then british prime minister theresa may takes questions from members of the house of commons. after that, a hearing on domestic terrorism. ♪ brian: david marinus, when did you decide to name your book, "a good american family"? david: 48 long time i was .alling it judgment in room 740 the house un-american activities committee conducted its hearings in 1952 on communism in the detroit area. that was early on in the

process. i knew i wanted to bring a lot of people into that room, not just my father and my family, but the chairman of the .ommittee and the fbi informant that was the nexus of the piece. in the end, it really was more -- is more history, but i knew a quotee i came across from a congressman from michigan who expressed surprise that someone from a good american family could be a member of the communist party, i said, that's it. i knew my family was a good american family in every possible way. juxtaposition to define the book. brian: i want to put up on the screen your mother and father. tell us when this picture was taken. when you look at them, what do you think about?

in 1944hat was taken when father was on leave. it was in the army, it was during world war ii. think about how beautiful my mother was, first of all. , my dad was already going through a tough time, but he didn't show it much. he had been a radical at the university of michigan, but the division, intelligence of the u.s. army had already investigated him because he was applying for -- he wanted to be an officer. he made it to become an officer, and right after this, he went off to camp leave virginia to , so id an all-black unit am thinking about, this is the

early part of their lives before they had the four kids. they were idealistic, i would say. brian: when did you discover that both your mother and father were at one point, communists? in thewas always background of our lives but never in the forefront. he was called before the committee when i was 2. by the time i would say i was sort of aware of the world around me, we had moved to madison. i was seven years old. nothing really sticking strongly about our family unit. he had already reinvented himself and moved on. it wasn't talked about in our family. occasionally he might say something that alluded to that era, but never any specifics.

i try to interview him maybe 30 years ago. then i started thinking about it more but i knew i wasn't going to write about it until they were gone. and then as i report in the my lifeid i spent studying strangers until they become more familiar to me. most people know about their family, sort of the family stories and mythology, but they don't have a biography going deep into study would happen. i was doing that with my own family. i learned more and more about their involvement in the communist party. brian: what would have been the years that they were communists? my mother was a member of

the on communist league. my father was not, but he was definitely a leftist. after he came back from the war, i would say from 1946-1952. brian: you say you are not quite sure in your book what they ever saw in the soviet union. did they like the idea of the soviet union, and why? i think they like the egalitarian idea. think that my father in particular and my mother, to some extent, were shaped by what --saw as the economic equalities that were more obvious during the great

depression when capitalism was being questioned more strongly with what had happened with the collapse of that system. i think his stubbornness and ignorance was not seeing things in the paranoia and murders history of the soviet union until later. when did he lose his first job, and why? fired february 29, 1952, during those hearings when an abbey i informant called the called tor spy was testify. of the been a member commonest party, a paid informant for the fbi from 1943-1952, when she came in from the cold. everybody in the party knew her. she named names. to investigate the

but a loto workers, of other people were collateral damage and my father was one of those. brian: the house un-american activities committee, abolished in 1975. david: it is a part of american history. one of the central questions of my book is, what is un-american? committeean of that was john stevens would you had walked back to it voted against every civil rights bill they came through congress. a member of the ku klux klan and had other dark parts of his past. where is he from? david: he is from northern georgia, grew up on a farm and andme a lawyer in georgia

briefly worked for the north georgia circuit as a judge and then got elected to congress from that congressional district up there. frank was really an interesting guy. counsel for the house un-american activities committee in 1962. earliereen a council during the famous investigation of communists in hollywood. from woodstock, virginia, out in the shenandoah valley. right after world war ii he served as the acting general counsel for the u.s. mission at

the tokyo war crimes tribunal, trying to japanese who were responsible for the atrocities. aian: the idea of having council interview somebody from the committee, and this case he was counsel. he asked her father -- >> the committee members would participate as well, but most of the tough questions -- was done by the council. that was the way worked. amendment, you can invoke the fifth amendment to not testify get yourself. it's written into the constitution of the united states. historically, people abuse the fifth amendment -- but the point is

