That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] hello this afternoon. Thanks for coming. Good to see you all. I think we need to know introduction. At least robert caro, i hope you read all his books and are as enamored of them as i am. We are here because we are enamored, to talk about writing. Not so much the subject matter per se, but why writing matters. We both feel, as i am sure you do, that writing matters quite a bit. How it matters is a task for the writer to come to terms with. How are you going to get people to read, turn the page, to be as enthralled with your subject as you are. If you know robert caros work, you know he is a master of the enthralled. We thought we would talk a little bit about that. I hope you saw there was recently an interview with bob in the paris review and one thing that i thought was so wonderful about it was bob talking about certain working methods was one of the things he said reminded me of walt whitman, in that if you have read whitman, one of the things you know about that exuberant poet is he uses lists. And once william gass talked about lists too, very different kind of writer than either bob or whitman and he said something to the extent that if i go to the store and i buy fruit, that is pretty boring. If i go to the store and i buy bananas and apples and cherries and mangos. Im running out of fruit. You get the gist and that is something is one thing bob eloquently talked about in that review piece is lists. Everyone was telling me nobody would read a book about that. I was hearing that year after year but i was coming to feel it was really i really wanted people to read this book because i felt he did something by understanding his career, we live in a democracy where power comes from the ballot box, he was never elected but he had more power than anyone who was elected. More than any governor, more than any mayor, more than any governor or mayor, shaped the whole metropolitan area, so i was thinking how do i get people to read this book . You have got to do it the introduction and show the immensity of what he did. You cant just say he built 627 miles of expressways and parkways. Then i remember in the iliad home or doesnt he lists all the tribes and nations, and greek tribes that came to sack troy. There is a real power in that. Maybe i can list the part, list the expressways. If i could do it right, get a real rhythm to it, it it could make people understand that, he built the vanwyk expressway, major deegan expressway, sheridan expressway, he built the long island expressway, Staten Island expressway, cross bronx expressway, brooklyn queens expressway and the same with the parkway and that only would work, i felt, if i got a rhythm but somehow the repetition of the word expressways, is what i was trying to do. We all think you succeeded. Rhythm matters. That is what you are talking about and it is almost poetic. The iliad thought of his poetry. They are a poet too. And we talk about this a lot. And one tells about robert moses or Lyndon Johnson, when telling stories, and one thing that is important is a whole sentence of a narrative workshop. The through line, dont know what it means. A sense with you as a writer, always know what you are doing and you talked about that quite a bit as well. I tried, we going Different Directions which i tried before i start to boil down to a very few sentences. What is this book about . If you go on a digression you can remember how to get back to the main line. I would say i dont know how bob feels about wearing a necklace, talking about this like bees on a string where the string is the narrative and we put beads on it and different beads are the digression and if you know bobs work, you use some examples. Richard russell chapter. A really good example of that. Lyndon johnson, for those here on the opening night, linda johnsons greatest achievement was passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and to do that he had to overcome, today they say congress has never been fractured and divided as it is now. It is really not true but in the 1950s. It was not divided along party lines, the southern democrats, conservatives, racist midwestern republicans against the civil rights and the controlled congress. I think of this in the year of 64. Of the 16 Standing Committees in the senate, the host had the challenge of knowing republicans and three others were republican allies so you couldnt get anything through. Franklin roosevelt passed the wages and our act in 1938 and the interesting thing about that is it is the last major piece of social where fair welfare legislation passed when jack kennedy was associated assassinated. Roosevelt didnt have a single piece of legislation for the last 7 years of his presidency. Eisenhower didnt want to pass any and kennedys bills always stopped. I said i got to show two things, the power in congress but also have to show the depth of the hatred of africanamericans, the depth of how determined they were to keep black americans in place and use congress to do it. Someone wrote the senate is the souths revenge to gettysburg. And been like that for 75 years. I can either do it by writing another couple chapters, there are so many books on race hatred in the south. I can do that again or take one figure, Richard Russell