on west eddie street. they moved in partly to take care of him. his wife recently died, and everybody knew he could not take care of himself, and partly because ed -- ed had such a powerful sense of place. he wanted to go home, and so they did in 1948. that neighborhood was still half finished. half of the houses on the block had not been built yet because the development that started back in the '20s stalled during the depression and then stalled again during world war ii, and over the next few years, from 1948 on to the 1950s, the neighborhood started to fill in, and the developers came in and put in small reasonable houses on to the empty lots. houses had been sold overwhelmingly to an italian

american and polish americans who were moving out from the center city of chicago. in a process they call white flight. as that neighborhood filled in, as the population filled in, it became a more prosperous area. in the mid 1950s, developers built a brand-new shopping mall, not that far from eddie's street. and that catholic parish that was so important to ed finally got the church it had never had, a gorgeous, beautiful church wrapped in marble. a place for families like the cahills to feel a sense of solidity that neighborhood never had. the cahills started to do well

for themselves, too. and ed started to move himself up in the company, and he was the head of sales. they had a third child in 1952. that's kathy, down here. the cahills were not extravagant people, but they had more people than ever before, so in 1953, '54, they bought their first car. they never had a car before. but now they did not see the need for ed to take the bus to the vacuum can down in the center of the city anymore. in 1955, they bought a tv and put it in the living room, and when the kids were old enough, they sent them off to the parochial school, to the grade school connected to their parish. and when judy got of high school age they sent her to a catholic high school. when she finished there in 1959,

they sent her to depaul university, one of chicago's two catholic universities. now, there's no doubt that this was a parochial world that the cahills lived in. they lived inside this type of up myrrh -- upper middle class, lower little class catholic world. there's no doubt this neighborhood out on eddie's street was wrapped around racial

expulsion, and discrimination. you can see that just in the picture of the folks standing out here in 1961. and the cahills, at least, their prosperity and their ability to buy the car and tv and to send their kids off to schools, private schools, was paid for in part by the vacuum can's connection to what dwight eisenhower would call the military industrial complex, because the military industrial complex was not all about missile systems and bombers, it was also about industrial strength coffee urns. you also have to think just for a minute about what this world looked like for stella cahill. here was a woman that grew up right on the edge of devastating poverty, who never had a stable place to live and now she and ed owned their own home out on eddie street. here was a woman who in the early days of her marriage and early days of motherhood wasn't

sure whether her husband was going to come home, and now living in this extraordinary family-stabled world. her daughter was in college, when she would have to leave school at 15. is it any wonder why stella cahill was smiling in the 1960s? and already that world built around eddie street, already there were cracks in the exclusions that that world had created, none more dramatic, none more important than the one symbolized by this young woman, elizabeth eckford.

her story would have been different, really, if her mother and father had had a phone. they were working people, and they had six kids to raise and they could not afford that sort of extravagance. so on the day before school was to start in 1957, september of 1957, on september 3rd of 1957, the eckfords didn't get the phone call telling her that elizabeth was supposed to meet with the nine other kids that were going to desegregate little rock central high the next morning, and that together the ten of them would be escorted to the school.

so on the morning of that first day on september 4th of 1957, elizabeth got up early to make sure that she could get herself dressed in the clothes she carefully picked out for her first day. she made this skirt. she had breakfast with her family. when breakfast was over her mom called the kids together so they could call pray together the 27th psalms. then elizabeth picked up the binder her mom had bought lure, and she put on the sunglasses that she hoped might hide how scared she was, and she took the bus to little rock central high school. the bus dropped her off two blocks from the school. i don't know if any of you have

ever been to little rock central high, but it's a massive building. it covers two whole city blocks, its 41 frontage runs two whole cityfrontage runs two whole city blocks. elizabeth was dropped off near one of the corners of the school, and she could see down towards the center of the school in front of the street, and she could see the white mob. she could see the national guardsmen the governor of arkansas called out the night before in order to prevent elizabeth eckford and the other nine african american kids of go into the school in defiance of a court order. she was 15.

as she was coming up to the line she could see that the national guardsmen were letting kids through, and in that mind of a 15-year-old, what she thought was they will let me in, too. when she got up the guardsmen told her she had to go down to the center of the line, all the way down to the entrance of the school. so she did. she walked along the street in front of the long guardsmen line, and as she walked the mob came up behind her, screaming and shouting behind her, some of kids shouting like a football game, 2, 4, 6, 8, we don't want to integrate. and somebody in the mob yelling over and over again, lynch her, lynch her. there were newspaper reporters, of course, because this was a major national story, and they trailed along her asking for

