so let's welcome kevin matson and "just plain dick". [applause] >> thanks for that wonderful introduction. always a pleasure to be at politics and prose, one of my favorite places to be. what i will do is talk for a while and obviously be eager to entertain questions that you might have about the book and its relationship to contemporary politics. what brought me to write this book is are always heard the term "checkers" throughout my life, "checkers" will direct it to the speech and are wanted to understand what that meant, and its origins and also put it in a biter context. that is what it began with. in some ways, one of the most important speeches in postwar american history and certainly have a lot to do with explaining the rise to influence of richard nixon and that in and of itself tells us it had a lot to do with a lot about contemporary american politics because of nixon's influence on contemporary american culture. what i really want to do is write history in the form of a novel. all the characters are real, the events are rea