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The receiving line, hope it is not too chaotic, not everybody can make it through because there is a period of time to do this and he will not sign anything. If you will line up over there to the left, you have to line up against the wall to my left, thank you for coming this morning. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] every saturday night we feature author programs from our archives and tonight our focus is on former president s to have written books. Of next is president bill clinton who served in office from 1993 to 2001. His memoir my life was written in 2004 and sold over 1 million copies in its first week. He has since written four the books including thrillers with james patterson. From june of 2000 for president clinton talked about his over 900 page memoir, book expo which is the publishing industrys convention, here is president bill clinton. [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. My name is Greg Cappelli in, Vice President and show manager book expo america. On honor to welcome you to this this very special occasion. We would not be here this evening if it werent for the support and loyalty of the bookselling and Publishing Community brings each and every year and for that i thank you. [applause] the fabric of our convention lies in the connections we all make with the authors that appear here. It has been over 100 years of memorable moment since the First Convention played host to a guest of honor, mark twain in 1901. Since then the book industry has continued to come together to host authors that provided us with thoughtprovoking discussions to say nothing of stimulating entertainment. Through it all i can safely say that nothing has approached the magnitude of this evenings event. It is with sincere gratitude i have the further introducing the president and editor in chief of tough publishing. [applause] thank you, greg. It is good to be here back among friends. On behalf of all my colleagues at the Publishing Group i thank you for the work that you do bookselling is a noble endeavor, you make readers of the world and you do so without quitting or failing heroes to us all. I am as excited as you are about our guest this evening. Among his notable achievements. [applause] he presided over the longest economic expansion in the history of the United States. [cheers and applause] he was responsible for moving the nation from record deficits to a record surplus. He provided crucial investments in education, tax relief for working families and helped millions of americans move from welfare to work. [applause] he has been an unflinching advocate for civil rights. [applause] he has promoted peace. [applause] and spread democracy throughout the world. He was elected president of the United States in 1992 and again in 1996. The first democratic president to be awarded a second term in six decades. [applause] i dont think there is any doubt that the law was different and he were able to run again. [cheers and applause] he would win with a landslide. His name is bill clinton. And his book is called my life. My life is an extraordinary story. Both a riveting personal drama as well is a fascinating look at the american political arena over the past 40 years. President clinton talks with candor about his successes as well as his setbacks, his career and Public Service and his life. It is the fullest and most nuanced accountable presidency ever written. In the prologue to my life the president mentions golfing in his youth. Have good friends was one. Make a successful political life was another, that he achieved both is no surprise. He also mentions wanting to write a great book. Happily for everyone in this room he has succeeded on that front as well. Im not alone in my assessment. Bob gottlieb who we kept sequesters in our chappaqua safe house during the editing of this book calls it, i quote him, authentic, engaging and revelatory. Clark will publish my life on june 20 second. Our first printing will be one and a half million copies and i suspect that wont be nearly enough. You are going to have the time of your life selling this book. We work enthusiastically to secure its success. In turn i have assured him when it comes to selling books there are no sure hands than the ones in this room. Tonight and in the weeks to come im counting on your support to sell not just a great book but an important historical document. A rare opportunity in any publisher of booksellers life. My my life is a book that deserves the widest possible readership. I want to thank you in advance for helping us spread the word. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming president William Jefferson clinton. [applause] [cheers and applause] thank you very much, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. You have to be careful, you will have me thinking i am president again. Thank you for the invitation to appear and i want to thank you for that wonderful introduction and for believing in this project and agreeing to publish my life. I found quite an honor to get to know sonny and all the people, although he wasnt always as upbeat as he was today. Back when all the gossip writers in new york were saying clinton is going to 20 countries and 30 next and will he ever do this book, from time to time when i was working like crazy on this book i would see sunny and he would give me that look. One time about a year ago, a little less i went to have lunch in new york with one of my College Roommates and a friend of his who became a divine who repayment became the republican governor of arizona, we were sitting there and sunny saw me and i got that look and the look was why did i pay you all this money if you are going to take time and have lunch and how dare you take the time to drive from chappaqua to new york city to have lunch. But eventually got it done and it was a wonderful experience. I want to thank the team, kathy hourigan, andy hughes, who have