Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20130413

lman and a friend of his called "in full glory reflected: discovering the war of 1812 in the chesapeake." is other is a book by james johnston entitled from "from sle hip to harbor -- ship to harbor." both are extraordinarily wonderful works, beautifully written, engagingly written. one deals with the sort of general overview in history of the war of 1812 as it, excuse me, affects the upper chesapeake and also the whole of the chesapeake. but it not only tells you the stories, but it takes you to the places and helps you to envision it through some absolutely extraordinarily lovely illustrations that were commissioned for the work as well as drawing on contemporary illustrations. jim johnston's book is an extraordinary tour de force about the journey of an american, african-american family from a muslim context in africa to a slave ship that brought that individual to annapolis on to georgetown in a much larger context and then, ultimately, the family journey all the way to harvard and to directing education of african-americans in the city of baltimore right up to the near present. both books are wonderfully done. i think you will enjoy hearing about them, and hopefully, you will go out and buy them if you don't have them already. and after the session you're encouraged to come and meet the authors and get your books signed. so i'm going to turn things over now, first, to ralph to speak for a moment, and then he will turn it over to jim, and then we'll open it up for questions. >> thank you, ed. and good morning, everyone. and, ed, thank you so much for mentioning that i do have a co-author, and that's very important because we formed a great team. burt deserves great credit for also being a major contributor to this particular book that has an unusual titles, "in full glory reflected." and i don't know how many of you might recognize where that title came from, but in full glory are the words of a gentleman named francis scott key. and if you have an opportunity to read the book, you'll better understand how we came up with that title. i think it's very appropriate that we have a session here on the war of 1812, because we are right now in the middle of the bicentennial celebration of the war of 1812. and isn't it also appropriate that we were at the key school. because francis scott key played a little role, you could say, in the war of 1812 that has left us with what i would regard as one of our greatest icons, and that are the words to what is our national anthem. and that is a maryland story that has national significance. this book is really the result of a team effort. there's no way that we could have had the illustrations in here and the maps without partnering with other people that helped to pay for it. because this book is full color all the way through. there's over 65 commissioned pieces of art in here that have never been done before, and you can imagine when you start to do that kind of thing, it really escalates the cost. so i would be remiss if i did not acknowledge the support that we got from the maryland war of 1812 commission and, also, the national park service chesapeake gateways program as well as private funding. without that this book would not have been possible, at least not in the way that you see it here today. the other thing that i want to make clear to everybody is that because it has been subsidized, the book only sells for $24.95. to get a book that's full color like that is pretty amazing. and the other thing that i'm really proud to tell you is that all of the profits from the book go to a restricted fund be that will be used to help maintain the interpretive signage for the star-spangled banner national historic trail. so when you buy the book, you're not supporting really and burt, you're actually supporting a national trail that would help people understand really the story behind what is the star spangled banner. a little bit about the book. it's not meant to be a scholarly book. it's meant to be a book to capture people's imagination as to what really is the story of the war in the chesapeake. and even though it was largely funded by maryland, we could not do that job without including virginia and washington d.c. so it is a book that i would say that covers the whole waterways of the chesapeake bay even though it does concentrate, i guess you could say, on maryland. i'm really proud of the book for several reasons. it's gotten many good reviews. in fact, there's one individual if you go on amazon and you look at the reviews that have been given there, it says that if you're only going to buy one book about the war of 1812 and the chesapeake, this is the one you should purchase. that's about the best kind of a review i think you could get. but the other thing i'm proud about is that this was truly a team effort. it was not just a burt and a ralph effort. this was an effort of two very distinguished artists. one was jerry embleton who lives in switzerland. he's actually english, but he moved to switzerland. if you've ever done or read any books that are put out by toes pray series which are military books, this is a guy that is featured in most of those. so we were very fortunate. but we also have a maryland artist, richard. shlek. another very well known artist. and then the cartographer, the individual who did the maps, bob pratt, is the retired director of the cartography division of national geographic. you just can't get great people like that unless you have sufficient funding. and so that's why, again, i want to emphasize to everybody how fortunate we were to have the funding from our partners to really help make this thing possible. i think at that point i will just close and turn it over to jim. but we really do welcome you to ask questions. and if you don't, then we're just going to tell you what we think about the chesapeake and slavery and all that kind of good stuff. so, jim? >> thank you, ralph, and thanks, you would, and the key school and all of you in the audience for coming. i want to first say, i've read ralph's book in preparation for this, and i highly recommend it. i'd do my book first, but his book is a really good book. [laughter] no, i do history all the time. he's got a good book. from slave ship to harvard is the true story of six generations of an african-american family from the arrival here in annapolis in 1752 through harvard in 1923 up until today. i'll speak fairly briefly and cover three things today. first, a quick run through the book and the six generations. second, i want to introduce the family, the fellow who went to harvard. they're here today, at least some of them, and maybe the rest will get here before i get to them. and, third, i want to talk about the significance of the book. so i'll begin telling you about each generation. the first was this man that's on the cover. he was a muslim from guinea. he and his sister were sold onboard the slave ship elijah here in annapolis on june 4, 1752. his portrait on the cover is painted by charles wilson peel, the great american portrait painter who did seven life portraits of george washington. and interestingly enough, he was a little boy living here in annapolis the day the slave ship came in. and he met, the two of them met, i think, 60, 70 years later when this picture was painted. and this picture was, of course, yaro as an older man when he was living in georgetown. in the next generation was yaro's niece. nancy hillman was one of them. she was one of the first, be not the first -- if not the first african-americans to win a lawsuit in washington d.c. also in that generation was yaro's son and his daughter-in-law, mary turner. and mary turner, when she got married to yaro's son, became mary turner yaro. and these people here today are related to mary turner. there's a community in western maryland named yarosburg, and that is named after mary turner or yaro because she was the midwife there. and the community is still in western maryland. the third generation of the family included mary's nephew, simon turner. he was born a slave near yarosburg. he joined the union army during the civil war and fought in the civil war. in the fourth generation was simon's daughter, emma turner. she was born after the civil war and was the first in the family to get a college degree. and i want to dwell on emma. her picture's in the book, but emma knew yaro's daughter-in-law, and these women here knew emma. so it's that short a span of time that goes back to 1752. emma married a minister. she was the first in the family to get a college degree, and she married a minister named robert ford and they settled, ultimately, in baltimore. thus, in the fifth generation their son, robert turner ford, was admitted to harvard in 1923 and graduated in 1927. it had been 175 years almost to the day that the slave ship brought yaro in here to annapolis. the sixth generation, i'm going to introduce the ones that are here, and i think their cousin will come later. the sixth generation includes these women. they're robert turner ford's nieces; cynthia richardson -- i wanted her to stand up -- denise -- [inaudible] and emily willis. [applause] and they have just walked in. great timing. alice robbins, stay standing. no, no, you stay standing. alice, would you raise your hand? alice is robert turner ford's daughter, and robin is his granddaughter. too shy to stand up. [applause] and you can ask them questions too. they're more articulate than i am. from slave ship to harvard, finally, let me get to the significance of the book. it's the first time in my knowledge that a family has been traced from the arrival on a slave ship to descendants living today, so that aspect is unique. but, of course, this family was just exceptional. and while this book tells the story of in this one family, there's more to the book than that. i call it a case study of race, of racial history. it places the family's constant struggles to succeed and excel against the backdrop of the tobacco plantations, slavery, slave codes, abolitionists, the georgia men -- which is a term i found, they were the slave will drivers who would take slaves from maryland and virginia and take them to the cotton plantations in the deep south. and i cover the slave drivers too. the protections that the family and african-americans received from the civil war amendments to the constitutions, the failure of the separate but equal approach to education and, finally, the civil rights movement and its achievements and what it did for african-americans. and some through this one exceptional family, i've tried to narrate the story of race in america. thank you. >> good, thank you. [applause] what we'd like to do now is to open it up for questions from the audience. and i'm just simply going to take my privilege as moderator to pass one question on to jim who started this off talking about the legacy, the giving voice to the african-american commitment. community. going all the way back to the origins of slavery. one of the things that i've been intrigued by, jim, is that you're talking in this particular book about a group of slaves really -- even though you focus on one family of muslim origins. and in particular one of the things that i found intriguing about sort of looking at the the history of the slavery in