not whether your guilty or innocent, it's that you have the right not to be browbeaten into confession. brian: how often did your proper use that? numberi didn't count the of times. most, not all the questions, but he certainly used it to not testify not only against himself but to name any other names are testify against himself as he was interrogated. brian: when you started the project, where did you go to find the things that you needed to write this book? david: so many places. one of the first places i went was the national archives, right down the street. the people there were terrific. all the committee records are open now. it is a congressional committee. the archive is there help me find what i needed in terms of

that two weeks of hearings and within those files, there was one fall for elliott marinus, my father. because it was a public hearing in detroit, i had long known about the transcript. in the transcript, my father says, i have a statement i would like to read. the chairman does not allow him to read the statement. he probably would have let him read it if my father had confessed to his sins and sought absolution and named names, but he did, so he was not allowed to read that statement. thought, where is that statement, i would love to see it, what did he say? the moment that i found it in his file was one of the most powerful moments of my

experience in reporting this book. , this was a central part of my families back story. i had never really a loud myself onfocused before that moment what my father had endured. , and oneat statement particular part of it, which was -- it starts by saying statement mariness. people who remember the era of typewriters remember the keys would stick. i that moment of seeing it, knew my dad, i had seen him type

for years and years and i remember he typed really hard and the keys would stick, and that was it. that was me finally putting myself in my father's place at that moment. on page 288 were you statement, specifically where did you find it, and how long did it take you to find it? david: i wish i could say the back -- exact docs number and file number. it is in the book. it was up in the research room and it was right there. brian: at the national archives of detroit, or right here? david: it was one of the first things i found, among all the documents that i uncovered. oldn: so he was 34 years

the day he testified, and he won to read the chairman said no. how big was the family at that time, and did he have a job? david: he had just been fired a week earlier from the detroit times, a hearst newspaper in we believe he was the rewrite men on the copy desk. he would take all the feeds from reporters and put it into english and write the stories. i was 2.5, my older sister was and jim was almost seven, my oldest brother. and of course my mother, so it was a family of five at that point. we were living in detroit in a flat in detroit.

the first thing i say in this my older brother and sistery brother are two of the smartest people i have ever known in my life. a graphics not a for memory, but a very, very sharp memory of certain things. he can recite any point he has ever read, that sort of stuff. but he was traumatized by this period, much more so than i. the five years that follow this , we were bouncing from one school to another as my father was trying to get his life back together. jim remembers going to the headquarters of the communist

, my father was also working as an editor. scene where he remembers immediately after my father was called to testify and ,ne of his friends mothers said jim stack is a communist. back off that since 1952, how did he find himself in the united states military, and what year did he go in? and was he a communist then? david: he went in right after pearl harbor. he enlisted. he wasn't a member of the communist party, but he was definitely a leftist, i would say.

mothers rather was a member of the communist party. he wanted to fight against hitler's and so he joined the war effort. one of the important, illuminating parts of my book, in terms of understanding my dad, was that he wrote all these letters home to my mother during 1941-1945 time from hundred hundreds of letters. course they have some typical romance and other things in there, but they are very illuminating in terms of the way he viewed the world. he was able to show his leadership skills as commander of that all-black unit. we see in those letters, and i

would argue you also see it in many essays which will get to later, i think you see his love of america throughout that period. he believed not in destroying america, but in making it better. brian: i would have meant to be a communist and 1939 versus 1952? david: that is an excellent question. was evidence of the evils of the soviet union. but there were different factors involved. warwas the spanish civil which had just ended. the united states and france and great britain were neutral.

the communist party was part of the effort to defeat franco. during the war itself, the soviet union and the united states were allies, fighting hiller. we were deep into the cold war. there was also a war going on in korea against the communists there. it was a different matter. i think that members of the communist party of the united states, the membership had .hrunk considerably many leftists had turned away from the party by then. some people continued after that. my parents did not, but they did

longer than i would have thought. mentioned charles potter. in most of those years, the committee was run by democrats. what is his story, because you write him up in there. i found charles potter to be a very interesting study. he was a classic mainstream midwesterner from the midwestern. he went off to fight in world officerpot as an through the battle of the bulge andhe was severely wounded ended up losing both legs and one of his testicles.

he came back like so many to their home state and and got involved with politics as one of those young veterans. was elected to congress, put on the house un-american activities richarde, much like nixon or those other young veteran congressman. they were staunch anti-communist. when the hearings were held in detroit he was starting to run for the senate, potter was. he was elected at the end of that year. in the senate he was put on the subcommittee with joe mccarthy.