been so thankful to prepare the launch of this book and every one who has been involved and the folks in new york who helped us a lot. My lawyer, bob arnett who introduced me to cannot and helped me negotiate with foreign publishers who will publish the book. So far only one of them has asked for pictures only a country. I want to thank all the people at book expo america for inviting me here and i would also like to acknowledge three people who were essential to the completion of the book who came with me today, justin cooper, essentially made it possible for me to do this book when i did. I wrote it in longhand in 20 some notebooks and he put it in the computer, printed out and we chiseled on 5 or 6 other times. Each section, he did the basic research and make tomlinson did all the fact checking. If there are still factual errors in it is not their fault, they certainly tried. It is impossible not to make a mistake somewhere. I want to thank the booksellers of america for agreeing to have this book my life in your lives for the next few months and for all you did to promote reading. I am a great book lover. You cant navigate my house for all the books everywhere and i cant build any more bookshelves i dont think. When i left the white house we sent 4000 books home to arkansas to the library and took 1000 or so to washington where my senator lives during the week and where i get to visit on occasion and we bought a couple thousand home and another thousand since then. People are good enough to send me their books and they come out, between the ones i buy and the ones that are given to me i can hardly walk around without stumbling over them but ive had a lifelong love affair with reading since my grandmother gave me dick and jane readers when i was literally 2 or 3 years old and i used to hang out at the local Public Library one i was in grade school and read about the indian chiefs i most admired. I still remember, a paper i did an Elementary School and native americans. Referencing these books i had read about sitting bull and crazy horse and the other great florida chief who developed the first alphabet for his people. I have always loved reading and books have had a big impact on my life and you will see in the book i mentioned a lot of the books that meant a lot to me in the course of my life and my teachers. Most of them survived the editorial cut although Robert Gottlieb, my editor, a joy to work with, one of the most interesting experiences of my life, worked with Katharine Graham and katharine hepburn, he knew something about everything but not so much about politics. He didnt think he wanted to know much about it so i sent him the first 150 pages. First thing we had this meeting i told him what i was going to do, we may do it that way but you are working for me now and i havent worked for him in a long time so it was interesting. I sent him 150 pages triple spaced, he said this is a really good story but are you running for anything . I said no, i am not. He said good. You cannot put the name of every person you ever met in this book. He said i do not care what happened to their children and grandchildren and it bothers me my president had enough room left in his head to remember his children and grandchildren and every person here met. They come from arkansas, that is what we do. I cant help it, that is who we are. Got some book readers from home out their too. So another hundred pages or so on the American South in the late 40s and 50s, he called and said i really like this but got any questions . Just one. Do you know any sane people as a child . I said no, but neither did anybody else, i just paid more attention than most people. So then i sent him 155 pages on my introduction to arkansas politics and my exposure to different people in the 70s and 80s and he said this is really good. How much of it did you make up . He said this is a story come you cant make stuff up. So help me god all these things happened. So he said when people read this they will all wants to go to arkansas because it is more like a novel by Gabriel Garcia marquez. I had very interesting run through and when gottlieb tried to give me to cut things we began to play games with him, i sent him one draft which said out of the blue in the middle paragraph, not only that but Robert Gottlieb is the greatest editor in human history. And he cut it. But he put that he did it reluctantly. But i found out, if i tried to say too much about movies or football or the rock n roll culture in which i grew up that stuff was all, i wanted to write a whole page on high noon, my Favorite Movie and why it is an important movie and it really is an important movie in American History and somehow i will give you what gottlieb cut. We started, i started playing games with his new york sensibility and i quoted yates three times before he finally cut one. I wanted to talk about how i made a trip to limerick on one of my last stop in islands, there were 50,000 people in the street and i was afraid he thought i had too much ireland in the book so i told him when i was in limerick that Frank Mccourt was a friend of mine and i love angelas ashes but i like to deal one better than the old one, survived the cut. Once i figured out the cultural taste of my editor i just kept ballooning the book and it was really interesting. This was, i had never done anything like this before. I am sure many of you have. I want to make a couple comments about it. First of all most of you in this audience are younger than me, most everybody is now. I really think anybody fortunate enough to be live to be said 50 years old should take some time, a couple weekends, sit down and write the story of your life even if it is only 20 pages and even if it is only for your children and grandchildren and closest friends. Young people today have access to more information than any group of people in history, they learned how to use the internet for good or ill at early ages, 60, 70, more challenges on