this state, muslims, black muslims are generally well schooled, and they're generally well schooled in mathematics. and one of the things that is rather interesting about the pattern that you're referring to in terms of being the body servant or the man servant or the person servant is that that servant's entrusted with a lot of responsibility. generally collecting debts, keeping track of money, dealing with things. so i'm just wondering is the fact that here you have this 14-year-old, you arrive, he's probably come already well educated and particularly in mathematics. and what i'm just curious about what you think. >> thank you, ed. yeah, yaro was educated in africa, and the way i know that is because at the national archives there's a deed that he signed, and he signed it in arabic. so he could read and write in arabic. and, in fact, he spoke at least three languages. he was muslim, so he spoke -- [inaudible] he was a good muslim, and so he could read the quran and he could write in the quran, and then, of course, he could speak english and in a quite poetic way. he was the body servant to his owner, it was the bell family which is a prominent family even today in maryland. and had this responsibility for doing things. his owner, first owner was an engineer, and so i think yaro learned a lot about ipg nearing from that -- engineering from that. and there is a tie with ralph's book, because before today's session we were exchanging e-mails. yaro -- islam follows a lunar calendar, and yaro himself talked about, measured his life in a lunar calendar. and i discovered in researching this another african-american that i think also was descended from muslims who called himself the moon man. and he told stories, you know, he would predict your future based on a lunar calendar. but that man also fought in the war of 1812. and so he was a figure in washington d.c. in the book i also trace, there were wars going on in africa, and so there were lots of muslims who were captured -- not, lots is extreme, not that many -- but muslims were captured in those wars and sold into the slave trade. and i believe on the ship that brought yaro there were a number of other muslims, and i found mislimb names in wills of people that were living back then and a small muslim community both in georgetown and washington, d.c. and in rockville, maryland. and these people tended to be, as ed suggested, educated in africa. and so, in fact, more educated than the people that that ownedm often times. >> one of the things i found interesting at sort of looking at this question of what the african-americans brought or the africans brought to the american world was this whole business of accounting system. when in the 19th century one of the scholars began looking at the indians from the eastern shore and how they'd moved up into canada and abandoned the eastern shore, they kept running up against an accounting system. it turned out to be arabic in origin. the idea, of course, is that slaves who were brought into the country often ran, and they ran to the comfort and the support of the indian community. so you find trails of interaction and ways in which systems are developed that can trace their roots back to the african origins. >> yaro himself in later life, once he was freed, became sort of a financier in georgetown and was loaning money to white merchants. and so that -- he obviously knew enough about both the law and business and money to handle his own finances. >> ralph, one of the interesting stories in trying to sort of sort out what happens in the war of 1812 is the role of the african-american community. the fact that the british come into the bay in your old home territory and issue a proclamation and say anybody who comes to us can be free and may even get a piece of land. and all of a sudden instead of getting the able-bodied 18 and 19-year-olds they think they might get by putting out that, what do they get? >> well, often times they got elderly people that were a burden, quite frankly, to the british. just to kind of go back a little bit, when the british put a blockade on the chesapeake bay, that was in february of 1813. now, keep in mind that war had been declared in june. england did not declare war back. they kept waiting thinking that the united states was going to realize this was a big mistake. but the united states never did that. so, ultimately, england then declared war also on the united states. the first thing that they did was to put up a blockade across the chesapeake bay. now, why would they do that? it really made a lot of sense. they had a superior navy. they wanted to bring the war right to the seat of where the american government was who had the audacity to declare war on great britain. it was to bring it right here. there was another reason. and that is if they could destroy the economy of the chesapeake bay, the people in the chesapeake would try to sue for peace or at least try to convince their politicians that we don't want to have this war. and what's the best way that you can destroy the economy of the chesapeake bay? and that's to destroy the money crop. and the money crop is tobacco. so when the british came in and raided a lot of these plantations, if they couldn't take the tobacco themselves -- which they often did and shipped back to england because it was or very profitable -- they would burn it. and that would hurt the economy. but if you left the slave population, next year they could replant. but if you offered to the slaves their freedom and you take away the work force -- and tobacco is a very, very intensive, labor-intensive product -- then what is the plantation owner going to do? we know and there may be earlier instances, but we know that on march the 10th of 1813, it's the first known instance of where slaves escaped from the plantation owners and boarded british ships. that's only a month after the british came in here and declared a blockade. during the total war, we'll never know exactly how many slaves escaped, but we're probably talking in excess of 2,000. when these slaves came onto these ships, think about the burden that it created for the u.s -- for the royal navy. that meant that they now had to shelter, clothe and feed those people. and so what did they do? they began to build a station on tan jeer island, and that's where most of the slaves went to, and that's where they lived. there was no room for them to be onboard the ships. and most of the military force that was in the chesapeake were essentially living onboard these ships. so that's why they built this base of operations on tangier island. and there's a fellow by the name of alan taylor, and if you have not read any of his books, he is a great scholar. probably book that most of you might know about is his book that's titled "civil war in 1812." he's right now doing a book on slavery in the chesapeake during the war of 1812. i've been very fortunate to get to know alan, and he has taught me a lot about what happened back at that time. but the most important thing he taught me is that the blacks that escaped were the navigators of the night. and what he meant by that is that if you were a slave, you essentially were working from sun up to sundown. and that meant that if you wanted to go visit friends or possibly even your wife or some of your children that might be on a. [inaudible] ing plantation, you had -- on a neighboring plantation, you had to do that at night. and you became very familiar of how to travel and what were the deer trails and rabbit trails and every other trail you could find to try to get from one place to another. and many of these blacks were also very familiar with the sandbars and the channels because they were the ones that were going out and fishing and doing the oystering and what not. and so the british realize that so that when these slaves escaped and got their freedom, they turned around and offered their knowledge of navigation of the night to the british raiders. and imagine if you are a plantation owner, and lo and behold one morning here is the british standing on your doorsteps and with them is one of your former slaves. and that's happened more than one time. there's actually a quote from a gentleman who was head of the militia in virginia who said that the slaves essentially have now become the pilots on the rivers and the navigators for the british to attack our plantations. another thing that the british did that's very, very interesting, if a man escaped and gets his freedom onboard the ship, the british would allow that individual to go back and bring the rest of his family if he so desired. that's an incentive. because when that word gets out, that means that not only am i getting my own freedom, but i may have the opportunity to go out and get the freedom from the rest of the people who are in my family. so when a british ship would show up offshore of a plantation to the plantation owner, that would be a terrible fate. to them, that would say there's a great chance that i'm going to be raided. i may lose my tobacco crop, i may even suffer some damage from burning. who knows what's going to happen. but to the slave, it was just the opposite. this was an opportunity for freedom. and the british got so sophisticated on this that at night they would put a lamp on their ship which, essentially, was welcoming and saying to the slaves this is where we are, come on out. and now think about this. if you were a young male and you were in many reasonably good health -- in reasonably good health, you would be offered an opportunity to join what was known as the marine corps or the colonial corps. and what that meant is that not only could you have your freedom, but you could be given a uniform, you could be given a weapon, and you could serve in the british military. you could go from one day of being a slave to another day being someone who's in the military with a uniform. i mean, think how proud somebody might be to go from that to another level. >> and, in fact, in the end the british did follow through with their colonial ma reaps. there's a whole portion of the island of trinidad today that has been settled by those former colonial marines who were given their land, eventually given of a place to live. at the state archives, we have a project to give voice to the lives of three groups of people who served during the war of 1812 who were african-american. we look to the slaves that escaped. we've already established almost 800 documented cases of slaves escaping to the british, and we have traced their lives by and large to canada and from canada there on. we're also very interested in another aspect of the history of slave reas it relate -- slavery as it relates to opportunity for freedom. because what does happen is those african-americans who become familiar with working on the bay find that it's relatively easy to get a job aboard ship. well, during the war when all of this commerce was being intercepted by the british, there were a number of ships, large numbers of ships that were captured as prizes by the british. and all the sailors were taken off those ships and given two choices; either go to prison in england or to join the british navy. most of them decided to go to prison, because they knew how bad the british navy was. what happens is they end up at dartmore prison, ultimately, and