comments she refused to give. the photographers asking in front her, walking backwards to get this very important picture, and she refused to say a word. finally she got to the center of the school, the center of the line along the street in front of the school where she had been told to go, and she came up to the guardsmen that were standing there, and she asked if she could get through, and they told her she would not be going to school and she needed to move on. for a second she had no idea what she was going to do. she couldn't go back to where she had come from, because the mob was behind her. so she thought she had no choice but to keep going, and that's what she did. she kept walking all along the street and the mob trailing behind her and the reporters

around her, the screams, the yells and the threats, until she finally reached the end of the two-block stretch in front of little rock central high where she saw a bus stop. and she sat down at the bus stop and smoothed out her skirt the way a proper young lady should. and afterwards the reporter said, well, they created a kind of corden around her to protect her from the mob. and maybe that's true. i don't know. but beyond them the mob screaming and yelling and that person still there threatening to hang her from a tree. how long she sat there, no one could ever say. maybe about 20 minutes, half an hour. and at one point an african american man came up and offered her a ride home. but her parents told her never

to take rides from a stranger, so she politely refused. and then finally a white woman came out of the mob and this white woman started to harangue the other whites around her to say that they were going to be sorry for what they had done some day. and elizabeth was horrified because she feared what that white woman was going to do by telling off the mob, she was going to make it worse. all elizabeth really wanted was to be left alone. a warriors of the civil rights movement sitting on a park bench trying not to cry. the next day this photo ran in all of the major newspapers in the united states, made the front page of every major newspaper in the united states.

and in that image what happened was that miltss of white people were forced to confront for only a moment the confrontation, the contrast that the civil rights movement wanted them to see. not the individual one, though that's, obviously, terrifying, but the systemic one, the one between a social, a community that can produce a woman, a young woman of such grace and dignity, and the social system that could take ordinary people like the people you are seeing in this picture and twist and turn them into thugs. in defense of the indefensible. over the course of the 1960s, civil rights movements would twist and turn all sorts of

complicated ways, and i tried to trace some of those in my book. but it would never have more power than when it built this extraordinary contrast that elizabeth eckford brought out on a glistening september day in 1957. four years later this woman, estelle a griswold, got herself arrested. estelle griswold when she was young in the 1920s dreamed of being a professional singer. she'd even gone to paris for couple of years to try to make a go of it. didn't quite work out.

in 1927 she came back home to her home state of connecticut where she fell in love and married an aspiring ad man. and for the next 30 years or so she trailed along behind his career wherever it took him. 1945 it took him to germany. the state department had hired him to help with the occupation of defeated germany and with the reconstruction of western europe after the devastation of the war, and she went with him. and from 1945 to '51 she works herself with a refugee agency, an agency trying to help the massive refugee crisis that engulfed europe in the terribly brutal it days after the war. in '51 they decided to come home. they settled in new haven, connecticut, came back to connecticut.

and for a year or so she continued to work with the refugee agency but its headquarters were up in new york and she got tired of the commute. so she quit. and went looking for other work, but she had a particular skill set as an administrator that wasn't an enormous demand for a woman in new haven, corner, in 1950. it took her a year or two to get a job. in 1953 she got a job that she thought would be interesting. the executive director of the connecticut branch of planned parenthood. the nation's leading advocate for birth control. now, she said afterwards she had no idea about birth control when she took the job. she didn't know what a diaphragm was. she thought the work could be interesting and she had administrative skills. and the work turned out to be very, very interesting.

in the late 19th century any number of states had passed laws trying to prohibit in one way or another birth control. and connecticut was one of two states, massachusetts was the other one, that had particularly stringent laws. in connecticut, from 1879 forward it was illegal for anyone to distribute, to sell or to use any form of birth control. from planned parenthood, it was formed in early 20th century, it made it a special effort in connecticut to get that law repealed, and for decades and decades in the middle decades of the 20th century planned parenthood kept lobbying the connecticut state legislature to repeal that 1879 law. but they didn't really want to do it. there were political costs of doing that, and the truth is nobody enforced the law.

and so it sat on the books. when estelle griswold took over as executive director of connecticut's planned parenthood in '53 she tried to lobby the legislature to get them to withdraw the law. didn't have any luck. and so in 1958 she decided to change tactics. she arranged for two married couples who were willing to cooperate with planned parenthood to sue the state of connecticut for prohibiting them from using birth control they wanted to use. they wanted to get the law declared unconstitutional. in the way these things work, that case wound its way up all the way to the united states supreme court. finally reached the supreme court in 1961 in, in the spring of '61. four of the nine justices were willing to say that that law was, in fact, unconstitutional.