that's when he started to see the different nasa nations and manipulations of mccarthy -- the achinations. jump forward to the 1960's, he wrote a book called "days of shame." he had knowledge a lot of mistakes that republicans made during that time. even writes a section where he puts in the fifth amendment in regrets that it was used rite. is an important this is the only time i will jump forward and let you ask me about it again. it was the republicans, margaret

chase, several other republicans .ncluding president eisenhower , will theame republicans 10 years from now write a book like that? brian: it's hard to believe joe mccarthy was 48 when he died. buried in your home state. i want to show you some video of to theruman and get other issue that you sent me to in your book. this is 1950. >> and want to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. not going to transform our fine f.b.i. into a gestapo secret police. that's what some people would like to do.

[applause] we're not going to try to control what our people read, say, and think. brian: that was 1950. you sent me to this. the executive order 9835. from march 21, 1947. truman is president and he issues this executive order. where as, it is of vital importance that persons employed in the federal service be of complete and unswerving loyalty to the united states, and i'll jump down to part one. there should be a loyalty investigation of every person entering the city civilian employment of any department or agency of the executive branch of the federal government. it goes on and on. but what was this about, put this in context. david: it wasn't just the federal government. there were loyalty oaths going all the way down through the state governments, the board of education, teachers in states were ordered to sign loyalty oaths, many of them refused and were fired. but it was the intense hysteria,

you might say, at least fear of the cold war, and of an internal threat to the united states, that just washed over this country in that period. and harry truman and the democrats were caught in a place that they basically had been dealing with it in various ways ever since, which is the conundrum, how do you uphold the civil liberties, which are at the heart of the american democracy, and yet not be accused of being soft on whatever. communism, or the enemies within and without, and so on. so you know, during that period, i hadn't seen that statement before, thanks for showing it, he made that and he also went the other way. they were trying to find their way through this difficult period. brian: i want to ask you, further on in this executive

order, this is one of his points, what would happen with this today? the head of each department and agency shall appoint one or more loyalty boards. each composed of not less than three representatives of the department of agency concerned, for the purpose of hearing loyalty cases arising within such department or agency. david maraniss: that's chilling, isn't it? especially when you think about how that could be -- how not only it was misused during that period, and there is -- there are parts of that, that aren't even in the book, like the lavender scare, where they went after gay and lesbian people in that same period, in the same ways, in the federal government. loyalty to what? and to whom? who defines it?

and, you know, how that can be, you know, how it was defined them in terms of loyalty to america versus the soviet union? what were, you know, is it loyalty in your mind and in your writing or is it loyalty in your actions? which are two very different things, and the ways that was misused and could be misused in the present is chilling. brian lamb: reaction of jenny and jim, your brother and sister, when they knew you were doing this and what you found? david: it was an interesting and important process. so for the whole period that my parents were alive, i was not going to write this book, and it was not something my father or my mother really talked about much. and when i really started to become obsessed with it and i

was talking to my sister and brother, jenny was supportive from the beginning. she might have had qualms about what i would find but she -- she's not the type of person, she's just very supportive of me always. jim, it was a little more complicated. he, i think in part because he was conscious during this period and maybe felt it was more his story than mine. i was just 2. what did i know? i think he underestimated perhaps my research capacity to find -- you can say, what can you really know about what my parents were thinking? after you read 200 letters from my father and 200 editorials and essays and stories that he wrote for the michigan daily you start to get a pretty good sense of what he was thinking. not entirely, of course, because no biographer ever knows the internal thoughts of another human being, i mean, you don't

know what i'm thinking at this moment, you know, nor die know what you're thinking, because there is a contradictory thoughts that flow through period. in any case, jim was pretty much -- he'll now say he didn't try to talk me out of it but i felt like he was trying to talk me out of it. brian: where are those two today? david maraniss: jim, he lives in western massachusetts. he was a professor for decades at amherst university. professor of spanish, including the spanish civil war. spanish literature, a calderon specialist. and he just retired. my sister lives in pittsburgh. she was the chief research librarian at carnegie melon university. brian: we need to talk about that war. bob cummings. david: bob cummings. my mother's oldest brother.