who is head of the southern block and the head for 30 years, show his immense power and at the same time how he hated, truly hated blacks. I did that by showing a biography, by doing a biography of russell, showing these things, it was easier for me to come back to the main theme which had been laid out in my mind before. Host that chapter, i happen to remember, one of my favorites, begins terrifically because it is a mini biography and it begins with Richard Russells little boy playing wargames, which gives you an insight right away or gave me an insight. As a little boy he is having the fantasy, right from the get go. And then we just get a kind of as i recall a straight narrative, very well written straight narrative of this and this, then we come back to the kind of legislation that he passed, the things he didnt see in his own community so we get a sense of the depth of his complex relationship, he wants to be like his father but he really wants to animate the civil war. If you are a new york city person like i am as you can tell from my accent, saying you understand the feelings of southerners is inadequate. I went to Richard Russells town, a little town, something happens. I saw something that helped me understand the depth of the whole jim crow picture. He was chief judge of the georgia supreme court, lived in a big white house on a hill and at the bottom of that hill is the Railroad Line to atlanta and so powerful the railroad wanted to make a stop so he didnt have time for another cup of coffee in the morning and didnt have to go in to catch the train so they made a station, like a subway, like a bus stop, no more than what we are sitting in now, no more than two people could get in but down the middle is a wall and on one side it says white, on the other side it says colored. When i saw that i suddenly started to understand things. It is a sense of place you are talking about. In terms of two places, one which you write eloquently about, talk about how you came to understand it. We went down to texas, these were already seven johnson biographies that had been written and talked about his boyhood. I thought that story had been told, not in enough detail so what i would do, Lyndon Johnson library where i was located in the papers during the day, the research along with me and myself, every day, johnson died when he was 64 years old, he would have been only 66 when i started the book, therefore all the people who went to high school or college with him was there and his best friend was truman force it, lived on the other side next to the courthouse in johnson city, still living there and his first girlfriend was living in a different house, still in the same house and i came back and i said i am not understanding these people and not understanding Lyndon Johnson was i have come to realize a lot of it had to do with this hill country, someone from new york is simply incredible, hadnt started and for 360 miles the hill country rolled on. It was called the land of endless horizons. Every time settlers would cross one line of hills there would be another line of hills, very few people lived in that area, the population is Something Like 1. 3 acres per square mile so we have to move two or three years to understand this place, cant you write a biography of napoleon but we did and it was understanding, coming to feel lonely and i wonder what it is like. Can i tell an anecdote about that . 43 miles out, they were basically when he was growing up, nothing but the Johnson Ranch where he lived wasnt even in johnson city but 18 miles deeper in the hills so Sam Houston Johnson used to tell me how he and lindenwood solo in one quarter of that ranch down with the Austin Fredericksburg highway which is a graded road and used to go down to this corner in the hope that one new person would come by, one new person to talk to. I had no idea where loneliness like that was and i knew i wasnt ever going to find out but to get some sense of it i wonder what it is like to spend today by yourself and go to bed, get up and know youre going to spend the next day by your self so i took the sleeping bag on the Johnson Ranch but on the adjoining ranch, johnsons were not fond of me, but i did that. It gives you a different sense of things to know that the next day you will be alone again. It is like if you were there with your father and have an overbearing domineering father as Lyndon Johnson did, this is going to be nothing to soften there he is, the great figure, all these things are more dramatic and telling. Host such an interesting thing to think about place shapes our lives so what you think about that, it really changes the way to create a narrative. We can explain it or lecture about it but to create the sense of place and the way we place behind creating a sense of character and creates ambition and psychology of character and use see that in johnson very early on. Exactly right because you understand his desperation to get out of it and he had a real desperation. s host i have a little passage, forgive me if i dont do it but this is the path to power and hill country, gives an example what we are talking about. Inevitably throughout came. The land burned the blazing hill country what is left of nutrients scorching away. What was left of the roof starving and