but the other five, they said that there was no real law here. it was on the books, but no one was enforcing it. and as you undoubtedly know to have a supreme court case you have to have real harm. you have to prove that somebody is being harmed, and these married couples couldn't prove that. and so estelle griswold's case failed. and that's when she decided to get herself arrested. to be more precise, what she decided was that the way to test this law wasn't by getting married couples so say they were being prohibited from using birth control. it was to get herself arrested for distributing it. and so the summer of 1961 she arranged for planned parenthood's connecticut branch to open a birth control clinic

in new haven where woman could come in and get the information that she thought about in terms of women, getting the information they needed on how to use birth control in their families. she always assumed this was about married women. they opened their clinic in october 2nd, on october 2nd, 1961. in direct defiance of the law. and nothing happened. because nobody in the position of authority in new haven cared that they were distributing information about birth control. but at least one person in new haven did. a man who worked for a car rental company, in fact, a devout catholic with five children at home, who believed,

according to the teachings of his church, that the use of birth control was a sin. and, therefore, should not be allowed by the state. and the law said this was illegal and he wanted that birth control clinic shut down. and so he contacted the local authorities in new haven to demand that they go over and find out what was happening and shut down estelle griswold's clinic. nobody wanted to do it. spent the better part of a day being shunted along from one office to another in new haven by everybody saying, well, you you ought to talk to this person, that one, nobody wanted to deal with this guy. he was so persistent and so insistent that finally the prosecuting attorney said, all right, all right, basically to get him off the phone, i'll send a couple of policemen over. and he did. he sent over a couple of policemen to estelle griswold's

clinic. when she arrived she came bounding out of her office and she grabbed hold of these people and brought them into the office and sat the officers down and for an hour she gave them every little bit of information she possibly could about birth control, all the panel flets, all the information. she was dredging up every bit of technical knowledge she had. they sat politely taking notes. when he shoes was finely done they got up and shook hands and walked out the door. two weeks later she got a letter informing her that she was being charged in violation of connecticut's 1879 statute. exactly as she wanted to be. she was convicted as she knew she would be in january of 1962, and fined $100 for this enormous

crime of distributing birth control. she then appealed that conviction all the way through the state legal system up through the connecticut supreme court. and when she lost, as she was going to do, she then went into the federal court. and in that long complicated way that court cases have, if any of you have been in a court case, you know what i'm talking about, her case finally reached the supreme court for oral arguments in 1964. and in the spring of 1965, at the end of their 1964-65 supreme court term, the supreme court ruled in her case griswold v connecticut not only that the 1879 connecticut statute was unconstitutional, but it was unconstitutional because it violated a right that up to that

point no american had. a right to privacy. it was out of that court case, in other words, that planned parenthood cracked through that parochial world that the cahills had lived in and opened up such dramatic litigation to come. the most dramatic of it roe v. wade. then there is this young woman. alison krauss. allison had been a graduate of wheaton -- john wheaton maryland, john f. kentucky high school just a year. when a "washington post"

reporter came to the school to ask about her. he went to the front office. when he asked for any information they could give him about allison, really didn't have much to say. they pulled out her file, gave him a copy of her grades, her s.a.t. scores. let him see the letter that her guidance counselor had written on her college application. something like allison is a very mature young woman. but really nobody remembered anything much except how pretty she'd been. even that wasn't necessarily a memory of her because already the photo you are seeing, her high school graduation photo had made the papers by then. not that anyone really, john f. kennedy high in wheaton should have remembered allison krause.

she came to the school the way a lot of kids did to a place like kennedy high, trailing along mind her father as he pursued his corporate skreer. her dad had been hired by the westinghouse corporation in cleveland, ohio, in 1949 when he was a young man. and there he and his wife started to raise their family, allison and her younger sister. 1963 her dad was transferred to the pittsburgh office. so the family trailed along behind him to pittsburgh. then a few years after that he was transferred again to the baltimore plant of the westinghouse corporation, but by then allison was a sophomore in high school and her younger sister was in middle school, i think, and they were a little worried how the schools would go, so they decided to settle in the washington, d.c., greater area, settle into the suburbs, and her dad would get to drive up to baltimore every morning

and allison and her little sister would get glistening new suburban schools. kennedy high had only been open a couple of years when allison enrolled. but for some reason or another allison didn't really make much of a mark in high school. probably because she had arrived as a sophomore. probably because she was 15. didn't join the sort of clubs that the cool kids joined. didn't earn the sort of grades that made her a standout in the classroom. and when she reached her senior year and decided that it was time to apply to college she only applied to one school. but she remembered that when she was little on a sunday her mom and dad and her little sister, they'd pile into the car and they would drive out of cleveland out into the

countryside and in that way folks used to do. she loved those trips, just driving aimlessly out in the countryside. so she decided she would go to a college that was out in that countryside, too. she enrolled at kent state. and in her first year at kent state the '69-70 school year, the feks at her high school only heard from her once. she wrote once in the spring -- well, i guess it was in the winter, to ask that they send her trints to the university of buffalo because she was thinking of transferring. no one didn't know why. it turned out she met a young man from long island. they had become boyfriend/girlfriend. and the young man didn't really fit in at kent state. he wore his hair too long. he didn't care about football.

