my name is melissa muscatine. i am one of the co- owners of politics and prose. we welcome all of you as does our fabulous staff. before we get started, i just want to mention a few housekeeping matters. if you do have a cell phone or device that may make in our own welcome, please silence it. we would appreciate that. i also would invite you if you have a question to please come to the microphone right here. we are videotaping this. we also have c-span here. it's really helpful if people can hear the questions. lastly, you do not need to fold up your chairs at the end. usually we ask you to, but, but we do have more events today. please just leave them. alex will do a signing at the end. i think you have seen his book right here. it's terrific. we have plenty of copies. i hope you will buy it. it's upfront if you haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. lastly, for those who are using our coffee shop and know it's under renovation, we have installed a temporary coffee cart downstairs that is operating during the day. if you are feeling desperately in need of a ca

. >> good evening, i'm bradley ram the co-owner of politics and prose along with my wife melissa muscatine on behalf of the entire staff, welcome. we have just a few administrative notes and now would be a good time to turn off your cell phones or anything that might make a noise during tonight's presentation. when we get to the q&a part of the session, we do have book tv here this evening so it's especially important that if you have a question you make your way to that microphone so the question is heard on the tape and in the rest of the room. at the end, before you come up to have your book signed, our staff would really appreciate it if you would fold up the chair and leaned them compact enough for a busy reader and they said enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. his work certainly fits that mold. he's managed in 154 pages of text not only to capture the extraordinary life but to boy in on the significance. in the cold war group and cold war groups and the intelligible miss of ronald reagan's mind. jake brought to the task a long career in journalism