shriveling, when, continual hill country brises that make the climate so delightful and the winter northern is the come sweeping down to the great plains, blue the soil away and swirls of dust, one bitter whole Country Farmer put it into the next country, the next region and when a heavy hammering rain came they washed the soil down the hillside and the cotton field to the farmers, often cut up and down the slope instead of across it. Cutting gullies in the ground the next frame would make it deeper so the rain would run down the land even faster. Water poured down the hillside and into the creeks in a torrent and flash floods with limestone beds sweeping away the fertile land on their banks that was the only fertile land in the hill Country Blues the rivers rose and when they receded more in the fertile soil back down with them to run down to the colorado and the gulf and all the time in places to pull a plow, men remembering the trail drive and couches of gold persisted in raising cattle who kept eating the grass as fast as it could grow and faster leaving soil in those places too to blow and wash away. It had taken centuries to create the richness of the hill country. In two decades or 3 after men came into it, the richness is gone. In the early 1870s the first few years of cotton planting, and aker produced a bail or more of cotton. By 1900 it took 11 acres, the hill country had been a beautiful trap. Getting to the point where it is a trap, thank you. Host she read that wonderfully. Host i didnt even practice. Guest i can add something to that. How did i find out about the soil . Lyndon johnson, when Lyndon Johnson is at the center, his aides never let him lose a vote. You cant ever miscount the votes johnson would say to his aides, find out how a senator is going to vote. If the aid said he is going to go with us johnson would say, and realized, something that ties into that paragraph, the majority leader for six years, he never lost a single vote and this was a divided congress. Because he learned the course of one mistake, his father thought the land of the Johnson Ranch was covered with grass that looked beautiful, it was always going to be that way. But he found out when the first rains came that there was very little soil there and he went broke, couldnt raise enough cotton or cattle and they lost the ranch and for the rest of Lyndon Johnsons boyhood they lived in a house in johnson city where they were afraid each month that the bank was going to take it away. There was no food in the house, Lyndon Johnson had a cousin, ava, who took it on herself to teach about the hill country and you dont understand the land and without understanding the land you wont understand the jobs that i dont know how that sounds to you but it sounds to me like you dont understand the land. She took me in a car to the Johnson Ranch which is beautiful again and she says get out of the car. And there was a field of grass. Stick your fingers into the ground. I stuck my fingers in and there was so little soil on top of the rock that you couldnt get the length of my fingers into the ground, you knew it was going to wash again and i always felt this incredible caution, refusal to take anything for granted, what one state could do. Host that is interesting. It creates character, ambition and anxiety. Guest so beautifully. Host the other thing we were talking about, creates mood which we were talking about, not just johnsons mood but our mood but the mood you want to create. If johnson is feeling something, if i am feeling something, you are feeling something, lets say he is feeling, we talked about desperation. How do you create that. Like saying i went to the store and bought fruit, okay, johnson felt desperate. How would you go about that. Guest that is hard to say. I tell you about a couple months. Host not you are desperate. Guest it would have been because i thought i wasnt doing the right johnson is running for the senate, the election he finally wins by stealing 87 votes at the end but this is his last chance. He is running for the senate against the popular exgovernor of texas, far behind, the campaign starts, he gets a kidney stone which requires an operation so hes going to be unable to feel pain in an operation, how to recuperate for 6 weeks and is so far behind, seems to have no chance in the polls at all. He thinks because this is a political genius something might give audiences out to the world of small towns. No one in texas has seen a helicopter. It stands still in the air. A lot of great speeches or that was the political sort of it. If i want to do it truthfully. This is a story of desperation, a terribly ambitious man, desperately ambitious who is seeing his last chance disappear but a few weeks left to do it. When i was writing the chapter about the helicopter called the flying windbag. That is what they called it in the middletown. Scotch tape to the desk, is there desperation on this page. And tried to infuse the chapter with that feeling. Host just the pain, knowing he has a kidney stone and is really incredible that you continue on and that creates a sense guest the guy who talked about johnson would a kidney stone is one of the sharpest pains known to medical science. Johnson had it. If the Campaign Come all this travel, when he was doing it before the