we have, again, are tracing the lives of those people from maryland who end up as prisoners of war at the prison. and then the third group that we're really talking about are those that do then join the british forces. i think we have at least two documented cases of african-americans who are killed fighting with the british in the assault on baltimore. so when you begin to sort of look at this whole business of the pattern of the participation of the whole community in the war of 1812, we're not only interested in the captains of the militia, we're also interested in the people who served in various ways within that war. jim, let's -- >> can i just add something because, ed, you made an interesting comment, and that's about two former slaves that died with the british in combat. but there's another story that not a lot of people know about, and that's a slave who ran away from a plantation in prince georges county that belonged to colonel ogden. and he did not join the british. instead, he went to baltimore, and he had a light complexion where, apparently, he could get away with possibly being considered a white man. and at least claimed that he was a freed black. and he went to a family that was known as the williams family in baltimore, and he ended up joining the u.s. army. so here's an escaped slave who doesn't go to the british, joins the u.s. army and where is he sent? he's sent to fort mchenry, and he's there during the bombardment of fort mchenry. and he's wounded by shrapnel from one of those exploding bombs that francis scott key wrote about in the star spangled banner, and he dies in the public hospital about ten days later. so he gave his life to fight for a country where he was a slave. but the story gets even more interesting, because when you joined the military, there was an incentive where you could get an immediate cash bonus which was known as a bounty. in addition to that, if you served out the full extent of whatever your obligation was when you signed up, you would be offered property. and that's generally land that would be out in western maryland. when this guy dies, if you can imagine, his former slave owner sues to try to get back the bounty property that was supposed to coto the slave. to go to the slave. and the court said that the owner had not done enough to try to get his slave back, and so, therefore, the heirs of this gentleman, frederick hall, was to get the property. that's a fascinating story. >> and i think what that does is show something that is very prominent in your book, jim, which is the enormous complexity of the relationships between and white and the black community. when i, i once -- and i'm going to do it today too -- everybody just sort of look around at the person on the right and left and look around the room, and you see that we're of different races. and i've told audiences this, that we've thought about american history and black history, but we also have to talk about our shared history. i think what happened was, i mean, history happened to all of our ancestors at the same time. when the war of 1812 happened, it affected both blacks and whites. but the problem has been in the past that we only covered the white aspects of history. and what i try to do in my book is cover both. i not only talk about what happened to the african-american families, but, in fact, the bell family that owned yaro originally first, i mean, they first came to maryland as a prisoner of war, as a slave, in effect. and yet despite the fact that they were slaves, they turned around and bought slaves. and as ralph has said, it was the tobacco that drove the whole thing of american slavery. if it had not been for tobacco, there would not have been slavery in america. we think about the cotton plantations in the south, but that was at the time of the civil war. it was quite different here in maryland where there were both free blacks and slaves living at the same time. and this particular family, a number of them started life as a slave and ultimately got freed and finished life as free people. and so the it's a more complex relationship than we want to think of. >> i think you can't find, i think, from the court records too that african-americans could win a court suit. and nancy is your particular case where she is picking up on a debt that was owed yarrow, and this is much later. you might want to -- >> well, the niece was nancy hillman, and there's an interesting story about her because she was a free woman. i think he actually freed herself. >> this was all before the civil war, so we're clear of the time frame. >> so when yarrow died in 1823, he had a loan out to a man, and the man quit paying. and eventually, the property that -- property was secured, and eventually they foreclosed on the land that the loan was good on. and nancy went into court, and she said, wait a minute, i have first right toss that. well -- rights to that. well, there was a complication in d.c. law, and that is african-americans -- in fact, no black whether free or slave was allowed to testify. and so she somehow or other had to win a lawsuit without testifying. and she won. i -- had a good lawyer, and she won. but the claim was levied against her. it prohibited her -- [inaudible] and the federal judge said no. the law doesn't go that far. african-americans are entitled to sue in court. they may not be able to testify, but they can sue in court, and she was one of the first to win and collect on property that yarrow had owned in georgetown. >> we have about 15 minutes left in our presentation. you all know we're being recorded and broadcast live from the c-span, and we'd be happy to have questions from the audience. please go to the mic, and we'll take you from there. so does anybody have a question that they would like to bring to the authors? >> you want to ask a question, otherwise we'll just keep talking. ralph and i can talk, you know, for a couple hours here. [laughter] well, go ahead. >> as we are, you all are thinking about it -- yes, please. would you go up to the mic, please? stand at the mic and raise your question, please. identify yourself if you would, please. >> my name is dan lincoln. and i have a question starting from what you've just described that spans, because history casts a shadow forwards. effectively, one of the things you're talking about is the impact of slavery on state of maryland because we're so close, obviously, to the chesapeake. and, obviously, at the beginning of the civil war there was an issue as to whether maryland would go to the northern or the southern side. and there's a whole history of lincoln and beyond that. no relation, by the way. so the question is whether this item you're talking about -- and several of you have discussed this -- with the release of several slaves had an impact in your opinion later on when it came to the evolution of which way does maryland go if in releasing the slaves? did it diminish, do you think, the slave content, the dependency on slaves that allowed brand eventually to go to the -- maryland eventually to go to the union side? >> i -- it's a good question. i think in maryland it was very unique because in maryland one of the things that happened was that tobacco started failing and, therefore, the economic rationale for slavery started failing. and that happened around 1800, 1790s. and so you see in maryland that -- especially in western maryland where there never was tobacco, the culture grew up against slavery, and the people in western maryland did own slaves. this family, their ancestors had been in western maryland. some were slaves, some were not. but the economic rationale for slavery and, it just didn't work very well. and so you started getting in western maryland a lot of people who didn't believe in slavery. they were not necessarily abolitionists, but they just didn't care one way or the other. it was not economically feasible there. on the eastern shore where there was still tobacco, slavery was in full force, and the eastern shore, of course, was very pro-south up to the civil war. >> something that i would add, it's kind of tangential to your question, but it's important. if you look at the statistics of what region of north america suffered the most raids during the war of 1812, it'll surprise you that a it was the chesapeake. and maryland suffered more than virginia. and the river suffered more than any part of maryland. and that was because there was so much raiding going up and down the river, also the potomac and other rivers. so many slaves would be taken off, so many hogs heads of tobacco were burnt, so many plantation homes were burnt that if you start looking at the newspaper ads in 1814, 1815, 1816, 1817, you see farm and plantation after farm and plantation that are for sale. and literally, the population of southern maryland decreased because of all of the depp priations that to can considered here during the -- that occurred here during the war of 1812. so slavery was a part of that, but i would say the primary reason for that was because of the intense raiding that took place here during the british. >> i'd like to go to the center of your question, because a rather interesting one, what are the pressures that keep maryland as slave, you know, maryland remains a slave state until november of 1864 when the new constitution is passed. this whole question of what keeps slavery alive and well within maryland and what sort of pressure does it apply in terms of the position that maryland takes with regard to the union is a very difficult one to sort out. i think what is true is that the war of 1812 creates an infrastructure for the resquidification of slavery throughout the united states. the war of 1812 gives boundaries and gives a very clear sort of outline to what the country is going to be and also the opportunity for expansion which eventually is called manifest destiny. and what happens in the upper chesapeake is you have a surplus population. you have a surplus population of african-americans that are really not needed for the agriculture that is predominant in the lawyer. and there's two paths that are followed. one path is to free and allow people to just simply work out on their own and to hire themselves out. maryland had the large single population of free african-americans of any place in the united states on the eve of the civil war. part of that has to do with the role that baltimore plays. the other part of it was that baltimore -- maryland became a breeding ground and a collecting point for selling slaves south. baltimore, one of the most, darkest periods i suspect in the history of baltimore is the fact that they were this center of the slave trade to new orleans. there is a very good book called "cash for blood" which details the cargo after cargo of slaves that are gathered on the whatevers of baltimore and -- wharves of baltimore and sent to new orleans for sale. so you've got this ongoing sort of tension within the state. you also have regionalization. when you come to the question of the eastern shore, be very careful. slavery on the eastern shore is a dynamic which is a very complex one. when we look at, for example, those african-americans who petitioned for freedom, just petitioned for freedom, you will find that in the lower courts in the first years of petitioning for freedom in