Thank you, thanks to all of you. It is really encouraging to see such a good crowd on saturday morning. I want to thank in particular ted and linda mohr, my hosts this weekend who have been showing me around savannah and showing me a wonderful time. Wonderful to be in this terrific city. I want to talk today for a few minutes about what led me to write this book republic of spin. My first book was on richard nixon. It was a book called nixons shadow, the history of image. It was not so much a biography of nixon as a study of nixon in the american imagination, not a story of what he did so much as a story of what nixon anmeant. Many were concerned with who was the real nixon . Some of you may recall nixon was always being trotted out in the new version, there was always talk of the new nixon, the old hatchet man being left behind, the statesman, nixon, man of the people, always a new image being brought out sometimes by nixon but sometimes forged and fabricated by his audiences. This led me to think about imagemaking in National Politics generally and this became a central critique of nixon certainly, were our politicians phony, manufactured . But also a critique of politics in the 20th century in our age of media where it seems so possible for politicians along with their consultants, spin doctors, handlers to present images and messages designed to give us what we want rather is and perhaps what they really where. Concern with authenticity hamas you might say, a theme we have been hearing a lot on the campaign trail this season. I began to realize that this story, even though i had just written this book about nixon was not just about nixon. It was about 20th century politics. I want to start by reading a short passage and despite what erik larsen said last night i do think audiences like, i hope audiences like to hear a little bit of the prose style of an author. I wont go on and on that getting a sampling of the book is partly what audiences want as well as an understanding of the book that comes through a more informal talk. Let me start with a short paragraph from the very beginning of the new book republic of spin. Our political world is awash in spin. Over many decades now elected officials and their aides have forged a huge arsenal of tools and techniques to shake their messages, their images and our thinking. From the white house on down virtually every politician of note boasted a brigade of speechwriters, press secretaries, campaign consultants, media gurus, handlers, pollsters, hucksters, flax, pacs and other assorted spin meister is to assure that each utterance is rendered in the best achievable light. Sometimes our politics seem to be nothing but skin. A dizzying cacophonous world of claims and counterclaims, each side charges the other with spin while asserting for itself a purchase on the truth. The growth of spin has given rise to a series of now familiar complaints. We hear that our politics are phony and corrupt, that our leaders are packaged and and principles, that their rhetoric is shallow and poll tested and even the most important political event, debates, conventions, speeches, interviews, press briefings are scripted, staged and choreographed. Spin, we hear, mislead or deceive such us and chokes off the honest and open discourse our democracy needs. This, i think, is at the heart of what worries us about the prevalence of political spin in our political life today and it was a question i wanted to get to the origins of. Where did this come from . Not just the tools and techniques politician by using that this anxiety that is adversely affecting our democracy. I realize nobody had written a history of the white house spin machine. Bits and pieces of it had been written about, talked about in many different ways but there was no single comprehensive history the told the story throughout the 20th centuries ago that is what i set out to do with republic of spin. This book has three narrative stories and i hope berated rather seamlessly, the intention was not for you to jump back and forth but for the characters and this seems to overlap among the three. The first of course is of the president s themselves who over the last hundred years have built up this machinery and in particular the specific innovation each one developed, specific struggles each one faced, specific challenges that each one confronted as they use these new tools to speak for the American Public and try to put across their agenda. A second story confirms less wellknown figures, spin doctors, information managers as they may be called more neutrally, experts who are trained in journalism comment advertising, Public Relations and other fields who in the course of the 20th century develop and expertise in words and images, they often come in to politics, sometimes on the campaign, sometimes in the white house itself, to work with president s to seek how they can best put across the message and then the third group of characters who are intertwined in the story are the critics, this is an intellectual history as well as a political history. It is supposed to tell the story not not just a house in evolve but what americans thought of it, how we assess its implications for democracy. There were some who were very bullish who felt new innovations, radio or Public Opinion polling could help us forge a stronger democracy where opinions could be exchanged freely, politicians could know what the public believed and this would help us to develop a democracy in which politicians were responsive to the public. There are others who have been very critical, felt the tools of spin were not used for leadership but for misleading, and powerful National Officials kind of an unfair advantage to put across their messages over the American