and he was radicalized at the university of michigan. and the day he graduated in 1937, he and two of his friends, ralph and another, left michigan, went to new york, got on a boat, took the boat across to france, took a train across france, to the spanish border, climbed over the pyrenees to fight against franco in the spanish civil war. brian: what was motivating him? david: ideology, politics. hatred of fascism. most of the americans and canadiens who went over there had some, or 2/3 of them had some affiliation with the young communist league. so you can say, you know, that that was financially what -- they didn't make money off of this, of course, but that's how

they got there. but what was driving them was a belief in a better egalitarian world and a hatred of fascism. brian lamb: what happened to him after that? david: he was there from 1937 until the americans were sent home, a little bit before the war ended with franco defeating the loyalists, the republicans. and he came back to ann arbor. the third member of that group, ralph, was captured by franco's troops and executed. and if you don't mind, when my wife and i were in spain, one of the most powerful moments was, i knew where he was captured and the cathedral where he and some other american soldiers were held, in the cathedral in the

top of the town, and to go there, into that church, you know, all these 70 plus years later, and, it still felt like a dungeon of death. it was a very moving experience to do that, and to trace his route all the way through spain. so after he came home, he was hailed at the university of michigan. he and elman, for surviving the war and what they had done. 400 or 500 people came to an event at the michigan union. his little sister, mary cummings, my mother, was there. a reporter for the michigan daily, elliott, covered the event and that's where my parents met. brian: that day? david: yes. brian: let's go back to that photograph just briefly go back to that photograph just briefly to look at your mother and father.

i want to ask you, both of them had the philosophy of the communist party at that time. where did they get it from? in other words, what were their parents like? and is that where the atmosphere they grew up in? david: you know, my mother was a member of the uncommonistun uncommunist league. it's a little narrow about their philosophy enough. i'm not denying but there was more -- brian: i'm more interested in where their philosophy came from. david: i would say to some extent my mother was influenced by her older brother, bob, who was already active in michigan, and then went off to fight in the spanish civil war. brian: where did he get it? david: good question. i think from the times partly. my grandparents, my mother, and bob cummings father, andrew

adair cummins, was born on the side of a hill in northwestern kansas. went through the whole struggle of the depression as a young engineer, bounced from city-to-city, trying to get work. he started sort of, you might say, as a modestly country club republican and was not radicalized but became an fdr supporter during the new deal and all of that. but i would say where my mother and my uncle got it was from the times. i think you can compare somewhat the period from 1934 to 1939 to the period from 1964 to 1969. a lot of young people were being radicalized by the events of that era. not everybody, obviously.

both then and in the 1960s, there were more young republicans than there were radicals. but it was a radicalization process of a lot of people. brian: if we can do this quickly, i just want for context purposes, at one point in the book you say seven moves, four kids and the blacklist. david maraniss: yeah. brian: where were the seven moves? david: well, from the time he was fired in detroit, our first move was to coney island, brooklyn, where my grandparents, my father's parents, lived. we lived in a small apartment on near se, near seek a -- eagate in coney island but not in seagate, which was a little more exclusive. then we moved back to -- we moved back to ann arbor and lived with my mother's parents briefly. then we moved to cleveland, ohio, where he briefly had a job with with the cleveland plain dealer until the publisher of

that paper found out what had happened in detroit. which my father readily acknowledged. he was fired from the plain dealer. we moved back to detroit. he worked outside of the newspaper industry for a few years selling party favors for a labor organizational place. we moved twice in detroit. then, in 1956, he was hired to be an editor at the local addition of labors daily in bentondorf, iowa. the typographical union was on strike in the area, and my father got back into newspapers there. we were there for a little over a year, and then got to madison, madison capital times hired him in 1957.