television than they have satellite but they still hunger to know about their roots. They dont want to be full of facts and information and uprooted from their past. One of the most amazing experiences for me in writing this book was seeing it through my daughters eyes. I have been talking to her about this stuff her whole life but she still learned some things about her family and people she didnt know. Shes also helpful to me, one of my best readers, she said this thing you said about the 50s you said in shorthand. I know what you mean, but youve got to unpack it. People my age wont know what you are talking about. But i highly recommend it to all of you because you cant imagine what it would mean to your children. Second thing, observation i would have is its very therapeutic because i found myself thinking about this book, writing about these three or four years now and then and when i would get into any particular part of my life after about an hour i was there again. And i know your memory plays tricks on you over the years but i really felt, i believe, as i did when i was 5 years old and my stepfather in a drunken rage shotgun and the bullet landed in a wall between where my mother and i were standing and i can almost feel it again. It happened to me again when i was president of the things i thought i wasnt mad at anymore i got mad about all over again. One day i was writing about what can started to Susan Mcdougall and got so mad i couldnt work for four hours. I never had any Writers Block but i did have these emotional waves coming over me and a lot of happiness too. If this book is no good it is all my fault. If it is good that people whose names i mentioned deserve a lot of credit. I just try to tell a story. I feel that i was very fortunate in my political career and having grown up in the last television age. I was almost 10 years old when Television First came out and all my people were working people from arkansas and at the end of world war ii the per capita income of my state was only 56 the national average, only mississippi at 48 was for. But nobody had any money to speak of, no one felt poor as long as they had close on their back and they were clean and had a place to sleep at night and had enough food to feed whoever walked in the front door. Most of our entertainment when i was a child centered around meals and storytelling. Before you could tell what you had to listen to one. You had to learn to listen and learn to appreciate the unique characteristics of superficially ordinary people. I feel profoundly indebted to all my family. My grandmother who was a nurse and her sister who was a nurse and my great uncle buddy who was probably the most important member of my extended family who was a farmer and fireman it had one of his lungs taken out in 1974, lived to be 91, they were great storytellers and they were really smart and back then this is one thing poor white people, black people in the south shared in common, pumping gas at the local filling station might be as smart as going to a hospital because there was no such thing as universal educational opportunity, it was largely by accident of birth and circumstance. They were all preg. I. Bill folks. It made for an amazing childhood. Made the ordinary extraordinary. My uncle never got over telling stories. In his late 80s, i was talking to him and he was bragging on the fact that his wife had been dead for several years and he was bragging on the fact that even though he had one lung he was still alert enough to drive his car and he took two ladies out for a ride every week, one was 91 and the other was 93 so i said you like these older women . He looked at me, didnt miss a beat, it seems like they are a little more settled. So i had an inordinate advantage when i went into politics because i liked people and i learned to listen to their stories. I also had a great advantage because i lived with my grandparents until i was 4. At 6 i spent massive amounts of time with them and they were unusual characters for a small southern town. They were uneducated relatively, white folks of modest means who didnt have a racist bone in their body and i learned a lot. From my grandfather, about looking up to folks and he is one of the people i dedicated my book to, but a lot of the good things that happens to me in life i dont deserve any credit for, i was very very young, nothing to do with anything good about me. I just learned from what i saw. And the power of their example was considerable. What i try to do in this book, i tried to accomplish two things as you can almost look at it as two separate books. From my birth through the election of 1992 i tried to tell a story, tried to tell the story of my life and the story of america and how my small life interwoven with American Life beginning with the south at the end of world war ii and through the 50s and my trips to Georgetown College and the oxford study and back through my political career. I tried to explain what happened in america, with particular care what happened in the 1960s and how america broke up and publicly and all the turmoil of 1968. With the death of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther king and controversy over the vietnam war, the rise of the Womens Movement and all the things that happened in the beginning of the polarization of politics politics part which occurred at the Democratic Convention and how republicans begin republicans and democrats became democrats and there was a lot of shifting chairs, the why the white southerners who had been conservative democrats became republicans and basically i reached the conclusion a long time ago which i say in the book that if you look back on the 60s on balance you think this would morgan harm you think your democrat if you think more harm than good you are probably a republican. There was a there were doubtless excesses and selfindulgence is in the 60s, all that stuff people say that is critical of me and my generation theres some truth