helicopter before going to the hospital he would be in such pain, his temperature would be 103, 104. We know that because i have the doctors records. He would lie in the back seat when the chauffeur drove him from one town to another, sweating so badly that they had a big box of shirts. He would have to change his shirt as he got into each town and he would jump out and the chauffeurs that you would never know anything was wrong with him, shaking everybodys hands, he would get in the car, start to drive off and i would hear him groaning in the back. The story of his life, desperation is a real part of it. Host when we talk about it, desperation, we know what it is but it is also an abstraction. When you get down to it and talk about it i say desperation. You get lot of material out of people. I once interviewed years or Virgil Thompson for the book i was writing about i think it was about Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson was a composer and writer and was deafer than i thought he was, and so i hate interviewing so this is why i ask i would ask him a question and he would answer the questions thought i should have asked. Guest thats great. Host not for me i wasnt because i was nervous anyway. I have to turn modifies around and by the time i figured out what he thought i should have asked, were on to the next subject. So, interviewing is an act of desperation, not so quiet for me. But for your two things. How do you get that information . You are tireless and dont mind people saying, i think you already asked me that. Guest yes. People are always saying to me, you already asked me that. But host come from being a reporter . I. Guest well, part of it is something that you do very well is you want to make people see a scene so you need a lot of details. So if youre write bath scene in oval office and talking to linton johnsons press secretary, who is standing against the wall while johnson is in his rocking chair and the governor of alabama, george wallace, on the sofa, and reedy says, president johnson was threatening to call in the national guard, and this and that. And i would say to him, well, that is great, and what were you seeing there . And he would say, well, dont know. President johnson was in rocking chair. George wallace was on the sofa. I if i was standing next to you what would i see . And finally many what i would be seeing . Finally he said, one of the things was that he called president Johnson Lyndon one thing that lyndon did was when he became president and moved into the oval office the took the stuffing out of the cushions on the couches, so that the rocking chair was still the same level but when you sat on the couch, you sunk down. So he was towering over you. Even more. That took a lot of getting mr. Reedy really angry at me. You asked me already. If you keep saying, ill tell you another example. Host what do you think. Guest what did we hear. Johnsons chauffeur was named carroll pete and he had never agreed to be interviewed in a lived in a little up to near galveston which was 2 80 miles from where we lived and i had to drive down there three times to get me to to say, okay, you can come in. But finally i got to the point where he was i said, well, you were in the front seat. Was lyndon sitting beside you . The said no, he would always be in back seat. Okay so what was he doing in the backseat . Just sitting in the back seat. I said did her do anything else . And after at a lot of question us like that, he said another always be talking. I said what do you mean talking . He said, just talking. Finally i asked the question. He it was like he was practicing. I said, what do you mean practicing . He said, well, its like heed be saying what did die wrong in the last town in and i would a you really made a fool of yourself. You were supposed to be nice to judge lee and you werent. Now in the next town whatever judge burnett wants to hear that you really not for roosevelt so remember that. And he said this is a guy whoa who would by sitting there talking to himself, practicing, critiquing himself, very interesting. And only came about from asking him over and over again. Host right. I mean its that kind of you have to be intrepid to do that kind of thing, just as a slight anecdote, because ive already suggested im not, this is the kind of interview i would do years ago, is when i was working on the book, my husband, who is wonderful and is a composer, we were in italy and he also had to speak fluent in italian, and Gertrude Stein and her brother, who has been dead for many years and i was working and my husband would go and get us in lunch and i said to him one day, why dont you go and just follow the oldest person you can find and see if they knew leo stein. And he actually did that. Followed the oldest person. He said he came back and he said he thought he was going to get arrested as a stalker but he found someone who knew leo stein. Its very hard to get interviews, and to get people to really talk in that almost granular kind of way. Which really is creates the narrative. So i want to just kind of unless you want to talk more about interviewing, just go to Something Else, because im thinking also about narrative in place, too, because from my own point of view, talking a lot about, say, johnson in senate, and