>> welcome on this beautiful

earth day. i hope you go do something special for the earth but we are happy. we have an unbelievably special panel today. we are lucky. there will be a lot we can learn from these individual books that you think you know about these subjects but will find your surprised to learn, as i was when i read them. i will introduce myself. i am dan smith, a writer from montana. i like to come here and get sunshine in the spring so it's nice to be here. we will be doing some book signings and i urge you to join us if you want to talk to talk to any of these authors.

we will lead you out. i want to introduce each person with a brief biography so you know who they are. first, i would say this is one of my books, so i will let you know that i will have a book fair as well, letters from yellowstone, but to the important ones. first is david maraniss. he wrote this book, the life of jim thorpe. an associate editor at the washington post and a distinguished visiting professor at vanderbilt. he's won two pulitzers for journalism and is the author of several biographies, including this unbelievably good book.

, which is a rich social history of that time. i was telling him a minute ago i was thrilled he did not get put in sports biography because this book is so much more than that. the next person we have is hugh eakin, senior editor at foreign affairs and author of this new book, picasso's war, and this is a different kind of book. it is a look behind the curtains of the art world. there is some picasso in here but you will learn how art markets are created and how we come to accept what we consider modern art and take it in stride but that was not the case at the time. the next one is mr. b, a beautifully written biography of george balanchine. jennifer homans is at the new yorker and trained in ballet so

she has some insights when she describes these innovations. she's the perfect author to bring this life to this magical book. we look forward to learning more about him as well. finally, beverly gage, author of g-man: j edgar hoover and the making of the american century. she commented last night when she was awarded best biography of 2022 that who would read an 800 page -- [applause] so, yeah, well worth the 800 pages. she said, who could read this

kind of book about a horrible man? it's a page turner. you cannot put it down. if you have any background in this era of history, it's a truly page turner. we are blessed to be here with these great authors. i have asked them to start -- let me say please turn off your cell phone. please be responsive to your fellow audience and these authors so we don't have calls coming in and make an effort to do it now if you have not already i will -- have not already. i will ask each author to give a brief introduction of how to -- of how they came to this subject and then we will hopefully illuminate the background of these people we think we know but i think you will be surprised at some things you learn. david? >> thank you and i'm honored to be with this panel. it might look like we are drinking beer but it is not.

more than 20 years ago, i was on a book tour in denver, and a gentleman came to me after my presentation and said he was from the united nation of wisconsin and he had my next book for me and a sheaf of papers about jim thorpe. as politely as i could, i said thank you very much. i'm working on two other books i'm about to do and, you know, i don't take suggestions from anybody because a book has to come out organically, but in fact, he planted a seed that took about 15 years to grow. the reason it did is i realized jim thorpe was the perfect person for what i consider the third person in a trilogy of books about sports figures who transcend sports. the first was vince lynn bardi, the coach of the green bay packers. even though i grew up in

wisconsin, that's not why i wrote the book. it was my opportunity to write about the pathology of competition and success in american life and what it takes and what it costs. the second of that trilogy was about roberto clemente, the beautiful baseball player from puerto rico who was also a terrific hall of famer, but that's not why i wrote the book even though he was my favorite player when i was a kid because he was so cool. so many athletes are called hearings and almost none really are, but roberto clemente was. his motto in life is, if you have a chance to help others and failed to do so, you are wasting your time on this earth, and he died living that mono, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to nicaragua after a devastating earthquake in 1972 after hearing the dictator of nicaragua was diverting the aid. he said, if i go, it will get to the people, and he died in a plane crash trying to deliver that.