People who would be fooled and lack the resources to know better and there is a third group called the realists who took a source of middle position, recognized the spin or publicity, propaganda in other eris was here to stay, and to educate the public. And how it worked in the hopes that the democracy could continue to be strong. I want to say about each group this morning. The story of the president s begins in my account with the roosevelt. This is not to say, in 1901 when Teddy Roosevelt became president. On the contrary argument the book that spin is as old as politics. And argue about the place of rhetoric in athenian democracy. In all year rounds leaders have superintended their images and try to make sure they were held in esteem by the public when they derive their power. For the american presidency there was the transformation at the start of the last century. There is the reason we dont know too much about most Nineteenth Century president s, we dont even know their names, they didnt do that much. Congress according to the constitution was the first branch of government listed in article 1, the presidency was article 2. It surprises my students who are used to thinking of the president as the big enchilada. What changed . How did the president become the one who drives the agenda to put his program across rather than implementing what congress thought best. Changes in large part because of the Industrial Revolution and the great social and economic problems that are introduced by the huge transformation and the nature of American Life and progressives, Theodore Roosevelt among some thought it was the place of the government in washington to tried to address those big challenges, and is not just the federal government roosevelt believed the president in particular, roosevelt had his own theory of the presidency basically saying instead of confining his role, the constitution said he could do, he was free to do anything except what the constitution said he couldnt do. He enormously expanded the field of president ial power but he knew he couldnt just do that by fiat. He wasnt a dictator. He felt he had to have Public Opinion on his side and the public was growing, the number of educated, literate americans were participating in politics was growing so marshaling Public Opinion was key to his political success and to do this, the public presidency, had to galvanize the public through the media. He toward wisely, took trips as no president before him had done, went out west, came down south, not just in a ceremonial role, and to advance a particular agenda weather was regulation of the railroad or the meat packing industry, all these progressive reforms that helped create a safer and fairer america. He also hired the first government information officers, press agents as they recall that the time when he decided to start his panama canal project, he put a journalist in charge of handling the oppressed for that project because there was so much interest in it. The great outcry from congress and why should taxpayer dollars be funding the aide who is going to give us Theodore Roosevelts propaganda and there was a big puzzle back and forth between the president and congress and he knew the value of commanding the headlines. Newspapers were changing. In the Nineteenth Century newspapers were partisan and champion the line of one party or the other. Now newspapers were becoming objective. They still had their editorial pages but readers cared less about the editorial pages than the news, what was happening and roosevelt recognized this and saw that his success depending on staying in the headlines, getting the news stories written the way he wanted so he would do things like descends to the bottom of Long Island Sound in a submarine, one of those oldfashioned with the circular portal door that closes, this was to demonstrate the navy needed to invest in submarines and develop into a modern navy. He once wrote 98 miles on horseback in order to demonstrate news to join him in an afternoon, in a small room which was the worst Natural Disaster in American History until Hurricane Katrina a few years ago. So the film shows hoovered down by a river pulling horses, out of the water, and the zeroth image of hoover as a man on the scene when challenges or crises arrived. He was also media saturday. He knew to give his speeches from the Mississippi River from a perch where you could hear the water rushing in the background so audiences at home have a sense of the man on the spot and National Geographic and other magazines and spreads of him in action with thoughs from the disaster scene. When as president hoover had an emergency proved there is a little irony in the title, sort of another theme of the book, that spin certain we can sell a candidate running for president but spin cannot save failure of policy and that is that theme that recurs throughout. More recently getting into a later part of the century i discovered even minor bureaucratic elements, development of less than apparatus that turned out to be consequential. During the vietnam war Lyndon Johnson organizes the Vietnam Information Group which has a rather benign sounding title but the first Interagency Group designed to sell the war, the vietnam war was going badly. People worried was able to message from the white house. Get and johnsons 8 in the steps state department, National Security council would gather on a weekly basis, putting out the right message, messages were coordinated and at one point in the fall of 1967 they did start the Progress Campaign to see an uptick in Public Opinion hellebore was going. It became a template for a Big Policy Initiative subsequent president s would roll out work plan in advance the messaging and a few years back you