masters of the senate, and the way you create what its like to be in the senate and one of the passages i like is where that book, as i recall, begins, which is the desks. Howhow did you almost sendma, before you see johnson you have a a panoramic view of the desks. Guest thats really host place, too. Guest i was trying to create to try to create on the page the world of the senate because ithink when i started the book i didnt know it was anything particularly interesting about that work. I knew id have to explain it because he would be the great majority leader. But i wasnt getting i felt well, i was the guy who was the nut in the gallery. If you saw me then, i would good to the senate in the morning, had a pass, and id sit in the balcony. The groups of tourists would come in and leave and another group come in and leave and id still be sitting the. You see the senators looking up sort of dubiously. I think they thought i was the nut in the gallery but i wasnt getting a feeling of what i wanted to do with the senate. Part of the thing wanted to do is when you get into the senate, you realize it was really great once in the days of webster and calhoun, this where is the fate of the country the great debates what happened to the senator . If i want to show what happened to the senate i had to show what it was before, and i couldnt think of a way to do that. So the historian of the senate was a wonderful friend of mine named don richie and, he asked if ahead been down in well. I said. No he said theyre in session so come down there. We walked into the door of the side and we walked down into the well, and i turned around and i knew then exactly how i was going try you dont see it from up above and you dont see it if you see it on cspan before the desks of the senate 96 difficults, now 100 theyre mahogany and burn issued each day to a high shine and the four rising out you say, this is really majestic, and Daniel Webster stood at one hoff those desks when he was debating calhoun so that was moment that i knew how i wanted to try to do it. Host almost as ifor you if you were there ask this is the epiphany. Guest youd like to think it want epiphany. Host in retrospect, its an epiphany. Guest thats exactly right. Host do you revise a lot . I revise all the time. Guest yeah. If you saw my office on a typical day you would see a lot of sheets of paper. I work on a type writer long hand and a type citer. Smith corona. This is very hard for me and its changed over the years, but what i would call i dent know if this is the language you would use writing withure own with your own voice, in other words making sure the material especially when youre dealing with material, interviews just talked about visits to places. Letters and then the case of johnson, speeches and appearances and so forth. You have your a tremendous mass of material. And you have to do something with the material, otherwise its inert. Just lies there and thats what im calling voices. You have to somehow create, is what i said before, and easier maybe in this language to say you have too create a story, and to create a story, you have to take charge of the material. And not feel dwarfed by it. You know what i mean . Its amazing not to feel drank witness the monumentality of the desks in the senate or the file folders one has in ones office. Dont know if you want to talk about that. But if you dent, i have another passage. Guest okay. Host this is what i mean. Its actually one of my favorite. This is from the most recent of bobs books, from passage to power. And i find it useful. This is taking charge over the material and this happened a passage ill try to read it this has a place pretty soon after the assassination of kennedy and bob tells it about the thing that need to be done left hanging, decisions out railroad, feather bedding, wage reply guidelines, political deadlines like the state of the Union Address and the budget that needed to be meted. Never might the election and whether or not johnson would receive the Democratic Party knock nomination, time was running short and then bob says, the passage i think is really sort of representative and wonderful of something. But well have him tell us. Tangled with and complicating the time factor, and every other factor associated with the transition, looming over every aspect of johnsons ascension so the presidency was one that made that ascension uniquely difficult, a complication that wasnt out of the new age but seemed rather as if it were out of an age long past, complicationed that required to plumb his depths. The president , the king, was dead. Murdered, but the kinged had a brother, brother who hated the new king. The dead kings many, the kennedy men, the camelot men, made up as a faction and a faction that had a leader and the election was coming in less than a year and a convention in nine months but due to faction and the brothers these were not the crucial days because of the kings fraction and the kings brother decided to contest lyndon joinen johnsons right too to the nomination. Crucial date would be the primary on march 10th. Four months off. Unprecedented shock and grief and anxiety, unprecedented danger to american, the human race, unprecedented time pressure on problem ifs with staff made difficult by the brother factor. Even