the third is jim thorpe, who not only was an athlete of unparalleled achievement. the trifecta he had no one has done before or since, which was not only was he an olympic gold medalist in the decathlon and pentathlon but also an american football player, the greatest early player in the professional football ranks, the first president of what would become the national football league, and the major league baseball player. no one had done all three sports. he was also a great hockey player, lacrosse. he was a champion ballroom dancer and even good at marbles, so he could do anything, but that is not why i wrote the book. i saw the opportunity, as with the other two, to use the drama of sports to write about larger themes, and in this case, about the native american experience. he was from an indian nation and his life put brackets around the most important events of what

white society did to indigenous peoples. he was born in 1887, the year of the passage of an act that took away the properties of native peoples and try to force them into being private landowners, a deal that cost them millions of acres of land. he went to the indian boarding schools where the model of carlisle, where he meant -- where he went, was killed the indian, save the man. it would divest them of their culture, language, heritage. and he died in 1953, when there was an effort in congress to eliminate indian tribes altogether. beyond that, he was screwed many times in his life, most importantly when the gold medals he won were taken away from them. that's why i wrote this. diane: jennifer? [applause] jennifer: thank you for being here. thank you, diane, and happy to

be here with everyone. balanchine. i wrote this book for many reasons but as a young person i was thrown by an accident as so many of us are into balanchine's world. i was in the presence as i came to understand it later in a life-changing experience of art and watching these dances that left you transported and i could not understand why this was happening. i thought i would leave it all behind but i could not because it was so much part of my life

and i was trying to understand what was it about balanchine that affected people so deeply, it had to do, i think, with the ways in which this man had lived 20th century life. he was born in russia in 1904. he grew up in st. petersburg and experienced as a child and young teenager the russian revolution, which was a harrowing experience for him. his childhood destroyed by violence and trauma and illness. he was alone, on the streets, ill, eating rats and trying to survive with this group of people at the school, and at the same time, as he came of age, he was thrown into the revolutionary avant-garde, so

there was this mixture of hatred of what had happened to his homeland and the whole reason for his art and the idea of making something that was progressive and revolutionary was central to his identity. after that, he left russia in 1924, just as lenin died and he ended up in europe and then the united states, where he cofounded the new york city ballet in 1948. so it's a story of revolution, war, exile, of the making of art out of a very, very difficult life, a sad life, in many ways, but also one that's full of determination and desire to almost -- almost ruthless

desire, and this is part of what i was interested in, that he was involved in trying to invent a new language with the body and he changed the way we see dance but also the way we see the human figure, and so if trying to understand how he did that -- so i was trying to understand how he did that. he did not do it alone. i called the book mr. b because that is what his dancers called him. we can talk about this later, but he did not have an art without his dancers. dance only exists in the present moment when it is on a stage in time, in action. and so, when it ins, when -- when it ends, when the curtain goes down, it is over. you might do it again the next night but it is different. he was involved and would say things like, what are you saving it for? you might be dead tomorrow.

he knew that from his own experience, you might be dead tomorrow. so he was trying to create an art that would galvanize them to almost explode the human body in a shower of life and depth of the human condition that would reach the audiences. so that is why i wrote it, because i was trying to understand who was this man and what drove him? [applause] diane: hugh? hugh: hugh: hugh: hugh: thank you hugh:. thank you. i love that our protagonists are so deeply embedded in the politics of this era. so picasso, in august 1939, los

angeles had its first frontal confrontation with picasso. you have probably heard of guernica, often talked about as the most famous painting of the 20th century. it arrived in august 1939 with a series of a dozen or so drawings, preparatory drawings he had done, courtesy of the spanish relief committee, an activist group that was trying to raise money for victims of the spanish civil war. the expectation was we will get huge crowds, hollywood backing, and we will raise a lot of money for this relief effort. guernica head been shown -- had been shown in europe and arrived in the u.s. in the summer of

1939. things did not go quite as planned. hardly anybody came. fewer people than are in this room today. in total, it raised a few hundred dollars, probably not covering the transportation costs of bringing this monumental painting around the country. so here is the sort of starting point in my story. the standard view of picasso, this larger-than-life, heroic figure, he sort of emerges fully formed as this kind of -- the first, you know, superstar artist of the 20th century. well, his history in the u.s. was one of continual failure right up until 1939 in los angeles and it goes back to the early years of the century, in 1911.