in all of it but it was also profoundly idealistic generation of people who loved their country. And so i tried to tell this story. The second part of the book which begins the day after the election was a transition until i leave the white house, almost like a diary of the presidency. There is a lot of policy in it. Some will think too much. But i think it is important because the presidency is at the siding job. You hire president s to make decisions. They not only decide which decisions to make but which ones to consider. And i had the great good fortune and challenge to live at one of the great turning points of American History, not only the end of the cold war but the end of the Industrial Age of the don of the global investigation age and there are a lot of decisions to be made yo this is not a serious policy, theres a chapter on Foreign Policy and this country or that country or domestic country or domestic education it all comes together. I come across it, people have enough background to follow the story but essentially i tell you the story as it happened to me. I want you to understand what it is like to be president what it was like for me to do the job and to see how everything happens at once, you come to office with a set of commitments, tried to keep but you have to deal with the incoming mail, all the things that happened that you didnt imagine would happen and you have to deal with political opposition and what you can do or cant, you have to take judgment how much the system can absorb, i tried to describe that in ways so you will see how it looked to me. A lot of president ial memoirs they say our goal and selfserving. I hope mine is interesting and selfserving. I dont try to sell a lot of scores here. I try i dont agree with the great temptations of modern politics to think these massive divisions that exist mean some people are good people and some are bad. Im not interested in whos good or bad but who is right or wrong for america, the world, i tried to explain from my point of view what my opponents believe and why. How the Republican Party changed at the end of the cold war, it started in the 70s in reaction to the 60s with the election of president reagan and how the definition of conservative republican today is very different than it was 20 years ago. When i was governor my vote went up every among republicans because i was probusiness as was prolabor because i was a fiscal conservative because they believe not all taxes were bad especially if they went for education and improved education. Because i was for safe streets and welfare reform. And it always went up. When i became president i found myself isolated from most of the republicans because they thought deficits were good because theres no such thing as a good tax. They had a whole different theory about that. They had a whole different theory about Barry Goldwater was a libertarian who supported my position on gays in the military but he was completely isolated by 1993 because of the influence of the religious right in america on the washington Republican Party. I tried to explain how that looks from their point of view and why they believe the International Community should be defined by people who share the same values, have the same ideas and make sure they are imposed and why that led them to believe the most important thing was to make sure the right people were in power and concentrate as much power in their hands as possible. I am from i think a more traditional american position going back to the founders which is that politics is not religion and we should govern on the basis of evidence, not theology. [applause] and that it is a great experiment but what is going on today has happened before in america and it should be no particular cause for concern either. I will tell you why. Throughout history, the partisan battles of always been most intense when we reached a turning point in history and had to reimagine our country and redefined the terms of our union. What that our founders mean when they said that form a more perfect union, the Permanent Mission they gave us. That was both a humble and varying statement. It was humble, more modest than the new right because our founders said we will never be perfect but we can always be more perfect than we are. And we had a huge partisan divide as soon as George Washington cleared a beginning in his second term because we never find what america was, we had a bunch of people who didnt want to be pulled by the english and didnt want to be led by George Washington. We had to decide whether to have a National Economy or National Legal system. Alexander hamilton and John Marshall said yes, Thomas Jefferson said no. Thank god Thomas Jefferson lost. When he got to be president jefferson like the whole National Union quite well. He spent the equivalent of the years budget by louisiana doubling the size of america, st. Louis and clark, imposed an embargo with vastly unequal impacts on the states but once we resolved that we had a period of remarkable political stability. Until 1840 when the country was faced with another challenge to the union. What do we do about slavery, let it expand or not and when people got mad about people trying to contain slavery they threatened to withdraw from the union. Abraham lincoln was elected on a promise to preserve the union and not to abolish slavery. A lot of people have forgotten this, but to contain it. Then the war came and slavery was abolished in the Southern States and after words we had reconstruction. We thought about this from 18401868 and it was tough. One illinois newspaper when abraham one is elected said we would be better off if he were assassinated. Nothing new about a lot of the stuff. Then president grant was selected, between 18681900 we had four Union Generals from ohio, you had 50 being elected president if you are a Union General from ohio. Was like, you know, there is no ticket to the white house like that today. We had partisan sites, Grover