joe mccarthy had just died. milwaukee braves were on their way to winning the word series. and life seemed good. brian: the consequences of that hearing, did they find him to be in contempt or what happened as a result of those hearings? david: no. there were many people over the course of the years who did not take the fifth amendment. but took the first amendment, cited their first amendment rights, and they were cited for contempt. you can't cite someone for contempt for taking the fifth amendment. that's a constitutional right. covered by that, but if you try to claim the first amendment, you're not covered. so people ranging from arthur miller, who we haven't talked about, the great playright, who coincidentally, went to abraham lincoln high school in brooklyn before my father, then went to the university of michigan before my father, was a friend of my uncle, bob cummings, and a very close friend of ralph -- the other spanish civil war

veteran, who was killed during the spanish civil war, years later, wrote arthur miller -- he was called before, because he had a communist pass, and he didn't take the fifth amendment but he refused -- he didn't answer, he was asked the question and the subject turned away from that but he never answered it. he wouldn't name names. he would only talk about himself and he was excited for contempt. that she was cited for contempt. the hollywood ten back in 1947, who did not take the fifth amendment but stood up and said they had the right, freedom of speech, and they were all cited for contempt and imprisoned. brian: your father's lawyer, george crockett. david: yeah. brian: congressman. david: i didn't know any of that until i started researching this book. george crockett later became a congressman from detroit. he was part of an integrated law firm in detroit before there

were any really anywhere else. and he was a leftist but not a communist ever. but he believed deeply in protecting the rights of controversial minority groups because he said, you know, if they go after -- the same rights are due to members of the communist party as have been denied to african-americans. so he saw a connection between the two. he wrote a statement called freedom is everybody's business, and that was his strong sort of manifesto defense of why he was defending communists even if he didn't agree with them because he saw the same dangers that could go against anyone else. brian: the former mayor. david: you could write a whole book about him. i didn't make him a major character. he was called before those same

hearings in 1952 as my father. had the same lawyer, crockett, and coleman young turned those hearings on end. he was not a member of the communist party. he was friendly with a lot of communists, and part of the radical movement earlier in the united autoworkers, but when they called him, they really didn't know how to deal with somebody who was not afraid of them like that. and so both chairman wood and frank tel avivener, tel aviv tavener, they both had southern accents and sensibilities, both came out of racist backgrounds so when they said or tried to say negro, which is what blacks were called them, whether consciously or subconsciously, it would come out negra. coleman young went nuts against

that and said, you know, that's not how you pronounce it. it's negro, not negra, and then from then on, sort of developed more and more control over the questioning, so that he wasn't taking anything from them about, you know, any of those issues. about, you know what it meant to be an american, when he and millions of african-americans were second class citizens, denied the right to vote. he talked about his experiences in world war ii when he was kicked out of an officer's club even though he was an officer because he was black. he really sort of made a powerful argument against them. and when it was over, he said, he told this to studs who interviewed him, walking through the streets of detroit it was like joe louis coming home from a fight. barbershops, walking down the street, everybody was padding me on the back, saying, you stood

up to those southern racists. brian: here he is, just a little 38 second clip talking about john wood and others. >> i took the trouble to look at the record of all the persons on the committee. and none of them had anything to be proud of. i've forgotten chairman, who was from georgia. but i checked him out, and his district consisted of about 80% blacks and yet only 5% of the blacks voted in his election so i decided the best way, either you run from these guys and you cringe, or you attack. brian: that was 1988. what's happened, do you think, since then to this day? about voting in places like georgia? david: well, i mean, it's

different, it's a different context but there are still voter suppression in states all over this country now. it's one thing that i have never quite, i mean, i understand it in terms of power politics. but in terms of reverence for democracy, why does this country, that upholds itself as the beacon of liberty throughout the world, end up with a democracy, repress the democratic process. it's getting close in some states. brian: i want to put on our screen some people that you write about in the book. here's martin dise. tell us about him. david: he was the first chairman of the committee from texas. he was a blatant racist. i don't want to say too much more. the earliest members of that

committee were, it was dominated by southern racists. brian: let's look at john rankin. david: from mississippi, similar. he was even more blatant, you know, in the congressional record, you can see him calling jews kites and blacks ni -- brian: did you know anything about this before you got into the research? david: i knew vaguely about sort of that history, but i didn't really know it. brian: jay parnell thomas. david: he was a republican chairman of the committee, who was the chairman of the committee during the hollywood 10 hearings. upholding what it means to be an american and calling these screenwriters and others unamerican, and shortly after that he was convicted of some embezzling, in his new jersey congressional office. and he ended up in the same