truman trumans ascension n has been easier than johnsons situation was extreme. And then it goes on in that case but i think the whole use of shakespeare, it would take a shakespeare, not a james reston, and then the kind of falling through with the whole king and the brothers king metaphor, and you do in a sense make it like a shakespearean drama, which i think not like well then he did this and that and so forth and so on you. Step back from the anywhere from the narrative and the story or tell as way to understand the story. Guest yes, well, thats you picked out you said it i said for myself those of you who read the book know that Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy hated each other. When jack kennedy offered him the vicepresidency the next day Bobby Kennedy came down the stairs in the hotel in los angeles three times, to try to get Lyndon Johnson to drop off the ticket. It was the worst johnson used to say that was the worth day of my life and ill hate him forever, and Bobby Kennedy hated Lyndon Johnson, and i im researching this and saying this is henry iv. These when someone comes to write the history of the united states, in 500 years, like were writing reading shakespeare, this is shakespeare, the president has been murdered and the president has a brother and the brother hates the new king. Then you can put a lot of things like, two days after the assassination, those who havent read the book, the test is tuesday two days after the assassination, author schlessinger convenes a dinner with kennedy men. The idea is to deny Lyndon Johnson the nomination in 1964 and main Bobby Kennedy the nominee and for the rest of the johnson president city Bobby Kennedy is a looming figure of two many who hate each other. You hate to use the word like holiday like hate but that word is correct so write it that way, bob. Dont try too diminish it, try to make it in the basic human terms. The president is dead. The king is dead. But the king has a brother, and the brother hates the new king. Well, that is a story. And you can make people you can then make people read political maneuvering and understand the maneuvering so many thing odd happened and hopefully draw them into the story. Host i know. I was trying to think i know somebody in the audience will have talks about in aspects of a the novel about how to create a story out of the king is dead, and i dont know the queen went to bed, or something, or the the king is dead, and because the king is dead, the queen went to bed i dont know, something to make a kind of causal connection. What is interesting is what you just said. You want told get it away from the journalistic and do Something Else. What do you mean you wanted to get it away from in the journalistic into what is Something Else exactly just so im clear. Guest well, were talking about the largest themes. A theme a book about a president who wants to end the great injustice, racial discrimination, for example. This is also a president who plunges the country into a war with so many people belied, vietnam is destroyed. These are huge themes. It is not stretching anything to say, im going to try to tell the story in those basic terms of those things, because thats really what its about. And that makes you try its hard dish mean, you say, am i doing this . Is there desperation on this stage in you never know. Whats what shoot be done thats what should be done. Host the larger scope. Guest how disthis man rise from the hill country to take over a nation and then in so many ways shape its fate. That gets us back to monumentality which gets us back to the them to of the seminar which is power and what you talk about when you start with the bridges. Right . Guest oh, yes. Host a wonderful metaphor because bridges bring things together presumably in that way, talking about whitman, whitman loves bridges, crossing the brooklyn bridge. Another poet talks be the bridge as a sense of hope and optimism but also a sense of the destruction. At the same time i think you we dont want to lose sight this is a wonderful passage but of the person in the center of all this, happens to be a person, and we have talked before one of the things that writing tries to do exespecially when you have a person, is create a sense of empathy. And do you feel empathetic with johnson or moses . Guest yes. Well, moses is a host i threw him in. Lets take johnson. Because of this almost larger than life. Its like lear or hamlet who i dont like. Guest its all the same human being. The theme of this which came from my books is that power reveals. Were all taught that power corrupts. Well, just another subject, doesnt always corrupt. Sometimes power can cleanse but what it alwayses to is reveal. Youve get to know your person, like when johnson is 20 years old, he is very poor boy, going through a poor boys school, in the middle of the hill country, southwest texas, they the state normal school, and between his sophomore and your junior years he has to drop out for a year so he can get the continuous education, during that year what he does is his goes and teams in what they call the Mexican School down in a little town called katur near the mexican border, and after you get the recollections of the kid he taught, and i wrote the sentence and i said, no teacher had ever cared if