queen anne's county, door chester county, all of those counties, those petitions succeed. when they fail is when they're appealed to the higher courts. and the rejudeification takes mace. so i think we've got to be really careful about how we sort of characterize the nature of slavery and how it works in the community, but at the same time realize that the war of 1812 is actually a transforming period in american history. it is the downhill slope as far as the institution of slavery is concerned because it becomes much more rigidified. in jim's book he has this quote of what happens in maryland, in maryland by 1850 -- remember when they changed the -- [inaudible] laws? >> it was after john brown's raid. >> after john brown's raid. >> in 1859. >> no more at all. >> yeah. the maryland legislature, the day yarrow came in on june 4, 1752, the yabd legislature has taken up a bill to make it more difficult to get freed. man you mission is the process of getting freed. >> yes. >> they made it more difficult, but they still allowed it. there were various things that allowed it. but after john brown's raid on harper's ferry, the maryland legislature said we're just tired of this. nobody's going to get free anymore. and do you know what this family did? this family before the law took effect, they went down and got themselves freed. so everybody in western maryland, all blacks in western maryland that could were either buying their freedom of getting their owners to free them before the law took effect. and, of course, you know, so the humanity takes over these things sometimes. >> we need to let the -- >> request interesting if you reflect on it. it is possible then to reflect on john brown as a form of patriot. >> right. >> we have another question, so i want -- we only have about five minutes left in the program, so we really -- this gentleman was ahead of you, and then we'll take yours. as you can tell, we tend to talk a lot up here. >> yeah. i want to applaud mr. johnston's book, because i think he did something that many people don't do, and that's operate to see a relationship from very difficult circumstances to some surviving possible accomplishments. we all are -- african-americans like myself have come from slavery. we were affected by slavery. and much too often we hear about slavery with no association to the end result where people have come through extraordinary circumstances to accomplish great ends in spite of the difficulties. and i sure appreciate that, because we need more of that. because most people think from a perspective that slavery has so, you know, hurt people that they can't rise above it. >> with right. >> and i think that we need to understand that and try to make that more about theme when discussing these kinds of situations. i won't take much, any more time. >> thank you very much. >> i agree. i think well said, and i don't want to add anything to it. >> we had one more question, i think, at least -- were you, did you -- >> of course this month a lot of attention to the war of 1812 and the chesapeake and the maryland public television has put some on already. one was entitled the war in the chesapeake, 1812. at the end of that they summed in about two minutes about how this had a transforming effect on the nation because before the war of 1812 people considered themselves first citizens of their states and then only secondarily as a citizen of the nation. and washington being burned, the great fight in baltimore to defeat the british that this had a transforming effect. i wonder if you gentlemen would talk about that for a few minutes. >> it is an important point that you make, and i'm glad that you raised it. what's the big deal about the war of 1812? because if you look at the treaty of gent, it's a status quo. everything was taken back to exactly where it was before. when you think about the colonies, you refer to yourself as a marylander or as a virginian. and even when we became a country and we got our independence. >> it was the time of good feeling. it was when people had pride in their country that they didn't have before that. so i do think the war is very important for us to celebrate not because of wars that were won or battles that that were l, but because of what it did for the country. and be think about the icons that came out of of that war. not just the star spangled banner as the flag, not just the words that are the national anthem, but think about old hickory, think about old ironsides, think about don't give up the ship. these are all great icons that americans don't even realize were a part of the war of 1812. hopefully, this bicentennial will help them better understand that. >> great. anybody else have any questions? we're, i think, almost -- oh, wonderful. come forward. >> cynthia richardson. >> yes. welcome. >> any slave who joined the military was given a bounty if he lived through the war. and the bounty would include lands in western maryland. and so i'm sitting there saying, well, gee whiz, we always wondered just how blacks got in western maryland and how during slavery they owned land. my great, great grandfather, arthur sands, and his wife henrietta sands and his daughter, lucinda sands, and her brothers lived on property, 67 acres, that they owned. and jim johnston sent me the map, it's called sands property. >> right. >> and he introduced me to is so much history. but i see that, i wonder also there were the harriss and all the people that i learned from jim johnston who lived in western maryland off reed road, and can they owned property. but yet they were slaves. lucinda said she belonged to -- >> right. >> -- john gray. children were slaves in the sands family. and so i'm wondering whether or not back in the day some of their ancestry had actually gotten this land b as a result of a bounty by serving during the war of 1812. what do you think? either one of you? >> well, i'll let ralph do that. >> it's very possible. a lot of these records do survive, so it's possible that you could do some research and determine where some of these bounty left-hand side came from and where -- came from and where they are today. it's certainly possible that it could be done. >> before we end, i want to tell a story on sixth ya, not answer her question. but when i was working with the family on this, cynthia said, well, we never thought we were special. and i said your uncle went to harvard in 1923, and you doesn't think your family was special? that's the kind of family they are. [laughter] anyway -- >> well, i think it's also very important if you wouldn't mind my stressing the fact that what the family does in that branch is come back and be instrumental in some of the best education that was ever offered in baltimore to white or black. so i think we want to be very clear about that. this was a, an emphasis on education which if you go all the way back to yarrow, he comes with education. and he utilizes that education to the best of his ability, as much as he could within slavery to free himself from slavery and to work within slavery. so this concept of the emphasis upon education and the need to really broaden our horizons and our understanding through education, i think, seems to be a very important theme throughout all of this book which relates to all of you who are with us today. so thank you very much. >> thank you all. >> thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> that was ralph eshelman and james john stomp talking about maryland in 1812. we'll be back in a few minutes with more from annapolis. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. here are some programs to look out for this weekend. today booktv is live from the 2013 annapolis book festival. topics to be discussed include maryland in 1812, the future of american cities, the war in afghanistan, the role of women and the state of american politics. our live coverage ends at 3 p.m. eastern, and all of today's events can be seen again at midnight on c-span2. tomorrow at 4 p.m. eastern douglas rusch cover talks about his book, "present shock." then at 5, due to the recent passing of former british prime minister margaret thatcher, a program from the booktv archives about the relationship between prime minister thatcher and president reagan. watch these programs and more all weekend long on booktv. for a complete schedule, visit booktv.org. here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. the philadelphia book festival runs from april 14th through the 20th. the festival will hold events in 54 city library sites and have nightly presentations in the parkway central library's montgomery auditorium featuring authors such as rachel maddow and cheryl strayed. on april 20th and 21st, booktv will be live on the campus of the university of southern california. we'll be covering two days of live panel author discussions and call-in interviews. checkbook tv.org for updates on our live coverage. also that weekend montgomery, alabama, will host the eighth annual alabama book festival. the event features i object to haves, a chirp's educational area and has about 45 author presentations scheduled. on april 21st, kensington, maryland, will host the international day of the book highlighting over 100 local authors, open mic sessions. please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area, and we'll add them to our list. post them to our wall at facebook.com/booktv or e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> we're at the annual conservative political action conference in washington, d.c., and we're with david her sanny, author of obama's four horsemen, disasters unleashed by obama's re-election. >> hi there. >> david is the editor for human events and a former columnist for the denver post. you talk about four issues going into obama's second term. can you describe those for us? >> sure. there's dependency, which is not just about welfare and food stamps and things like that, but a general fundamental change in the way that people react to each other in government. we have debt which is self-explanatory, but i think the problem's a lot worse than people imagine. there is surrender which is a foreign policy chapter, and it's not a neo-con sort of argument, it's more a reflection of how we believe our place in the world and what it is. and finally, it's death which is inevitable for most of us and is about abortion for the most part. >> so this book is being published now in march. how long did you have to put the book together, and were you thinking of obama's second term, or what was the timeline for this title? >> with well, i didn't think mitt romney would win. i wrote that. but i pulled it together rather quickly. i had been thinking about it, but the book is, it's not a huge book because how much can you read about the four horsemen really. but it is a slim book, but it took about a month to write. >> currently we're in the budget situation, what are your thoughts on that? >> well, i think there's an ideological divide in washington mow that's going to be hard to come to any sort of consensus or agreement on what to do. and, you know, we're in bad shape in that sense. i like the paul ryan budget just came out recently, i'm a fan of a lot of the ideas in that budget. and i think republicans need more ideas and less platitude. so i'm happy sort of in the direction that