may recall newspaper reports of the White House Iraq Group which did something similar for the George Bush Administration and came up with lines like we dont want the smoking gun to be a Mushroom Cloud and other memorable lines that helped drive home for the nation the danger of Saddam Hussein acquiring nuclear weapons. And then of course i come to the present with barack obama to had given us such innovations as the white house ideography end white house twitter feed and everyday there are new innovations in Communications Technology and spin that president s have to adapt to. That is the first story, the main characters, the president , if you like reading about president s and what they are doing behindthescenes that is all in here. It is rated together with the second story of these spin doctors who insisted the president s and every step of the way, surprising even going back to the teams and 20s how deeply involved they are. It is not recent phenomenon. Some are people you might have heard of, bill moyers working for lbj, Ronald Reagans image master, roger ailes, richard nixon, george bush seniors media guy who went on to found fox news. There are all these obscure figures who i found deliciously fascinating who also played a really historic part in the development of this vast machinery president s now have at their disposal to influence Public Opinion. One of these figures was named judson, the First White House speechwriter. The title of white house speechwriter didnt coming to use until the eisenhower years but that is what he did for warren harding. Harding as some of you know was known as a bombastic bloviating speaker. He was mocked by the likes of h. L. Mencken who compared his speech to stilbene soup and dogs barking at the laundry on the line. At the same time, harding, because of the rising visibility of the president in the new mass media, newspapers was being called upon to give many more speeches than his predecessors have been so judson is the literary clerk, that is the official title, who really helps out a indeed and curmudgeonly h. L. Mencken writes a column where he says he is having some positive effects on the harding. In the eisenhower years, robert run, rewards a new the and tv actor who by the 1950s was kind of stalling his career of a little bit, but he had gone involved much like his friend ronald reagan, they had parallel tracks in hollywood. He got involved in politics and in 1952 is watching wyatt eisenhowers Television Debut in kansas, what is supposed to be a grand day, there is a downpour, eisenhower in reading his script for a fog that glasses, there are bleachers behind him, they are going back and forth like nothing important is happening the optics of just terrible and Montgomery Place is the call to the campaign saying you need emergency help. The next year after eisenhowers election, montgomerie is given a fulltime office in the west wing, becomes the firstever white house tv coach and starts doing little things, telling eisenhower to change his glasses, these lists frames which will look better on tv, even has eisenhower come out in front of the white house desk to look more relaxed, starts playing, raising and lowering the lectern, raises it because he feels eisenhower has been lowering his eyes to reflect the script, i will try not to do that here. He gets involved in the substance, the pacing of the speeches is correct. Eisenhower is born in 1890. He is a man of an earlier time, not like jfk who comes after him, he surrenders himself to montgomery and other mia advisers and by the end of his presidency he is quite adept with television, gives a law office addresses that are wellrespected over sputnik in 1957, over the little rock crisis, integration of little rock high school, where his moral leadership in the oval office and primetime addresses is considered an important contribution and that is in large part to these Unsung Heroes like robert montgomery. In the spirit of giving you the flavor of this, the firstever president ial pollster who i will wager, you have never heard of, a finnish geologist who spent time around the west in the extractive industries, got into all oil and texas, when a wall street firm thought they could use his expertise in understanding those industries. He was diehard political buffs, studied politics and Public Opinion, and he realized the way magazines like literary digests who were relied upon for polling, the way they surveyed Public Opinion was completely inadequate, compared it to how you test the chemical content of a piece of rock. You cant just skim the surface because that gives you a superficial reading and doesnt test the full crosssection. You have to pulverize the sample of war and he felt the survey is written in the newspapers skinned the surface a you have to go deep inside them, calibrate them. I recently read an excerpt from the book that Politico Magazine published and gave it the title fdrs silver because white and 8 silver who runs the 538 website, he was not doing his own polling but was taking all the numbers that were out there from the partys can thises to numbers from bookies to the newspaper surveys and figuring them out. He walks into the offices of the Democratic National committee in 1928. They think he is a crank and threw him out but four years later he tries again, that proved to be an enormous help to roosevelt and the democrats winning back the white house. You dont need to spend money in pennsylvania, you are going to win it anyway, these kinds of judgments and in 1934, he once again, in the offyear election when a president holds the white house his party held the white house, and and that was quietly saying they will pick up here. And they were floored. I will never question another election