there was an exhibition of his first show of drawings at a tiny gallery in new york. they were sold for $12 apiece. and guess how many sold? exactly one of 83 works. the rest were offered in a special deal to the metropolitan museum of art, which erupted in laughter, and they were sent back to europe. this pattern repeated over and over. in 1923, there was a show in chicago. not a single painting sold. and that was the first show of paintings instead of drawings. the first great museum show in 1934 in hartford, connecticut, the curator said, years later, how could this have been such a flop?

so this story of resistance and outright hostility to modern art is a very american story and the starting -- the starting point of my book was to answer why and how is it that we have forgotten this and how did this dramatic shift take place? it turns out to be a small number of people in this story and one of them is this early 20th century figure, john quinn, who almost impossibly identifies the artist we recognize today at a time when nobody cared about them and they were regarded, ridiculed. a kind of inheritor of this -- of his work was alfred barr, founding director of the museum

of modern art, and again, a unique figure who happened to be in russia when stalin takes over in 1927 who happened to be in germany in 1933, when hitler comes to power, and absorbs this idea of art as the kind of first front of fascism when it cracks down on society. he translates this into a case on why modern art needs to come to the u.s. and my book is essentially telling the story of how that happens. diane: thank you. [applause] beverly: it's wonderful to be here and see many of you. unlike many of my panelists -- my fellow panelists, i did not

come to writing about j edgar hoover because i admired him so much, but because i wanted to redeem him in some way, but i was fascinated by hoover from the moment i started working on that book to the very end, and it's a book that i worked on for more than a decade, and there are a couple things that fascinated me about him. first was the sheer longevity of his career.

it was a span of 48 years that he was head of this giant institution that became known as the fbi and that he built, so like many of my fellow panelists, i was interested in hoover as an individual and he is an interesting individual. the book is a large part a political biography but does get into some of the fascinating questions about his personal life, about his sexuality, about his relationships, but he was a figure who, during that amazing span of time, really had his fingers in almost everything that happened and many of the things that i care about as a historian, so the book tries to get away from what i think has

become a caricature of hoover as a one-dimensional villain, a man sitting alone in a dark room listening in on the wiretaps and strong-arming everyone else into doing what he wanted and tries to take him from the margins and put him back in the center of this political story and of our story in the 20th century because that is really where he was. just to put a little bit more detail on this span of time from 1924 to 1972, it means he became director of the bureau under calvin coolidge and stayed on under herbert hoover, the dawn of the great depression. he was there under franklin roosevelt for all three terms of roosevelt's time, so the 1930's, the new deal, into the second world war. he stayed on through truman's presidency, the rise of

macarthur's presidency -- the rise of mccarthy, the cold war. he was there under john kennedy and lyndon johnson and he was there under richard nixon and died at the end of nixon's first term. to understand that, there is some truth to the idea that hoover acquired power, used it ruthlessly, did not like his critics, went after them. it actually cannot explain this to her story, how he got his start, how he built that institution, the fbi, in his own image, according to his own priorities, and then how he stayed there for so long, not as one of the great villains of american politics.

that comes toward the end of his life and was his dominant image after death, but as one of the most popular public figures in all of the united states for most of his career. in this book there is all this new detail from endless records but in the end of the most surprising thing was, how well supported he was in the white house and congress, a vast popular constituency, and when we look at the terrible things he did and believed in, we have to ask about what he did and the growth of the federal government, the security state, and the boundaries of american

democracy, who is considered a legitimate participant in this national project and who is outside of it, subject to surveillance and disruption and discrediting, which the fbi did a lot of during his time. [applause] diane: now i would like to ask some brief questions of everyone to give you a sense of some of the rest of the story that i think was interesting about these books and hopefully we can get the authors to introduce you to a couple of these facets that you may not be aware of. one of the first things i think -- beverly, i will start with you, because your hoover is very different and i would have expected, and one of the things that interests me is how well, socially, he was accepted within that circle of the kennedys and