Cleveland serve two terms, one interrupted, slightly different view but there was a consensus within which the debate occurred. So we survived our second the challenge, then a big challenge when we became an industrial country rather than an agricultural country and had all these new immigrants coming to us and we were pulled into the world at least economically. So then the question was what do we do about these large economic units that dominate our lives and create dollies factory jobs but causing a heck of a lot of problems and the answer, do we have to have a Big Government against big industry to promote competition, preserve decency in the workplace and keep our Natural Resources from being completely plundered, Theodore Roosevelt said yes. William howard taft said no and Woodrow Wilson said yes. The greatest partisanship in our countrys history and of four your period the democrats remain the conservative party which they had been from before the civil war to 1912 to being the liberal party in america, the more liberal party, slightly left of center party and we thought about the terms of our union as against the industrial era and relationships to the world all the way to the end of world war ii when we went into the United Nations which we had not done after world war i. So we had a period of the people and more unity when roosevelt got elected because of the war but we resolve those questions, then we had 45 more years or 40 more years of more or less cohesive thought from world war ii until 1980 or so. President reagan was the first sort of postindustrial president is in a way of postcold war president because even though the berlin wall had fallen no one thought there would be a nuclear war. Government is the problem except for defense. And we the new Republican Party was by then represented all these forces you know about today. We tried quadrupled the debt and a lot of other problems like elected and 92 saying we have a new democratic approach, we are not just going to preserve the past, we have a new economic policy, new social policy that favors work and family over welfare and dependence. We have a crime policy, Foreign Policy, we tried our way for eight years, then in 2000 but for a moment as if there might be an emerging bipartisan consensus when how core was running onto the press. Risk and george bush ran on compassionate conservative which is a nice way of saying i will give you what they did with a Smaller Government and bigger tax cut, would you like that. It was a fight within range if you see what i mean. Then an emerging consensus but the new Republican Party was far to the right of that, so that is not what has happened particularly after 9 11 when our unity was taken for weakness and there was an attempt to push its way to the right so foreignpolicy is more unilateral than mine was. My view was we should act together whenever we can and ask on our own if we have to. Their view was different, it was act on our own whenever we can and cooperate when it is in our interest to do so and there is a very significant difference in the particulars there. The same is true about domestic policy but what i want you to understand is it is because we are in a fundamentally different era and this is the story i tried to tell along with my personal story. Every time america has gone through one of these periods of the people, the partisanship, the struggle for power, the personal nature intensified. The stuff i went through as its closest parallel emulators of the republic, go look at what adamss people said about Thomas Jefferson in 1796, it would blister there is often dogs back. And so you shouldnt worry about this. Every time we have had a chance to do it we have always chosen the union, chosen a widening circle of opportunity, deepen the meaning of freedom, strengthen the bonds of our fear and we started to fray, the Civil Rights Movement and womens rights movement, roe v wade and all that and had a big reaction starting in the mid60s all the way to the end until the reagan revolution but the main things that made it possible for those folks to get in power was the fundamental nature of our relationships changed, the way we work, the way we live, the way we relate to the government and each other and the rest of the world changed. We are in this period we are trying to figure it out. As you might imagine in my book i say i think my side will win because it works better. We always have chosen to become a more unified country and more inclusive country and to reach out to the world more. With the single exception of the end of world war i when we withdrew from the world with hideous consequences. I am optimistic about all this. What i tried to do with this book is always tell my life story, my family absolutely. How hillary and i met, what we did, what we tried to do in public life, how we tried to raise our daughter, a lot of personal stuff even in the white house years but i tried to show how this one little story was part of americas big story so that i hope when you finish the book you will think you learned not just more about me but also about your country, the history of your country, the potential of your country, the way politics works, the way the economy works in the Foreign Policy challenges we face. I dont spare myself in this book, i take on a lot of water not just for personal but also political errors i made and try to explain what they were and how they came to be. I dont settle a lot of scores in this book. I explain, i think you will find my relationship with Newt Gingrich for example quite interesting and you will see that i like bob dole a lot and my predecessor president bush a lot. And we had these honest disagreements and what they were and what the fights were. You will see why Kenneth Starr really believed it was okay to apply different set of rules to me and all the people who knew me and all the people from arkansas then he applied to everybody else and why the congress thought it