prediction of them. A columnist for the washington post, the president told jim farley, the forecast was the most remarkable thing he had ever seen in politics, made the cover of time magazine, profiled in others. He and his wife took to the social life of the capital, entertaining diplomats, Supreme Court justices and congressman at their yellow brick georgetown, they sailed to europe on the queen mary. And democratic headquarters, and master charge, newspaper clippings, almanacs, legislative reports, slide rules, adding machines, and index cards. Analyzing Political Behavior in every state, county and city in america. He would screw maps on the floor and look at the mall they said one visitor, then he would play with a calculating machine and pencil and pad and would come up with the information that was necessary to concentrate speakers and propaganda in certain counties of the state in order to win. The press painted him as no more partisan or irrational than a machine. Is a method is simply to avoid opinion, stick to statistical facts. There are all kinds of carriers like montgomerie and judson and many of the more recent figures whose names are more familiar to you as well who populate this book too. The third story, interwoven with theirs is a of writers, intellectuals, critics who argue about spin. Some of these were optimists, sometimes surprisingly so like a philosopher john dewey to when radio came on the scene, Great Potential that this medium could restore town hall feeling that the National Democracy that they had. And the hidden persuaders, people remember is that as a book about advertising industry, a chapter and more about politics in which he worries that the new strides being made in motivation research, trying to probe the unconscious to a understands why people make the choices they do, this was going to undermine the enlightenment basis of individual economy and rationality, our notions of public police. People were not voting for the candidates for the reasons they thought they were voting. This kind of destabilize our understanding of how democracy really worked and put it in some peril. Then there are the silent heroes of the book, these are the realists, people like Walter Lippmann in the 1920s, or all to a lot archibald mcleash. Theodore white in the 60s pulled back the curtain on how the strategy is planned and how campaigns are conducted and given us the understanding of political campaigning today. Even the germanamerican philosopher wrote an essay called lying in politics during the vietnam war. He is deeply critical of Lyndon Johnson and the credibility gap opened up, and the official line of the government was failing to reflect the on the ground realities and also didnt want to throw her loss in with the moralists who condemned politicians for being liars. When she asked has politics and truth ever been in at the company in effect. She recognized from time immemorial politics is a realm in which people are always grazing the truth, putting the best face on their arguments and this is the way it should be and the way it has to be if we want pure truth, we look to the judge, scholars, philosophers, there are rooms in public life. Politics has never been one of them. These other three stories that cover the early embryonic years of Teddy Roosevelt administration and the beginnings of the 20th century up through this crazy cacophonous media saturated spin soaked world we live in today. And it came through the course of my research, all of them challenged revise, i started out thinking about spin. The first which i probably made clear of the spin is not new. We sometimes think that it is a recent phenomenon, clinton or reagan or jfk and somehow before that, politics is more honest, more pure, more straightforward. And in our own time, and the advent of the modern presidency, and celebrating themselves to the public. And spin is not all powerful. Contrary to critics like Vance Packard or those words i read at the beginning, the common complaint we have about political culture today. What was striking to me, the research i did was not just the president s effectively sell their programs but how ineffective spin off in waters and the limits of spin whether it was Woodrow Wilson failing to sell his lead divinations project to the American Public or franklin roosevelt, one of the most effective communicator is the oval office ever seem, being unable despite his fireside chat to put across his Court Packing plan of 1937. Public opinion, counter spin from congress or the opposing party. And series of elements in an open society like ours conspired to limit the power of president ial persuasion and to go even further, theorists of spin and throughout the book really come to see and states unanimously, most of what we are supposedly persuaded of, we are inclined to believe. It is hard to convince a public to completely reverse itself on a position. The most effective spin to, as one of these advertising men said doesnt persuade, it resonates. It brings out believes that are already within us. So spin is not new, spin is not allpowerful and finally spin is not all bad. The names spin, the term spin is one that comes out of the 1980s from the debate is, after the candidates would debate on stage, reporters would interview their surrogates about which man had won. And the place these people gather, it was upgraded to the spin room because there are so many of them. In calling it spin there was an acknowledgment spin was a game that the reporters were in on it. They knew to be sincere, and the audience wasnt on it. And we could evaluate and spin is different and more benign form in the early part of the century called propaganda. And a more passive audience wohl and joy the spin culture, it is