his roommates used a homophobic slur about him. and so he decided that he had some friends at the university of buffalo and i would like to transfer there and allison was going to follow him just as her mother had followed her father all those years. she and her boyfriend were together on the 4th of may, 1970, crouching in a parking lot when the bullet from the national guardsman ripped through the kennedy high t-shirt she was wearing that day. the next morning the anger was flooding through the country in what would become the most intense moment. anti-war movement. campuses shutting down and the protests reached kennedy high school, too.

kids went up to the flagpole in the front of the school and demanded that the flag be lowered to half mast in allison's honor. another group said, no, that flag had to stay a top. there was a lot of pushing and shoving if until the principal came out and worked out a compromise. said the flag in front could be lowered to half mast but one on the side at the top and that got the kids back into the school. but at some point somebody came out and took that flag at half mast and pulled it down and they burned it. in a garbage can. and it was a few hours after that that the post reporters came to find out what they could about allison's story. after he talked to the folks in the main office he wandered around the hallway to see if any of the kids had anything to remember and they wanted to talk about the protests and they wanted to talk about the war and some of them argued that why should the flag be lowered to half mast because one kid was killed when so many young men

were dying in the war. but when he asked if they remembered allison, most of them said, well, maybe they saw her once or twice in the hallway. but really nobody knew her at all. that fourth of july ed cahill put the flags back up on -- a tradition, all the flags went up, and the flags multiplied because ed collected flags, kept boxes of flags in his basement and every year he would bring them out and drape eddie street and he added music. he would put his record player out the window and plast out patriotic songs and set up bike parades for the kids and cookouts for the neighbors in what he proudly called an old-fashioned holiday. some of that seemed the

appropriate thing by 1970, the displays he embraced in 1961, the world he embraced in '61 somehow seemed a relic of the past. i'm not trying to say that the social movements of the 1960s were all triumphant. civil rights movement of the 1960 rz elizabeth eckford came from, where her moment has to be understood had its triumphs in the 1960s, dramatic triumphs. i will argue to the day i die that they were important triumphs. but there were also limits to what the civil rights movement could do. and among them was the segregation that embraced little rock high in '57 and that ran around eddie street all the time that the cahills were there. and it's true that estelle

griswold and those that followed shattered open the restrictions of parochial world that was so important to the day hills. but the issues they opened clearly haven't died. we live with them still as it's so clear in what's coming from the supreme court in the next few months. and it's true that the anti-war movements, and i insist there were more than one movement, did have an enormous impact on the war in vietnam, even as it cost far too many lives. but the larger framework of america's place in the world wasn't fundamentally transformed. and that's the story of the '60s i'm trying to tell. a story of the '60s that's complex, that's intimate, that's

personal, that's terrifying and inspiring and deeply profoundly ambiguous. a story of the 1960s for our own troubled time. thank you so much for spending some time with me today. now i see that there is a question. no. my mistake. thank you so much for letting me join you today. thank you so much for taking the time. house and senate members are away from washington for two weeks for district and state work periods over the eastern passover holidays. the senate is back monday, april 25 at 3:00 p.m. eastern. lawmakers are expected to debate several of president biden's federal reserve nominees, including lael brainerd, and

lisa cook, who would be the first black woman to serve on the fed board. when congress returns watch live on c-span, see the senate on c-span2, online at c-span sprg or with c-span now. our eight-part series looking at the roles of the first ladies and the issues important to them. >> it was great advantage to know what it was like to work in schools because education is such an important issue both for a governor, but also for a president. and so that was very helpful to me. >> using material from c-span's award-winning biography series first ladies. >> i am very much the kind of person who believes that you should say what you mean and mean what you say and take the consequences. >> and c-span's online video

library. we'll feature first ladies, lady bird johnson, betty ford, rosalynn carter, nancy reagan, hillary clinton, laura bush, michelle obama, and melania trump. watch first ladies in their own words saturdays at 2:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span2 or listen to the series a as a podcast on the c-span now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. black panther. at least six presidents recorded conversations in office. hear them on c-span's new presidents day. presidential recordings. >> the presidency of lyndon johnson. you will hear about the 1964 civil rights act, 1964 presidential campaign, the gulf of tonkin incident, march on selma and the war in vietnam. not everyone knew they were being recorded. >> certainly johnson's

secretaries knew because they were tasked with transcribing many conversations. in fact, they were the ones who made sure that the conversations were taped as johnson would signal to them through an open door between his office and theirs. >> you will hear blunt talk. >> jim. >> yes, sir. >> i want a report of the number of people that assigned to kennedy on me the day he died and the number assigned to me now, and if mine i are not less i want them right quick. >> yes, sir. >> i promise i won't go anywhere, i will stay behind these gate. >> presidential recordings on the c-span now mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. there are a lot of places to get political information, but only at c-span do you get it straight from the source. no matter where you are from or where you stand