was all right to apply different set of rules to me then they applied to Newt Gingrich and why they believed they were right. That is important. Im not supposed to tell any stories from the book and already told one brandon to tell you one more because it had a big impact on me. When i was 13 i had a science teacher, almost 55 years ago, the eighth grade and he had a wife named vernon who bought who taught history at a sisterinlaw named vera. Who taught the geometry and algebra. Verna, vera and vernon. The ladies were fine looking women. Looks like sisters, they were really attractive ladies in early middle age. To put it charitably vernon was not a fine looking fellow. He was chunky, he was big around the waist, he was barely, he wore coke while glasses, had hardly knows and smoked cheap cigars in a plastic cigar holder which gave his mouth a real pinched look. And he knew it. He was nobody at school. When he was in class and said kids youre probably not going to render anything you learned in science class about science so if you dont remember anything else or member this. Every morning i get up and go to the bathroom, throw water on my face and put shaving cream on it shave and i splash cream off and dry my face in the mirror and say you are beautiful. He said you remember that you will go a long way if you remember that. And i have been as you see. [applause] whatever your politics, i can tell you in my experience overwhelming people i work with and politics are honest and a lot of hysterical Media Coverage about politics, things have sobered up since 9 11, whatever they did or said, but i think it is important for you to know i sat with bob dole, i asked him youve been longer than i have, let me ask you do you think politics is more or less honest in washington . He said it is not close, it is much more honest. I said do you think people believe it is more honest . He said not close, less honest. There is a disconnect there. If you dont support president bush, if you read what he said on the campaign he is doing what he said he did. You got to give him credit for that. You dont have to say he is a bad person, you say i think he is wrong and here is why. If you do support him you say not those of us who dont are bad people but you think we are wrong and say why. Because this is a great enterprise and no one has the whole truth, we are struggling to create a new reality. At the end of the book i tried to say how i think my philosophy should operate in the post9 11 world and i wont go through all that, wont spent much time doing it but it is worth looking at because it is a logical question to ask but i would just say this. I am all for whatever we can do to eradicate al qaeda and the terrorists. The president said tomorrow he wanted to double, triple, quadruple our true presence in afghanistan i would cheer but i think it is important that we do this in a way that doesnt compromise the integrity of our country or undermine the future of our children. [applause] i dont know that im blameless in this was before the patriot act, i agree with you this book deal is nuts. Who cares what people are reading, that should be changed, i agree with that. To be fair, both for the patriot act, before president bush was president , i was president , we had a law on the books given the terrorist at that was understandable which simply said if we have a suspected terrorist that we can arrest, in order to obtain a conviction we would have to produce evidence with a witness that would blow our Intelligence Network and put more lives at risk, we could just keep him in prison indefinitely and it sounds totally rational when you think about what we suffered in new york on 9 11 but what if we make a mistake . And some poor sucker is just wasting away in jail . That happened on my watch. These are new and very difficult questions but i think we ought to begin by saying freespeech including access to written materials and all that, we need to bend over backwards to protect that. We all accept certain limits on our liberty. I remember when there were no airport metal detectors and i never walked through one i wasnt happy to do, have you . I like that. I used to argue with the nra all the time, theres a lot of hilarious stuff here about my fights with the nra but their position was the one area of our life we should have no provision is in the gun area. Slept with another 5 years or 10 years on the sentence and that is all we need to do. I said think if we took that in every other area, get rid of seatbelted airbags and let people drive 100 miles an hour and every time some to kill somebody in a car crash we just put 5 years on their sentence, get rid airport metal detectors and every time somebody will up a plane just take their remains and sentence them to 10 more years in prison. But the point is we all accept these things and yet we have a new and different threat. The fundamental problem is we are in an interdependent world where all the benefits we get, you can get on the internet, ive got a cousin who plays chess with a guy in australia, they take turns deciding who has to stay up late. I wrote this book, would have taken me another you to write that book, how quickly we could retrieve material but you cant claim all the benefits of an open World Without facing the fact that there are risks, people who murdered those folks in new york, pennsylvania and the pentagon used the interdependent society, open borders, Information Technology to kill all those people. So we it will take a while to get the right balance to figure out how to defend ourselves. Thats another thing you shouldnt be pessimistic about, no terrorist ever sunk any nation alone. Throughout history every offensive Weapon System or technique has always had a period when it prevailed until adequate defenses were developed. First time a person took a stick and made a spear out of it or wrapped the stone around a stick and made an ax out of it, worked like crazy, summary of the two sticks