party's going. >> what do you want people to be able to take away from this book in regards to the second term? >> well, that politics matters, and it's not just about popularity, but it's about policy, and politics can be really destructive. i'm sort of a libertarian about the world, and that's my viewpoint, so i think the book warns people that these problems are a lot worse than they think, and they don't just go away of of we have to do something about it. >> you're editor of human events, can you tell us about what you do there. >> well, i'm a new editor there, and we put out what i'd like to think is accessible but smart content about politics and culture and books and all sorts of things that are going on, and we have some great writers, and we'll be bringing new contributors aboard soon. it's an old publication, since 1944, now we're just online. >> david hirsani, author of "obama's four horsemen." thanks. >> thank you. >> last month week tv launched our online book club with a discussion of michelle al sand alexander's book. and all month long you posted your comments on our facebook page and on twitter which culminated in a live, moderated discussion. here's what some of you had to say. >> join us this month as we read jeb bush and clint bolick's book, "immigration wars: forging an american solution." and as you read, post your thoughts on twitter using the hash tag btvbookclub. you can also watch jeb bush's recent appearance on booktv by visiting booktv.org and then join us on tuesday, april 30th, at 9 p.m. eastern for a live, moderated discussion on twitter and facebook. >> david is the author of "spin masters: how the media ignored the real news and helped reelect barack obama." what was the real news that was ignored here? >> well, you had a great number of things. i mean, stories about the economy, stories about foreign policy, etc. what really prompted me to write "spin masters" though was the benghazi attack. and in the days that followed, it became clear that the political news media rather than focusing on a story of foreign policy failure of a president who had promised rapprochement with the muslim world and was failing to produce it, who had said he'd, you know, significantly destroyed al-qaeda and yet here we see the terrorists acting up again, instead of that story we saw a story about a mitt romney gaffe. and, you know, admittedly, romney probably didn't handle that situation that well with his press conference. he called it at the wrong time, he said the wrong things. but there was an actual, real policy story there about the guy who runs the entire foreign policy apparatus of the united states. it really does seem that -- i used to work for robert novak, and he used to say that a reporter is someone who will sell his soul for a good story. but it turns out that when the story might make barack obama look bad or make his presidency look like a failure, reporters suddenly lose a lot of intellectual curiosity. and they often, you know, when you have a news media and especially a d.c. political news media that's 90% liberal according to surveys, that votes 90% democratic, that's very unrepresentative as america as a whole politically. they're going to miss a lot of stories by definition simply for inability to see and failure to be interested. >> you're the editorial page editor at the the washington examiner. did you take any issue with the withdraw your paper covered the campaign and the election? >> well, you know, for the part, we covered it the way, on the editorial page anyway, we covered it the way i wanted it to be covered, so i suppose if i have to blame anyone, it's myself. we're proud of who we are as washington examiner, but we also, you know, there's no reason we should be the only ones to be able to find obvious trends in the labor statistics that we were practically the only ones to write about, and in some cases the only ones. people seem unaware. everyone's aware the economy's kind of lousy, unemployment, but obama's always made this argument, well, we're doing everything we can, we're about to turn the corner. people don't realize there's a labor market depression for people my age and your age. anyone 25-54, that group has not regained a single net job since the recession ended. not began. don't blame obama for the crisis. look at what's happened since june of 2009. that group has lost more jobs, there are fewer of us working today than there were in 1997. and why hasn't, you know, and all of the jobs being recovered are being taken by people 55 and older. why hasn't a story like that been written? i could find exactly one story that at least recognized the great jobs recovery among oldsters. but the fact that young people have no opportunities today and are not finding job, not recovering the jobs that were lost and not moving ahead, that's an enormous story that was completely missed during the election. and there's no reason we should have been the only ones to see it. >> the author of "spin masters." thank you. >> thank you. >> booktv is live from the key school in annapolis. next, peter and alan will take part in a panel called urban legends, what's happening to our cities. .. what i would ask you to please do is step up to the microphone the you will see there in the center aisle and asked you questions so we can hear you and people involved here you. it is now my pleasure to introduce you to our to authors. the author of the great inversion and the future of the american city. one of the nation's leading chronologists american dream editor at governing magazine and has lectured in the school of public policy at the university of maryland. the author of the united states of the lost city, democracy in the mirror. cheering to a new york times book review, the "washington post" book world, and the "wall street journal". in 2000 he was the recipient of the american political science association for distinguished contributions to the field of political science by a journalist who lives in arlington, virginia. immediately to my left, the author of tapping into the wire, the real iran crisis. the ceo of the evergreen health cooperative, a member-owned health care model of prized but the affordable care act is a good 20 years prior to that as a public health leader having served as howard county health officer in baltimore city health commissioner. receiving many national and local awards for his innovative health policies, including the works from the american public health association, the innovator of the year award from the daily record in baltimore port 20 award from the baltimore business journal. he received an undergraduate degree from harvard, m.d. from emory university school of medicine and a master's degree in public health from johns hopkins university. in his book he uses episodes of the hbo inner-city drama of a liar to challenge misconceptions about real-world connections between drugs, crime, and poverty and the public health role in addressing these issues. now i'm going to ask each of our authors to say a few words about their book, and we will start with alan. he will speak with us about his book. >> a cute. it's good to see you all. i thought i would start by telling your story, and i will try to tell it as quickly as i can't. in 1979 there was a great snowstorm in chicago. more than 20 inches of snow in the city was paralyzed to the point where the city's siege al qaeda trains would come in toward downtown and there were so crowded that by the time they got to the inner city stations near downtown the poor people who were trying to get on could not get on, and veterans would pass them up and go downtown. this caused such an uproar that the incumbent mayor at the time, there was an election about to be held. he lost the minority vote heavily and was defeated. well, this could not happen now. and the reason is not because of the efficiency of the trains come and is not because of planned change in the absence of snowstorms. it is because the people coming in from the outskirts would be a poor. the people stuck on the inner city platforms would be affluent professionals. chicago has changed that dramatically in that time of 30 -- a little more than 30 years. you can call this gentrification and lots of people will. chicago, in my opinion has undergone changes that go beyond gentrification. it is more like what i call to traffic in version. chicago, and i will get off it and a few minutes, but stick with the for while, chicago is coming to look like a european city of 100 years ago. london, vienna, paris. the people who have economic choice are increasingly coming to live in this sense. minorities and immigrants a living at the edge of the city limits are beyond. something like this really happens in one city at a time. but i just described to you is happening in a growing number of affluent metro areas are around the country. washington d.c., atlanta, boston, minneapolis, seattle, even new orleans after wrecking katrina. kendis has, as you might guess, major implications for the concept of place in american society cannot. the truth is, and it may be the main point, we are living in the book in which the massive outward migration that characterize the second half of the to do century is coming to an end. we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs from an urban mobility as result . lots of reasons. one of them is that the industrialization of essential city. you know better have noticed there's hardly anything made in the center of town anymore. hardly anything made anywhere in the city in terms of manufacturing. men and may seem like a critique and noisy place, but if you compare it to the manhattan of 100 years ago senate manufacturing, deafening help restore law forces and coal dust and the streets, the new york of today is nothing like that which is why you can have their breasts like soho and tribeca which are fluent and much desired. why else is to traffic and version taking place? well, those of you were wrong the 1970's remember how dangerous the streets seemed and how you're working of the street right in there was somebody walking behind you and you thought, there's a good chance the person may be a murder. well, that person still could be, but the statistics are so far down on that score of random violence in central cities, not all, but most. and to eliminate that fear of the part of the younger people who are the ones given to a great extent to moving into central cities. where do young people want to go in washington? on a friday or saturday that there want to go to 14th and u street, the center of the riot corridor. that is up on the ball. it is a marginally more dangerous place than chevy chase , but not in a way that makes any difference to them. they want to get to the h street corridor which is another riot corridor in the late 1960's. they don't even think much about it. most of all, i would argue, and this is the least tangible, the values and demographics of millennium generation's are different. i have done a lot of teaching in the last decade. a little while at maryland. it every class setup would ask where would you like to be living in 15 years to make this city, the suburbs? way out in the small town of the country? a certain number says small town almost nobody says suburbs. the vast majority said what to live in the