. >> it was written by justice lewis powell. he wrote it at the urging of his friend at the u.s.mber of commerce. the memo called for a big business kind of corporate makeover of government. he wrote in strident terms. he felt the memo was attack on american free enterprise. powell believed the system was under attack. he called upon corporate leaders to go to washington, get out from behind their desks. you know, they were losing the battle, the public relations battle. they wanted control over media. they wanted, you know, business schools, you know, more business friendly. so, that's essentially what they did. they implemented friends of powell and corporate leaders all across started implementing the memo. >> the documentary is a lot of issues that led from the rise of big businesses, bailouts, killing regulations on banks. after all your research, was there one event that put us over the edge, would you say? >> what got us interested in the topic and taking a long form look at this, i think documentaries are positioned to look at a topic lie this, we looked at the lobbying t

one thousand nine hundred seventy one memo secret memo written by a future supreme court justice lewis powell and the memo really inspired corporate leaders the business roundtable the chamber of commerce he wrote it for the chamber of commerce and then that became the blueprint for the headlines that you see today it was actually implemented in a in a field manual written by the heritage foundation called the mandate for leadership in our film really connects the headlines all of the uncertainty the craziness back to that tracing it back to this one nine hundred seventy one memo yeah and it's i mean the movie is brilliant and there's it seems like there is this thirty year effort to really educate america on economics and you know who we should rely on to make the economy work and we see the think tanks that have brought up the changing of faculty classrooms is that kind of the is that kind of the ork of this is yeah it was it was called for in the power memo in fact it's a result of kind of organized money getting together and saying what they're teaching is too liberal on the campuses you

stewart david stewart practiced law for 25 years justice lewis powell and arguing a couple of cases before the supreme court. his passion for law made for a great career also lead him in an unexpected direction. writing books. years ago, when stewart suspected than 0 boant in a lawsuit was misstating debates from constitutional debates he spent a weekend reading james madison's notes from the con veption. had struck anymore that he had to tell l story. it lead to the book the men who invented constitution which was a fabulous book. stewart's legal experience which included a defense at work as a defense counsel in a senate impeachment trial of a federal judge played a big part in his writing the next book, "impeach the trial of andrew johnson and the fight for lincoln's legacy" the large i untold story of a murky figure many american history. aaron burr. we known as the burr of the politician and the dualist who killed ham l ton what about after the dual? as you'll see with the wild teal of an outlandish plan. mr. burr had more in store for history books. one of the stranger than fiction s

the united states supreme court for decades and the weather was john marshall harlan in the 50s, lewis powell in the 70s, sandra day o'connor in the modern era. moderate republicans are gone from congress and they're gone from the supreme court. samuel alito and john roberts reflect the modern republican party. the polarization we see in congress we now see in the united states supreme court. so that to mean is the roberts court. it is a more conservative court than william rehnquist ever let. >> in your book, you describe john roberts is a radical. >> i do. the book is called "the oath" and it begins with the story of the botched oath that everybody remembers so well, but no one has told the story of why it was botched and that is why you open the book. and it is both a nature scene story on its own, but it also said that the protagonists, barack obama and john roberts. and the paradigm is that the man who claimed to be the candidate of change and the supreme court justice who claimed to be the baseball umpire who didn't want to change the rules have precisely reversed positions. it is obama

central position on the court letting that nomination beah game changer it happened in 1987 when lewis powell retired and he was the swing justice of his day and we had the titanic battle that in many respects is going on today. it never ended and it informs how we think that the nomination process. and so i just -- what happened in the last couple of years i just personally hate to think about the is going to happen when that occurs. i would say another thing about the still resonating battle. and again, recent political events i think should make us kind of rethink what seems to be the take away from the battle which was a definition of the political mainstream in which a nomination would occur or outside which the nomination when from into lots of trouble, so the mainstream coming out of the board battle was defeated on the issue of didier believe the constitution contained the right to privacy the constitution gave people individual rights that were not enumerated in so many words in the constitution and so he said for instance that he thought the griswold case from 1965 which created dis