together and animals get across it and you have a shield and it doesnt work anymore. When nights got on horses they could do real well against people that werent on horses until they figured out how to build castles with modes and the horses couldnt get there. Then they figured out how to put a catapult together and get over the castle wall and somebody figured out a defense, it is gone on from time immemorial so we are in the process, this thing about the patriot act, you should oppose anything you dont like, this is america, we should have these free dbase and in this case i think you are right, nearly as i can tell the government hasnt made a case ive seen for it yet. But on the other hand you have to recognize we are just trying to figure this out. It is a new period and we are struggling to come up with the defense, part of the transition we are going through, new Security Threat and new defenses and how to do it without compromising the character that made this country special. Compromising the freedom and liberty we want to leave to our children and grandchildren. That is the last point i want to make. After all i had been through i was more optimistic than i was the day i got there. I had more confidence the ability of free people to meet any challenge, overcome any obstacle and i believe now weve reached the point the main thing is nobody is going to be right all the time. The main thing is politics is going in the right direction and helping more people than you hurt and we have now reached the point we cant afford to have a politics that believes our differences matter more than our common humanity. In 2000, tony blair joined me by satellite and we announced that the International Consortium that had been working for years on his proceeding in secrecy in the human genome. Lots of fascinating things about it, we identified whats most likely to cause breast cancer, parkinsons and all timers. It is going to be a wonder but the most important thing to me about unpacking the mystery of the gene is the scientists discovered genetically we are all, 99. 9 the same and if you take one racial or ethnic group and compare it to another, the Group Profile have more similarities than individuals within the group do among themselves. You just think about all the blood that has been spilled, all the stupid things done, all the time and energy that has been wasted, all the heartbreak in the middle east and elsewhere over less than one tenth of one of human difference. That is the single great challenge. Do i think we should defendant fight terror . You bet i do. I will send 100,000 troops to afghanistan. But we have to build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists too and we have to learn to cooperate in ways we never have and we have to do it in a way that doesnt require us to give up our identity, racial or religious or National Identity but enables us to subsume those, to enjoy our differences in a world where we are safe because our common humanity matters more. That is basically the great work of the 21st century and that is where i came at the end of my journey and what i try to do now that im out of office. Any weight is true when i was a boy in law school i said one of the goals i had in life was to write a great book. I have no earthly idea if this is a great book but it is a pretty good story. Thank you very much. [applause] booktv on cspan2, watch booktv nonfiction books and authors. Sunday at noon eastern on in depth a 2 hour live conversation with author and faith and Freedom Coalition found a route read. At 9 00 pm eastern on afterwords Breitbart News Senior Editor at larges book read november and his thoughts on the 2020 democratic primaries and elections, interviewed by reason editor at large matt welch. Labor day at 6 00 pm eastern judy gold with her book yes i can say that. Melissa coram and jennifer leavitt, with that book unacceptable. Westmore with 5 days. And sailing true north. And watch the all Virtual National book festival Live Saturday september 20 sixth on booktv. When you read the things that were said about Thomas Jefferson, an agent of the first get a government. The things that were said about Abraham Lincoln and fdr that he wanted to be a dictator so it does come with the territory but in trumps case at least in the modern political era, i have never seen anything like it. Sunday at noon eastern on in depth hour live to our conversation with father and faith and Freedom Coalition found a route read whose books include awakening, act of faith in his most recent for god and country, joining the conversation with text and tweets. Watch booktvs in depth sunday at noon eastern on cspan2. You are watching booktv on cspan2. Every weekend with the latest nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2 created by americas Cable Television companies. And brought to you by your television provider. On our Author Interview program afterwords, joe pollack discusses the 2020 election. And if live sunday at noon eastern, author and faith and Freedom Coalition founder ralph reed joins us on in depth to talk about the influence of christians in american politics and answer your questions. Then on monday its an extra day of booktv programming which includes our in depth interviews with author and robin hood ceo wes moore as well as author programs with comedian judy gold, reporters melissa korb and many corn and many others. Check your program guiled. Now we kick off the weekend with a look at the soviets role in the nuremberg trials. Hello, everyone. Welcome and good evening. Thanks for joining us virtually tonight. On behalf of harvard bookstore, were pleased to introduce this special event with Francine Hirsch and her new book, soviet judgment at nuremberg in conversation with joshua rubenstein. We bring authors and and their work to you and others during these challenging times. Every week were hosting events here on our zoom and always

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