i'm wondering if you could tell something that surprised you when you were doing your work, just briefly, something a little bit outside of what we expect to see. beverly: right. well, i would say there are two aspects of the ways in which hoover was quite popular. roosevelt and johnson were the two figures who enabled him, and powered him -- him, empowered him, expanded the power of the fbi, and hoover would not have become what he was without their support and at many moments the support of a whole generation of liberals who really saw him as a sort of heroic state

builder, believer in the liberal state, and the political puzzle of the book is thinking about hoover in two ways. one is hoover as someone who came out of a progressive liberal tradition of building administrative power, belief in the federal government and what it could do in professionalism and nonpartisan service and all of these aspects of washington culture of a certain kind of midcentury liberalism, and on the other hand, was of course a passionate ideological conservative on questions of race, communism, religion, law and order, and the political trick is that he put these two forms together and kind of created the fbi out of them. so the support of liberals was one really important piece that i had not expected to find as much of, and that does change by the late 1960's, and then the other, which has more to do with his personal life, you know, the

major relationship of his adult life was with clyde tolson, the number two man at the fbi, but also basically hoover's social spouse. they traveled together, had all their meals together. they went to broadway shows together, vacationed in la jolla together. they spent lots of times in the kind of l.a. social world in hollywood and it was a very open relationship, which is to say that many of the people they were socializing with treated them like a couple. when you look at hoover's personal correspondence, he's often signing it from edgar and clyde. they are double dating with dick and pat nixon. so one wants to be a fly on the wall for those dinners and cocktail parties. but this was surprising to me but there were many aspects of that relationship that remain

secret. was it a sexual relationship? how do they feel about each other? but the social aspect was incredibly open and well-documented and fascinating to look at in an era when we think that would not have been possible. diane: that was the one that stood out to me, that in the particulars of what they were looking for in an fbi man, and if you have seen fbi people on television lately, if you are a political junkie like i am, they all kind of have a similar hoover look of what he was looking for in an fbi man. is there something you learned that surprised you surprised us? >> absolutely. like many -- pretty much all of you on this panel, he was a kind of cloaked figure. there was a mythology around a

sort of postwar art mythology known primarily as an inventor and distraction in advance or most famous conveyor. there was this idea, the secular thing, and it was very stripped-down, and the human form completely revealed. no extra costumes, no sets, very -- almost an idea of transparency. the freeing of the human body. i -- the more i looked at this, i spent 10 years in these papers. it's very you have to be intimate. at least i did. it's like living with the dead.

it's about how to make dances, but act he was mystic. he was extremely interested in all kinds of traditions. he -- i learned this by flipping through one of many folders i will flip through because he pretty much -- he tried to -- he threw a lot of things away. there was no big archive. there were just a lot of credit card statements, a lot of phone books. a lot of -- you can learn a lot from these things, but at the end of one of these files where i was wishing there was a tyler something, it was written about

the choreographic process and the artistic process. it is about being revealed in human form. a little too close to nudity, which is something he wanted. it was very erratic for him. he also wanted the body to be invested with the divine. so, it turned out that was a big part of the project. and how he does that with dancers without saying that's

what he was doing, there were secrets. a secret way of working with people. where, it was nonverbal. but, so many of the answers i've interviewed, and i've interviewed them to understand what their experience was, and so many of them that to me it was like a religion. so what i came to believe as i unraveled this theological aspect of his life is that he -- what he had tried to do was create a counter revolution in the spirit. who would oppose the material revolution of the bolsheviks. that had so influenced and also did destroys childhood and the life he knew. there was a way in which these two things were a cold war story. his mind was always in america, and it had been given a home in

a citizenship, and a place to practice his art. even that was very tough. with the company that was established, the sort of cold war aspect that was suffused by religious idea. it was very interesting to me, and unexpected. >> thank you. >> these are all really deeply researched books on the four of them. the footnotes can often be as interesting as the prose, if you are like me and want to read into where this goes. >> i love the footnotes. >> i'm wondering your case what challenges you encountered try to reconstruct his life as a researcher.