city. i did this five times and i get very consistent responses. i love coming to be a scientific public opinion taker, but it was definitive enough to me to make a difference. nobody wanted to live in the city. virtually nobody which is not to sell some of the lobby, but that was what they expressed, and that thought it was meaningful. let me give you some statistics that bear all this. according to the demographer barbara nelson, the number of families raising children in there also is likely to be close to total 5%. it could be as high as 45% in this country. in 1957 of american households are raising children. the increase in single person households may be twice the increase in the number of households with chiller. people over 65 and 2010 with 13% in 2022 and 19%. that is a figure we can be pretty confident in. a later age of marriage, smaller size of families. at the other end, more healthy and active adults in later years, it's hard to escape the notion that we managed to combine the elements that made demographic in version, we managed to combine the elements that make a demographic in version of a possible, but likely. we are moving toward a society in which millions of people with substantial earning power or ample savings have the option of living were very want. many will opt for central cities. others will find themselves forced to live. some will want to live in the suburbs and stay there. no doubt that some people, a significant number of people : of the buffalo will want to live 40 miles out. i am not disputing that. equally important, other people, people trying to make it into the middle class of immigrants and the poor still live in place less desirable further from the center of the metropolis. this is the direction we're moving in. income and property values are advancing rapidly in the cities, particularly in the center cities. meanwhile their declining or advancing slowly in most suburban america. that is simply a matter statistical fact. and so we used to talk robotic could be viable with an inner-city dying of the core. i suggest that there will be a time not too far in the future where we will be talking your weather is successful inner-city can drive a lung stag in the suburbs. that concern to me, is a very likely future of the american city and the one i called a great inversion, and that is the subject of my book. in the interest of time will stop there and we can take up any of these subjects if you would like to. >> thank you. we have heard the first of are examples, what is happening in the city's. now we will turn to something very different. he will ask dr. peter to talk about his incredible book with tapping into the wire. >> thank you, charlie. of many of you have watched the wire or parts of it? avenue. about half. most of you know what is. i have not watched the weather was being filmed or shown to a problem because we did not have hbo and partly because the mayor of the temper of the work week personally talk about it in cabinet meetings to a hud official to was to watch this and how bad it was making baltimore look. i took him on his word. i was the health commissioner for baltimore from 1992 to 2005 under both players. but then about 2010 meursault, 2010i decided to watch. i don't like violent films. i don't like gratuitous violence , and their is a huge amount of violence in the wire. but really with reason, if you will. it was not just gratuitous violence. i watched all 16 episodes of about three weeks. my wife is sitting back there. three in the morning to you have to shut the self. it became very clear that it was -- many of the episodes were good lenses on which to shine a light on major issues in urban policy for not just public health, from crime and education and homelessness to drugs as a public-health problem of violence as a public health problem and party. so i ended up putting together a class that i teach, baltimore and the wire which mostly because i carried easily and also because it is, you know, popular material. extensive readiness of your. but it also led me to decide to put this into book form. and now we would get into questions, so i will leave it in just a second commercial one of the things that we look at, one of the things that is clearly obvious is that this is a description of many urban areas of the country, but the only description and the only -- but it truthful major factor of many cities. a lot of the lessons that are learned can be transferred to other jurisdictions, but i think it highlights a couple things. first of all, as opposed to those who said this didn't -- just made baltimore looked badly i would argue that in public of, when you have a problem and are willing to admit it is windy conducive about it. this, i argue, it shines a light on many of the problems that too many folks have pushed under the rug for too long or moved up to the suburbs and that we need to shy light of these issues. the other issue is for those of you who saw the show, you saw a cohort of young people who are left to drift, mainly because of the picture in the chaotic lives which we can talk about a minute the other aspect that i think it's all is that it is incredibly important to remember that it matters. the social determinants of health, but bottom line is place matters. were you are brought up and what the kind of resources that are available for you and your family and your colleagues living around you mix all the difference of the world and now you -- the results of your life. we could talk to us some of that in the issues that these kids face. unfortunately i think there's probably a happy balance between the inversion in some cities and the relatively extreme poverty. but we have not unfortunately tend to have a happy medium, our role of -- relatively impoverished city to manage. >> thank you. >> the best thing about attending a but festival like this is you get to buy these cribworks. right along with that is your opporunity to speak to the authors in person. what people like most about these sessions as we have a long question and answer. a just want to remind you the way if you have a question for one of our authors that you step up to the microphone. for you the best part of attending is you get the book. for me the best part is that i get to see -- seized the microphone and asked the first question. we will take the privilege. there will start with alan. your book presents a compelling analysis a realization in which to identify critical elements that led to the success. based on the elements of success you have identified skynyrd revitalize german corps is the product of design or does is simply emerged in the right circumstances are present? >> primarily a market phenomenon some cities are more likely to undergo demographic conversion. while the most important components is a downtown jobs base. he lifted most of the city's image and -- cities admission there is called a large downtown jobs base. so that -- if you don't have that epic trying to up create a demographic inversion simply on the basis of amenities and public policy is difficult. there has been a lot of attention to the geographer and prominent author talks about the creative class and the way to make your city into a more prosperous city is to attract a creative class, the professionals and academics and all entrepreneurs and the people who have money and want to live in the center. there is a grain of truth to that. what i would say about most of these issues, are attracting the creative process works if you're already get a critical mass of vitality in the inner city that will bring the men. if you start out by saying we're going to bring a lot of gays and other creative people into the city and have a flourishing downtown, that's very difficult to do. i would also say there are something you should not do, many of which have been done in canada be undone. would be best not to bring in a state highways right into the middle of your city. it would be best not to pursue exclusionary zoning which makes it impossible to have mixed use projects in your done some. taking a line for the medical profession to be first do no harm. what cities did in the 1950's and '60's was a lot of our. there is no magic bullet. >> the kid a real sense of the people. toward the end of chapter 12 he wrote a passage that want to read to you. the ultimate politics, the real politics because of the art as well as the mind is the simple and complicated influence the people upon people every honest with ourselves and in a lacy was invented for us by writers and directors, but feel those people as people. why can we get up from our televisions a look through our nose and see and feel the world going on around us in the same way. how we see the need for real changes. what are practical ways that we can help make this real change happen? >> helped me to write the book. he actually wrote that. i think part of the problem is that so much of suburban and the dickensian outside their window. what they see on tv, whether through the wire or revenues, people overwhelmingly think why can't these folks pull themselves up by the bootstraps. at think it is a much more categorized thing for your folks and families in the inner-city, particularly places like baltimore and cleveland that there are not the family resources and support the appearance or grandparents have been there were able to immigrate or move out to the suburbs. i think there is no one solution a couple of quick points. i don't think that we can have a complete conversion because you are ending a pushing of people who have lived for years and years and been the heart and soul to the cities in america. we cannot just have -- and a washington welcomes. you were talking about. all the indigenous population that is been there for years. we need to have a mixed income. but i think we can't just do one thing. i argue there is a 4-legged stool for help the community with a healthy -- access to health care, healthy foods, and activity. secondly, a decent, solid go public -- public education system. safe and affordable housing with public safety. as you may know many cities have huge problems with lead poisoning were not only lead poisoning causes educational problems for the kids of a poisoned but arab to representative -- irrevocably by all sorts of other things. tune as livable wage jobs, not minimum-wage, but livable wage jobs. it much easier said than done, but i would argue that how many of you know about the grand prix in baltimore? unknown money loser and has been both years, the amount of resources put in by the corporate headquarters and the mayor's office, not just financial, but immense amount of work trying to bring the grand prix for a day or two or three to the city streets of baltimore which benefits baltimore city not at all. i think we lose money. just a fraction of that thought and some of the resources to be brought to bear on how to come about with this 4-legged stool i would argue we would be in much better shape than having a today year grand prix. getting people who've gone to the suburbs and just again to home to enough 55 and a particularly bad predicament because its own accounting, its own jurisdiction. "the areas in the valley. tax revenues help to support. chicago, cook county? center. baltimore is its own county. we host most of the nonprofits