these kids learned or not. This teacher cared. He thought it was really important to them. I think i said that. He would get so angry, he thought it was very important they would speak english and so that if during a recess he heard some boy shouting in the playground in spanish he would run out and spank him. If it was a girl hed tongue lash them. So you could say that this was just Lyndon Johnson doing the best job he could which was characteristic o Lyndon Johnson. I thought he had empathy because he didnt just teach the kids help taught the janitor and johnson want ited tom speech english and he bought him a textbook and after the janitors words he said we would sit on the steps of the school. Johnson would pronounce, i would repeat, johnson would spell, would repeat. So this is the same human being now president , and his advisers are saying dont make priority of out of Jack Kennedys civil rights bill. Its a noble cause but a lost cause. The southerners control congress. Dont do it. Its a noble cause, dont fight for a noble cause. Thats a lost cause. And you know what johnson says . He says what the hell is the presidency for, then . And of course in his first speech, after kennedy is assassination, he says our First Priority has to be to pass the civil rights bill. And one of kennedys aides, says to him, basically i forget the words do you really mean this or is it just politics in and sonson says, listen, didnt i tell you once about the kids in catoula. Vowed if i ever had the power i would help them. And now i have the power and ill tell you something, im going to use it. So, if you feel you understand something about its like you get to know a friend. Host but i know were almost out of time i like my friends very much. Your johnson is not my friend. Hes your friend. And i just want to end on something up think its so important because of this issue of empathy and how you create it. Im old enough to be one of the people for whom the chant holiday the chant hey, hey, lb, how many kids did you kill today . The sense in which i have that johnson in my mind, and yet i have this johnson and this i think this is bob and i want to end with something bob wrote, in his mind this is shortly after the section i read before and as was always the case, live don johnson with Lyndon Johnson in addition to on stab. We him there were the an stack kells wind. The emotions understand him which that had been rubbed raw by the terrible going hill country, the scars so deep that raised question whether they would be healed or whether anybody could make him feel secure, with that [applause] sunday, in depth will feature a live discussion with author and political commentator, nick adams. Were talking your calls, tweets, emails and facebook questions. Despite all of the cultural problems of america might have right now, this is still by far and away, the greatest country in the history of the world. Nick adams, the author of the american boomerang, and retaking america, crushing political correctness. The mr. Adams is the founder and executive director of the foundation for liberty and american greatness, an organization dedicated to promoting american exceptionalism and combating antiamericannism worldwide. Watch in depth live on sunday on booktv on cspan 2. Michael days your book is called obamas legacy. What he accomplished at president. What is the most significant accomplishment of the obama administration. Host he pretty much saved our economy. Look what he was handed in 2009. Were in bad shape and he went to work and were doing much, much better. Absolutely. On the other side of that what would be most criticized senator. I think what hurts him most is he was not able to make a dent in terms of guns and the proliferation of guns in the nation. Did you find any policies on accomplishmented that will have a historical significance that didnt get a lot of attention in public . For me are i think the whole issue of clean air, clean water. People werent paying attention and the thing with other 189 countries is designed to save our planet. This weekend on cspan2s booktv, were feature thing Rancho Mirage writers festival. Today coverage start as 1 30 eastern. To me diseases are verns and not nouns. Youre cancerring, youre heart diseasing, your alzheimering. One doesnt get cancer, its something the body does. Former senator barbara boxer. Say said, resign, youre a disgrace. Its the whole thing. I said, no. No. All i tried to do was find common ground. You want to twist it, twist it, be my guest. Panel discussions on the state of americas hospitals. Life and politics in florida, and the environment. And pull litter prizewinning off her to lawrence write. I lived a lot in middle east, and one lesson your learn from the middle eastes that things can always get worse. On sunday, beginning at 3 00 p. M. Eastern, authors dennis prager. Make a list ol things you think would main you happy and if they all rave you would be temporarily happy. Dr. Gary small, director of the ucla longevity center. If you can achieve your brain health, then youll be able to remember and think about all those decisions you need to make every day to keep your brain healthy. And a Panel Discussion on national security. Watch the Rancho Mirage writers festival today on booktv. [inaudible discussion]