>> the first challenge was covid. my policy, my model is to go wherever there is. for my vince lumbar people, turning to my wife after 1996 election, with bill clinton, muttering the immortal words, how would like to move to green bay for the winter. she responded no. but i've done that for all of my books, and about halfway through this book, covid came on, and i never got to stockholm where he won gold medals, and i probably would have spent significant time if i moved to oklahoma where he was. that was complete a different. there are ways to make up for it, and because he was born in 1887 and died in 1953, there were no contemporaries to interview from books on clinton or obama.

each case interviewed 400 people. it's all archival. branch rickey, the general manager of baseball was known for a phrase, luck is the residue of design. the first thing i did was interview or talk to several activists and scholars to make sure that i was ok that i wrote this book, and they could help me along the way. one of them who is a brilliant activists in washington dc let a fight for decades to get a football team to change his name, and my father was interviewed, but he met a great man. he was interviewed once. i said who did the interview. he said it was david hurst thomas, but as an interpol it is the museum of natural history new york, so i wrote to thomas and said what i was doing and he

invited me up, and i went to his office on the fifth floor of the building in new york, and he was actually sitting at the desk with his cowboy boots on the desk, and we talked for a couple of hours and he said i read your book on lombardi. you're the guy. i spent eight years researching jim thorpe. i was obsessed with him. i couldn't read the book read i have nine boxes of archival material. so, i want you to have it. this was right before covid. i took the train to d.c.. i drove back up. and things like that. they really help me along the way. it was locked. but residue of design. >> so, this is titled -- i should've introduced us at the game. this is the gates of the 20

century. i am wondering how your book in the lives you've documented reflect the gate, but also reflect the current times as well. >> yes. that's a great question. the -- it is interesting for me working on this book. i could see a lot of parallels with today. this art obsessed society that that the same time extremely censorious and reactionary. but, one of the things i think are so striking to me was i was saying this to jenny before the battle. the figures in my book were outsiders. he could include picasso myself,

and at the dawn of the 20th century, the united states was at this really interesting geopolitical moment. coming out of the spanish-american war. it was arriving on the world scene and had aspirations clearly articulated to be a great power. including all of the prerequisites, cultural, economic. and political. the cultural dimension was vacuous. there was a blank slate and there was a sense that j.p. morgan was going to europe and buy up all the sold art. bring it to the metropolitan. especially if he could do it duty-free. >> which he could. he got the tax law change for his historic art. not for modern art. that was heddle -- heavily task -- taxed which is a chapter my book. it's very interesting.

tax law shapes the kind of culture that this early rash new world republic was shaping, and it was in cultural and securities there was an emulation of the renaissance. literally, the renaissance. they are not trying to promote artists and create new culture. they are trying to acquire what those mattice acquired. they want to build safe houses. so striking at this long early 20th century is how much resistance there was to getting to the on phone card. getting to the point where the culture, american culture is larger. it could embrace new cultural ideas.

to go along with this -- two important ones. kind of why i like that up until world war i. paul rosenberg, between morris, and again, because of geopolitical circumstances.

takes over. after world war ii. there is an immense continuity of the small group of figures telling us a much larger story. i think that made it possible. >> that's fascinating. >> interests is me about the war overlap. there is so much revolution and impending change. there's an interesting cultural change. so, respond to that. >> is minor, but it 57, jim thorpe did that fight in world war i. volunteered to serve in the merchant marines and were work two. he was there. the backdrop of the kill the indians, save the man was this indian war. middle of 19th century. >> that the underlying story.

>> i have another question. i will look for volunteers here. this is so obvious of a question but i don't mean it to be. all of these characters are protagonists with a darkside. i'm wondering how you came to terms as you wrote that or did european change. i'll throw that out because some of you have more ideas on how to respond. >> as the darkside representative here, yes. for me, because hoover's darkside is so well known, and in some ways, the most surprising pieces for me were the less dark moments are the moments where he heated things where i thought, ok. that makes sense. i could kind of admire that. there were moments of that is light.