prison as lardner, one of the hollywood 10. brian: woody i he's a major character, figure in this book. the chairman, in 1952, congressman from north jersey -- north georgia, who, after world war i, had briefly joined the ku klux klan, and in another incident that i only came across doing the research, although there is a wonderful book at the lynching of leo frank by my friend steve oney. leo frank was an atlanta industrialist that ran a pencil factory, and he was accused of murdering a 13-year-old girl in his pencil factory. it was by all records, accounts, a frame up. he was innocent. but he was convicted, and then

the governor of georgia, after a lot of pressure, a lot of coverage of it in "the new york times" and elsewhere, this is 1913, he commuted the death sentence, and the people of marietta, georgia, leader of marietta, georgia, took it upon themselves to break him out of prison and lynch him. the leader of that effort was a local judge, named newt morris, and his chief disciple, who drove the car that carried his body after the lynching was john stevens wood, future chairman of the house on unamerican activities committee. brian: your parents lived for how long? david: my father lived to age 86. he died in 2004. my mother lived to age 84. she died in 2006. she only lived a year and a half after he was gone.

brian: and what was their life like in the last, say, 20 years? david: well, i think their lives from 1957 on, when he got to madison was, i don't want to be simplistic, but it was the life of a good american family. they were wonderful parents. our house was full of music and books and friendship. they were open to the world. as i write in the book, my father, by the time i was conscious, taught me to not fall for any rigid ideology, to be open to humans of all sorts, to hate the message, not the person. even it was racism or whatever. and he was -- he succeeded as a journalist in madison, eventually became editor of the capital times, progressive paper in that city. my mother went back to school, was phi beta kappa at ifthe the universityat

of wisconsin and became a book editor. jump forward, my father retired at age 65. my mother would go on to teach literacy to immigrants and poor people and they moved to milwaukee from madison. my dad said sort of half jokingly he didn't want to wake up every day and re-edit the newspaper, after he retired, so he moved a little bit away. i would go visit them in milwaukee and there would be a stack of 20 books on the couch that my father had checked out of the library that he was reading. they had nine grandchildren along with their kids, and that was their life. good american family life. brian: we have a book out called the presidents. in your interview that we did years ago in your book, on bill clinton, it's in there, but it was before he became president. how does it stand up, in your

opinion to this day? david: well, i think that the central threads of that book hold up. and i would say, there were two central themes of the book. one was that with bill clinton, you can't separate the good from the bad. they are all part of the same human being. and the same sort of motivations that drive him in a better sense drive him into difficulty as well. complicated in that sense, and maybe an exaggeration of all of us. sometimes often for the worst. sometimes for the better. the other thread is that, loss and recovery.

when he's down, he would find his way up. when he was up he would find his way down. cycle again and again. i think when i talked to you in probably 1995, he was before monica lewinsky. you see that time and again all the way through his presidency and post presidency. i think in the current era of 2018-2019 of the me, too, movement, there is somewhat of a reassessment of his behavior towards women, and i 2018-2019 -- and think that's totally justified and the achilles heel of bill clinton. brian: did you a book on barack obama. when did the text on that end, at what point in his life? david: that was even -- clinton -- my book on clinton, i'm fascinated by the formations, what shapes them, why they are the way they are. and i go back to look at that. so with bill clinton, it ended the day he announced for

president, if little rock, arkansas, in 1991. obama, i didn't even get close to that. i hope to write a second volume, long after his book comes out and after there are archives at his presidential library. but the first book was really an attempt to do two things. one, really study the world that shaped him and how he reshaped himself. how he found his way. so that book ends the day he drives off to harvard to go to law school. you can see his political future forming. brian: i want to show you some video of an earlier interview. not by you, this is a moment, we'll see if you can get some more response. let's watch this and it will all make sense to you. >> this is a tweet. right. from david -- david maraniss. i know you've seen this. we'll put it on the screen.