that don't pay taxes, most of the vault populations that have financial needs. so the city is constantly having higher and higher tax rates which pushes more people out. we have to have suburban folks understanding that what affects the city will initially affect them as well in the short term for financial reasons that the state has to take on certain responsibilities and because of the issues that are rising. so it is in everyone's best interest to take on these issues >> inky. let me invite you to once again stepped up to the microphone and pose a question to one of our authors. right here in the center aisle. >> thank you. i have a comment and the question. a comment is for peter. thank you for coming. it was interesting, the quote that you pulled out has to do with humanizing the problem. that is something he has done his whole career. thank you for everything you have done. it is terrific. and it's a great book. i have a question. a phenomenon i have observed in my neighborhood which is close by witches, nobody goes to work anymore. they're retirees, but there are a whole bunch of working people who stayed home and work. so if you can comment on what impact tell a working in the internet may have as far as that an image that you described, that would be interesting. >> it has surprised almost everyone in the last two years by not taking off in any spectacular wait. the number of people it was assumed that we would have a fairness of cents a percentage of american workers still working to metallica reading by this point in the 21st century that has not happened. numbers are much lower. i think there is a much larger point involved that while there are people for whom at a given point in life this is the ideal solution to the people who have the freedom one way or another to work with others in a physical way, to be downtown or to be wherever the job is mostly want to. they must you want to interact. the number of people for whom telecommuting is a satisfying way to do a job in a larger organization is simply much smaller than we thought it would be to which is not to say that it will grow, but we have the technology now for a lot more people to work from home. and what is more common is that somebody will have a job in which their stated these are five days a week in the office and it will stay home one day we can work. we are seeing a lot of that. in terms of people simply saying it will do all of my work at home and not come into the office, 300 people that is a surprisingly small number. >> text question, please. >> my question is also for mr. aaron all. i was glad that you referred to his work and talked about how it does not really talk about the whole. >> speak a little louder. >> sorry. appreciate the talked about richard and now he does not address larger concerns. i also enjoyed the you are -- you have seen, and the panel itself seems to take this inversion and a shift not as a inherently positive thing but that it has its own problems and benefits. just looking at what has happened or what inner-city slums and from in some of the cities that you talk about to where they are now and talking about the suburbs and how they might transform, could you possibly project some of the anticipated problems that would now be moving to the suburbs such as transportation or infrastructure and that sort of thing since city centers are a bit different than suburban areas and have their own unique challenges. >> one thing that we saw was a substantial increase in poverty in most of the inner and middle range suburbs. while still low, it went up by quite a bit, up into the teens, 13-15 percent poverty range which is something they were not used to before. in terms of as far as changes that they will need to respond to, there are social programs which were not very well developed in the suburbs and tell a few years ago that will be a much larger aspect of the budget and probably cause some fiscal strain know of some words in the next ten years. transportation is an interesting one. for decades we talked about the spatial mismatch, people living in the inner city. well, those same people, particularly immigrants of living in the suburbs. it may turn out ironically that they are closer to the place to places where they lived in the middle of the city which i have not heard much talk about but simply seems to be a matter of logic. now, most of these, as you talk about desorbing counties don't have very good public hesitation in order to get some the from one suburb to another there are forced to deal with the fact that they have to not only expand their public recitation systems the change them. that is doable. >> next question. >> i wonder if you would take a couple of minutes to apply your to themes to the city of detroit . you mentioned led to the nuance. detroit was a new emergency manager. you all announcing you are leaving the trading going downtown to the old debts and warehouse building. we will there be an inversion? would you apply your different theories to deter? >> detroit is having a sort of -- this is an odd word to use, but boutique conversion. that is, there are a number of artists and other creative people who have decided that deterred is a place to settle. it is to cheaper one thing. is currency in the way that a lot of people in their early 20's like crunch. you are seeing that. does it have the potential to make detroit into something more like what chicago is now? no. detroit simply does not have the industrial base of this point. i think that detroit has very serious problems that will be difficult to overcome. cut the budget in most of the social areas that have cost the city so much money. the emergency financial manager will do that. you mentioned the nuance. strains they start to happen. we may not feel positively about all of them, but nor listened to a city with an enormous minority and poor population to what is really much more like a middle-class city because so many of those poor people move to other places in louisiana and texas primarily. and so set close to the french quarter to neighborhoods in which there was still good housing stock, some of it tamest and having to be prepared. not enough people living there. we have had -- new orleans has had not only an influx of no class to these neighborhoods but entrepreneurialism and scientific innovation. your lens has just in the last couple of years changed into a city -- from a city which was identified by most people in this country is one of the most-active to what will soon be one of the more creative cities in america. that is it -- that has a lot to do with the historical and architectural image and legacy that new orleans as. it has to do with music, food. there again, if more than one thing is moving in the right direction the city can do things to promote it. if nothing is moving in the right direction you cannot suddenly invest millions of dollars in expected the city will change. >> i want to piggyback on that question and directed to doctor p levinson and his baltimore experience. what i have heard described is a dynamic for a new population moves into the city and it displaces the endemic social problems but does not really solve them or fix them in any way. i wondered if your take on baltimore is one that those problems are really just intractable and that there not going to go way or the ways that they can be addressed. >> address in your initial issue is important. anyone familiar with east baltimore development initiative which is the big push to develop the area north of there, supposed to be mixed and come, but that as they tear down a large swath of east baltimore which is predominantly poor african-american trying to relocate people, that has not been done well. secondly, there was a program that allen knows well, moving to opportunity which several cities, chicago, baltimore, boston, and a couple others look to move to areas of opportunity in the suburbs and hoping that people buy into the, for lack of a pejorative term, middle-class will use. in fact although some things did tend to get better with those families, a very large percentage several years later wanted to move back to the neighborhoods that they were from. that is clearly true in baltimore, and they are available for them. you have to be careful about displacing people, particularly the people who are the heart and soul of that city. secondly, i do think that these -- as you bring in -- you have to have a happy medium where you bring in enough income tax producers to be able to generate the resources to do this 4-legged approach. at think that can happen and you don't want to have an all-or-nothing. >> do we have our next question? >> i have been hearing a lot lately about how his zillions of jobs have just been permanently destroyed. not only for the working class, but also for middle-class people . utterly destroyed and will never come back because of technological massive technological change and outsourcing and other issues. i am wondering what affect you think that will have on improving things in baltimore or cities like that? >> so the educational system has to address that, whether it is the blue-collar worker training, again, using a sort a pejorative term. they have to switch. we have to prepare people for the current marketplace. will we have done in the past and a public education system is not tend to prepare people will not only for college before would jobs are out there, and not everyone is less to go to college, and for those who don't yet have traction pathways for them to be able to earn a livable wage. so we have to address our public school systems to do those sorts of things. plenty of new types of jobs in terms of the tech in biosciences that's necessarily require a college or graduate degree, but we have to give your education system toward that commander doing abysmally poor job of doing that, basically focusing on keeping truancy down and kids in schools and not generating kids are going to be available for the jobs in the near future, not just the distant future. >> would you like to take on that question? >> no, i basically agree with that. and just finished reading a book that talked about the declining number of percentage of americans to finish college. the prescription was we just need to send them all, everyone to college. i am dubious about this. i think he is right. printing up diplomas for a large segment of the population that is probably not interested in doing college work is really not the solution. the solution is to find something that is available that they want to do and then educating them to do it at whatever level and not making college a panacea for the problems that we suffer in the city's end in the suburbs now increasingly for that matter. >> thank you. we are ready for our next question. >> what prospects to use it for buffalo, new york? recently started to make some headway in their water from development. there is a medical center and biotech that is moving in the downtown area. for years buffalo has been stagnant, if not declining. to you for see any of these things like the waterfront development or the medical community as may be taking them out of the doldrums? what kind of future d.c.? >> i was in buffalo last fall. i think buffalo suffers from a lot of things. it suffers as much from the deindustrialize