it imposes a mass internment of the japanese during the second world war. even after the height of the many truly terrible and outrageous and often illegal things that the fbi was doing to finger -- figures that work martin thinking it they were also engaged in a much less well-known but pretty aggressive campaign against those clans. nazi groups, white supremacist groups. often using the same techniques, so for me, those were the sort of surprising moments. i did -- are we ok? does everyone need to run? >> please do your cell phone off. is that possible? >> i don't and that comes through anyway.

i did have, because huber has been seen as such, there is a complicated story about him, about the centrality to so many political movements and social movements. particularly repressing them. i had some anxieties about whether i was doing something to redeem this character. i did not want to do that. i wanted to humanize him. i wanted to understand them. i wanted to become more complicated, but without shining away from the dark stuff. i think it worked in the end. it was a challenge. i think that was the biggest challenge for me. >> never has the cell phones, could use turn them off for leave the building. it is very distracting. >> i think it is everyone. >> sorry. >> go ahead.

>> just, in a very different way, he had a quite darkside that came in several forms. one is a depressive personality more than i understood before, and i think because of the various traumas he went through, but the more important one was the relationship he had with women. not so much interpersonally, but in a sense of yes, interpersonally, but in terms of the making of this art, he was married five times. he never really had many other women besides those five wives. all of those wives were dancers. answers he was interested in. his creative process, and the ways he was going to make this word and spirit which he thought was in a kind of way that we don't think anymore, but he did

-- there was a femininity and an interesting -- interest in the androgynous and the ways in which you could make the spirit out of female body. that was the side of it. the process of remaking and revolutionizing dance in which we move our human bodies was to work with -- as violence to it. it is flesh and bone. you are moving flesh and bone. in the training. everyone knows that training can be difficult, and this was an extreme. the requirements of it, it was not only physical, just like extreme extensions of the limbs, but extreme speed, extreme -- height, jumps, lowes, he was

interested in more. in making the human body into something much -- with a greater capacity than it had in any other life. he wanted an extraordinary being, not an ordinary being. ischemic private cost -- this came at quite a cost. these women were often young, but i mean teenagers, or into their early 20's as they are beginning. but the ways in which they were being asked to move, and which they were moving themselves, he was of course there driving force. it could be punishing. with this emphasis on revealing the forum, it often meant not too much fat. two fat. so there was an emphasis on

stripping the bodies, sculpting the body in ways that were not natural, necessarily to human develop in. so, these women would have -- many of them had really difficult times with it. in terms of the extremes, the weight, in terms of the regime. he wanted them fully to himself. this was going to take everything they had, so please, no boyfriends, let's not get married. let's not have children. don't do those things. it will take you away from you. you don't want to be mending socks that i will give you the stage. there is an almost cultish aspect to some of this. it was not cultish in the sense that it was about one person, but it was about an art form and so even though when i try to do this, it was to talk as much as i could to the women who were involved.

two really present their testimony. what it was like to give them the voice and how they experienced it. the amazing thing was that they often experience it as they would never take it back because either great moments in their lives and they loved to dance, so it is a very complicated story that relationship between him who could be really ruthless, and not caring about him but also caring about everything is a dancer and a human being. except, when they were dancing. difficult. >> we have time for a few questions if anyone would like to ask a question of these authors. we do have a microphone, and i see the first hand is a peer. the only thing that i asked is that you please form as a question and make it brief so we have time to talk about some of

these ideas. i saw someone with their hand up. >> d -- q your mia wright? how wonderful it is to see another example, many examples of the reality behind what we see in public. it is so different. my question goes to jean. you mentioned that you had been at the theater school. i assume you mean the school of l.a.. featured by grace kelly. was she a dancer there? what did we do? >> yes. she was trained as a dancer. at least until sometime in the 20's when he had a knee injury. they require surgery. he had to stop dancing. he was a good enough dancer had but, mainly, what he was was a choreographer. the dance training had given the tools that he needed, but it

wasn't going to be the end of the future -- the future, and he needed to know that. he could mimic everything from trotsky to your dog. he knew how to just capture something immediately. in motion and in life. to answer the question, the theater school, i do mean the theater school, it was not called the donovan school when he was there, but soon was afterwards. next thank you. that was a great question. go ahead. wait for the microphone. >> hello. i'd like to know with respect to the relationship of lbj and jaeger hoover, which one was driving the hostility and intimidation and threats mostly towards martin luther king? vicki. >> ice question. >> that's a great option.