certainly not one in which why have no say or no capacity to evaluate, it is an ambivalent stance towards been. In ancient greece, plato writing about rhetoric deport all rhetoric because the purpose of rhetoric, he said was merely to induce conviction, not to teach truth. It could be conviction about something true or false but philosophy was what brought you to truth, rhetoric brought you to conviction. Was the date for. Plato had his ideals and the debate versions in the real world and that is what rhetoric was to him. Terrace of, this was all wrong, he said rhetoric can be used for good as well as hell and it was not the use of rhetoric per se but it was abuse he worried about by the wrong person at the wrong end. Barack obama running for president , ran on a program of less spin, he was running as an honest man, he called for more Straight Talk. More Straight Talk and less spin. When obama took his own shellacking in the offyear congressional races, and lost quite a number. Took a very different line, he was asked why he and the democrats struggled so much in 2010, he came in and paid a lot of attention to policy, and calling for less spin to two years later calling for more spin, to be up the nest to being an aristotle in. All of us have this ambivalence. Undersurface, we are platonic, we see this vacuous, often deceptive spin, we get angry and and go against it but deep down, and i we actually are capable of seeing through this and in support of a cause or a candidate that we like to succeed. We like obama and wishy was better. We wish their arguments were finally proactive. Spin has this double balance. I think one thing i hope to show, in long history of spin is started in this book, spin although it has many times been used for misleading is used for meeting, the president ial rhetoric has brought us not just the lows the highest highs of the last century. On that note i am going to conclude and i would love you to line up at the microphone, and take your questions. And [applause] before this primary season, how if you hadnt written a book and you were covering this or taking a look at it, where would you like this in the book . We see highs and lows, the astronomical spin on this especially from the republican party. Is some of it going to backfire . I wrote about this with obama but other president s going back to jimmy carter, tried to run on the spin of no spin. Because we are in such a spin saturated culture we get set up with it, we create the authentic candidate. It may be donald trump who in his unfiltered way the words come out, there are got responses and it is appealing to for obvious reasons and on the democratic side it was similar to the appeal of Bernie Sanders, he says what he believes, looks like he rolled out of bed and gave a speech. It is interesting to note about 15 months ago i was at a White House Briefing on advice for obama for the state of the union, the president was in there but his aides were. One of the people was a kid divine, sanderss Campaign Guru and he is laying down this line he wanted obama to take in the state of the union, the system is rigged. The exact line he had Bernie Sanders using. He is sincere indeed leaving it. But there is an artifice behind the authenticity, with donald trump. You worked with roger stone, one of the most devious but effective consultants on the republicans side, and the seeming spontaneity. And he says he stole the election and the spotlight is back on trump for a few days. He is underneath his spontaneity and throughout our history even the most seemingly and coach, untutored, politically innocent politicians use practice and for fraud. Harry truman to get a quick example in 1948 delivers a speech in the Democratic National convention where he is praised for his spontaneous ad lib style and gets rave reviews and this is seen as the beginning of his come back which comes back in his upsetting winning reelection. For months with the radio coach, brought it to the pacing, figured out how to get notes that would service the spine of the speech without adhering rigidly to the reading. That too, it didnt mean harry truman was a phony. He was a very authentic figure but behind the authenticity their is spin as well. Even this year in our seemingly spontaneous, chaotic, authentic debate of course there is still polling, speech writing, imagemaking, it is all still there under the surface. Microphone. All right. I am curious your thoughts, contemporarily with karl rove and what he did with the Bush Administration going back to a numbers game, is that now how you see future politicians working it . Is it cyclical and comes and goes . One of karl roves contributions the change about politics in recent elections is this emphasis on what they call micro target, using data to figure out which constituencies need to turn out. That is a little different from spin which is about communication. You might say the air and the and as opposed to the ground game that they are tied together. What it allows for is micro targeting of your messageing. That is something the great Public Relations specialist who was advising, something he was on to 60 years ago as well but we certainly see a more sophisticated form of messaging because each constituency through its own niche media whether it is fox news or africanamerican radio, on Climate Change the Bush Administration, whether men to get them to hear the white house position, there are all kinds of ways messages are tailored for specific media in order to reach specific constituencies. I wish i had more time but i know you all have either events to get to and i am getting the no. The destructive nature of the internet that tom friedman wrote about last week. We have to talk about it outside. Thank you all for com