we will say this only once. filed, undercutting, unlike any i've ever encountered. brian: what's that about? i do not know. you know david? i have never met or spoken with david maraniss. zero. no interaction whatsoever. to me, this is a sort of, you know, trump-like people getting angry on twitter at someone they don't know. brian: he wrote a book on barack obama, and that was a tweet that you sent out. can you help us. david: somewhat. i mean, i said it, i'm only said it once, i'm not going to say those words again. i will say i have respect for david, what he does. not for the way he behaved as a researcher or writer. i have spent my whole year competing against reporters at the "new york times," "wall

street journal," the los angeles times, and even doing books that other writers are doing, and never before had i encountered someone who went out of his way to tell sources not to talk to me because i wouldn't get it right and only he would. he did that time and again. undercutting not just me but also david -- who was doing a biography of obama at the same time. it was mind boggling. not only did he do it then but then in his own book he goes on to criticize myself again. for what reason? what was -- i just found it, i mean, i used those words, i don't regret them. again -- he says we never encountered each other, no, but i certainly encountered him through the source i was dealing with who would call me up or write me, this guy just said this about you. i never had that before, and that's what happened.

brian: what would be your approach if you went back and wrote another book on barack obama? david: well, i mean, what would be my approach. brian: what aspect of his life would you like to write about specifically? david: well, i mean, i think i would take it from where he left off. the first book, it was not just about barack obama. it was about his father, his mother, hawaii, kenya, indonesia. i'm satisfied with all of that. but to take it from that point through the illinois with legislature to his presidency, and looking at both the choices and compromises, and path he had to follow to get all the way to the presidency, would be my next book.

brian: you said that the possibility when you started, title of this book, instead of a good american family would have been room at 740. david: judgment at 740. brian: is room 740 still there? david: i've been in that room at building. parts of it were moved to a new building. so that room is not there any longer. brian: have you had any reaction from your siblings about this book yet? david: my brother, who had questions about it, he's been very positive. he's read it several times. and they are both rooting for me. you know, a lot of my -- there are cousins in the book, too, who were very important. bob cummings' daughters, other cousins. i sent to it all of them and told them this is coming, you know. this is a family history that really hadn't been told before. it was also important for madison to know this story,

madison, wisconsin, with my father was well known. most of the people didn't know this part of his story. we'll see what happens, reception so far has been really warm. brian: let's look at the cover of the book and i want you to tell me where the picture was taken. david: isn't it interesting to see in a house in the background. when i first saw it, i thought, is that a fonny photo? and then i started studying the statue of liberty photos from that era. that house is further back than it looks but it is on the island so we're visiting the statue of liberty shortly after we left detroit, after my father was called before the committee. and, you know, my parents, my dad with his arm around jim, my older brother. i'm the little guy in the shorts blinking into the sun, goofily, and then jenny and my mother, and the statue of liberty, life

savor there. it's a family picture that we've always had. it was like waiting for this book. brian: other than the document you found, and we've only got 30 seconds, at the archives what was the other big find for you? david: my father's f.b.i. records. including the military intelligence report write discovered that one of my colleagues at the "washington post" had been investigated -- i mean, interviewed by the military intelligence and asked whether my father should be a member -- an officer in the military he now says it was the biggest shame of his life but he said negative things about my dad. brian: title of the book, a good american family and our author

, has been david maraniss. thank you very much for your time. ♪ >> all q&a programs are veil on our website or as a podcast at www.c-span.org. >> next sunday on q&a, historian david mccullah discusses his book, pioneers, the historic story of the settlers who brought the american ideal west. that's q&a next sunday at 8:00 p.m. eastern and pacific time on c-span. c-span's newest book, the presidents, noted historians rank america's best and worst

chief executives. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] provides insight into the lives of the 44 american presidents. true stories gathered by interviews with noted presidential historians. explore the life events that shaped our leaders, the challenges they faced and the legacies that they left line. order your copy today. it's now available as a hard cover or life every day with news and policy issues that impact here. morning, we will preview the week ahead in washington. also, a discussion of the constitutional battle between congress and the white house over the mueller report.

live atto watch c-span 7:00 eastern on monday morning. join the discussion. >> tomorrow, democratic presidential candidate joe biden makes a campaign stop in new hampshire. watch live road to the white onlineoverage on c-span, , or on our radio app. british prime minister theresa may takes questions on national health service funding, brexit, funding for schools, and programs to assist working families. this is 45 minutes. that regard. >> questions to the prime minister. janet devi. >> question number one, mister speaker.