this is one of the relationships that really fascinates because i think we have a public image, and there was what i was seeing in the dock minced with lyndon johnson, which people know about the nixon tapes. also he a lot of phone calls, and office life. hoover and johnson were old friends. they actually lived on the same block in washington. for many years will johnson was in congress. they work their dog stood together, and so, this is a book about washington. about washington as a small town, and that's one of those small town moments. when johnson became president as a result of the kennedy assassination, he and hoover were already very tight, and johnson from the first look at hoover as a tool that he could use and is johnson in 1964 who exempted hoover from what would

have been mandatory federal retirement at the age of 70. he did that to get to your question, in order to use hoover in a variety of ways. on the one hand, johnson was very explicit about pushing the fbi into civil rights enforcement, and asking hoover and the fbi to do things that were going to help him promote and forward a civil rights agenda, particularly around attempts to pass the civil rights act of 1964, and the voting rights act in 1965. so, in that sense, he pushed hoover to escape more aggressively and manage the political situation around civil rights in order to get these landmark achievements there. on the other hand, and this is probably less well-known, he was often very actively in the loop with hoover and sometimes, he conspired with hoover to spy on martin luther king in particular and surveilled civil rights

movement. particularly, the student movement that emerged later. there was a lot of direct interchange about stokely carmichael, for example. especially in the mid 60's. on martin luther king, it was clear that johnson had seen and maybe even heard of the tapes that were made. the fbi put bugs in those telltale rooms. and to sex like. washington favored figures in the hopes of discrediting king. it was clear that johnson -- the most outrageous thing in 1964, democratic national convention in atlantic city where the mississippi freedom democratic party had shown up civil rights activist trying to unseat with the south. johnson went to the fbi and said

their specials quads to spy on a wiretap. with activists and leaders showing up at the democratic national convention. all totally legal activity and just put collectivism. even hoover was a little uncomfortable with this. they sent back these political reports to lyndon johnson to help him manage, disrupt, and discredit civil rights activists. >> one actor said he was going to report that johnson was going to fire j edgar hoover but when johnson found out bradley was going to print the story he appointed him for life. i'm wondering if that was totally true. >> i don't see any evidence that

lyndon johnson ever wanted to fire j edgar hoover. they liked each other, they got along well. i don't think that johnson had that plan. >> we have time for navy be one or two quick questions. >> you didn't expand on how jim thorpe's metals were taken away. >> they were taken away because it turned out after he won 1912 in stockholm, there was a story that broke the said he played bush league baseball in the eastern carolina league two summers. they were immediately taken away and there were four reasons why it was incredible he just. the first is that literally scores of college players were playing minor league baseball in that era including dwight eisenhower. they were playing under aliases. eisenhower played under wilson.

jim thorpe played under jim thorpe he never tried to hide it. pop warner is coach at carlisle and the head of the olympic committee knew precisely what thorpe had been doing it might about it when the story broke to save their reputations. thirdly, the question of what's amateur and what's professional was bogus. jim thorpe played baseball for about a dollar a day. it had nothing to do with the metals of his winning. george patton impleaded -- competed in the modern pentathlon. he was paid by the army to play for the pentathlon which were all military events. he didn't suffer at all, but jim fort did. -- jim fort did. finally, the olympic bylaws said to file a challenge against someone's amateurism it had to be 30 days after the end of the

olympics and this came six month later. it took 110 years for that to be righted. only last year was he finally restored all of his metals and records. >> that's an amazing story. want to thank you all for being here. unfortunately, we will be cut short because we have to quit on the hour, but we can continue the questions and conversation if you like in the signing area. if you like, you're welcome to follow us over, because we don't know where we are going either. [laughter] >> literally and figuratively. [applause] >> thank you.