asian as any other city american. buffalo also made what from an urban point of view was our horrible mistake. the could have been a magnet for jobs in research. that was a disaster. nevertheless, people are coming downtown. there is a high-tech sector. ides of buffalo was somewhat more emerging then i would have expected to be. it is not a detroit at this point. there is live downtown. people to the builders are investing money in and tells. i don't think of love is dead. pittsburgh followed in educational and medical development strategy which is really more successful than in almost any other city in the country. buffalo relies on education and medical institutions. but the economist a couple of years you're an article this was in buffalo as having a future. i think that will turn out to be little the pessimistic. >> do you think in my lifetime i will see this? >> let us all live long and well into the prosperity of the cities. >> thank you. >> our next question, please. >> my name is david earning it -- irving. washington d.c. and chicago. i grew up in chicago. i saw the, you know, the large numbers of public housing built of such a card of this just over 60 blocks. >> speak a little louder please. >> i witnessed the creation of public housing in chicago that stretched over 60 blocks of the south side. also, the creation of the notorious housing project, one of the largest in the nation. i witnessed the destruction and dismantling a both of these by daily sun. so i witnessed the creation in also dismantling of the. people were told that these public housing projects, they would be relocated temporarily and brought back at some point later. add all the anyone ever believe that would be the case. i don't know what has happened to these people as a cargo. and then in washington i went to college in 1971 and came back 30 years later and was absolutely amazed by what had been accomplished. fourteenth street corridor and you street and south west coming even more so. now i am witnessing what is happening. the blood being displaced, the same line, they will be back -- be brought back at some point. um wondering what happens to these people. vertigo. the county in chicago, party and other places. i just ever really understood what happens to these people. in d.c. and in washington. >> how the weak? i just never understood. i did not see them come back. the housing projects were dismantled and makes use development was put up, i did not see these people coming back my second question is in baltimore, i worked in baltimore. i no they're trying to do something similar to that in baltimore. jesse it happening by one very weirdly -- view is. what will happen to these folks in baltimore city be as i do not see the same thing happening in baltimore as i did in washington and in chicago. >> i can give a couple of quick answers and then i will yield to peter on the question of baltimore. about 30 percent of the people who were living in high-rise public housing have been relocated in some effective way and that the rest of not. they are free to seek other places to live on their own. it is not -- there is very little solid evidence on where people are going believe the inner city where they're is a public housing project for just a neighbor that they happen to live in. cities in general did not come near realizing the promises that they make to public housing tenants when the public housing is the most. washington is example of a city that has changed to a great extent due to the preferences and plans of mayor tony williams who really wanted areas like 14th and u in the eighth street corridor to be developed. there are cases in which when the market is favorable and you have something to sell, you really can accelerate the process of direct traffic in version. where did the people go? a think the simple answer is prince george's county. it has almost a million people. d.c. has 600,000. so i would say that that is the number one place. beyond that, were the displaced cors chicago, some go to the south suburbs. that is not enough to account for the number. some are going to the southern region of the country into cities and in some cases suburbs of atlanta, memphis, national, charlotte, raleigh, those kinds of places, but we don't have a precise answer to that question. >> baltimore was the same. the tearing down of the high-rise buildings which apparent that agree from public health point of view would probably remember. one of his points is of the institutions that are supposed to work with people and failed miserably. and so as you remember, if you did not see it all when i rise comes down, a huge amount of dust comes out and we have the same thing happen in baltimore in the big outbreak of an asthmatic reactions because they had not thought of the fact there be on this particular matter. similar to what happened in washington and chicago, they tore him down and promise that people be relocated. there are few areas, a very pleasant place, some of the old high rises, 50, 60 percent of people up and scattered. there's a real problem. my wife is a social worker who works the people in section eight housing. section eight housing vouchers are really hard to get to miss a we really don't know. workout surfing, moving in with family members, people moving to baltimore county inside the beltway. really not a great amount of detail that i know about, the data where people went other than that it did not come back to the same areas. >> well, we have time for one final question. you get the honor opposing the final question. >> i. very new to the area. the year-and-a-half. born and raised from an anchorage, alaska. so to come from a place like anchorage, and i'm speaking completely from just what i have seen of the last year-and-a-half , coming from a place like anchorage which is a big city, which i would citrus of the 5,000 people. so many things that i was proud of about my community. it's jerry communal, some of our -- i just read in some statistical reports we have over 100 different languages spoken in some of our elementary schools. for me to move to a place. i want to go and see more people that look like me to move to washington d.c. wait. this looks like alaska. you know. and it was an interesting observation for me because the general manager spoke as the question, word of these people go. for me as someone who is not from here, i almost wish that people were making the decisions , care about the people who are no -- used to live here for generations end up being displaced. so i guess i don't necessarily have a question, but i would like you guys as professionals to speak on that. in your experience when you been in those terms the really come across people who actually care of the people of their displacing or is it really that type -- excuse me, the decision of getting money into the -- have jobs in our districts and all that fun stuff. >> just as in the direction i would say if you want to go to a place where the school sees 50 languages spoken in the classroom go to the suburbs. go to in their fairfax commissioner margaret county. i mean, that is where they are. in the old stereotypes of immigrants coming to this country and settling first in the inner-city and moving further out and then further out still has been completely broken. iran's go to the suburbs for more ever there were living in. they are to montgomery county, fairfax. didn't -- the do not particularly go to prince george's. there is a separation between were african-american settle when they leave the city and were immigrants leave the city. is there a concern when people move back into the city has to people they are displacing? not primarily. people will say i moved to the center -- i moved to 14th street because i really want to be in a diverse area. again, if you want to be in an adversary you're better off to the suburbs because that is where increasingly in future years diversity's born to be. the center of the city is going to be diverse racially, but it will not be diverse as much by class terms. that is, you will see a large middle-class african-american population living in the city and the desirable parts of northwest, but you will see a lot of poor people there. those people will be moving further out. i think that is probably a foregone conclusion to some extent. >> and it is not just about black people or african-american people but all of us to make the community. poor endo class and rich and the homeless man to me is just as important as the judge so i guess that is my question you push the community out. >> yes a profound question and we have about one minute left. >> twenty years of being in those as the decision rooms to my have come across several decent political folks. really, truly care about the folks that were being displaced. the public education, coming across far more who are not. i would argue, as this may sound, public financing of campaigns is probably the best way to get this because the way that our campaigns are funded in this country, the people who have the money, banks and downtown of a once again to be to people, and that is where the decisions are getting made. if we have public financing will people would be coming into office without feeling like a go to others and might do the right thing. a good way to end this conversation. >> we have come to a wonderful and to a great conversation, and i invite you all to join our authors next door you can by copy of the book. thank you all for being with us here today. [applause] >> mr. beilenson and mr. ehrenhalt discussing the future of cities in america live from the 2013 apple is book festival. we will be right back. >> i was curious what also you think the role of ceos in talking about capitalism and defending capitalism as. do they have a role. talk about government, role of government sometimes and how it works against business. the ceos have a role in talking about and defending capitalism and explaining to people or is there something you have seen purely by example? >> i think that we do. i mean, one of the most disturbing statistics for me is that for the longest amount of time -- you have to understand the history of the united states. we started our report. we were back water, the united states. really as we embraced capitalism in the united states, we had tens of millions of immigrants come over to create a better life for themselves because they have more freedom. freedom to enterprise, the freedom to start businesses. for the largest amount of time, well over 100 years, the united states was the freest nation in the world in terms of economic freedom. the most capitalistic nation in the world without exception. in a short-term deal, the year 2000, the united states still ranked number three in the economic freedom index, behind hong kong and singapore. we were not number one, but we were still number three against pretty dynamic economies. over the last 13 years we have dropped down to number 18. when people ask what is wrong with the economy, why we have such high unemployment, why has disposable income declined and has of the last two years? the answer to me is right there. we are less economically free today that we were 13 years ago. and as our economic freedom declines, as government regulations increase, as taxes increase of the engine that is the basis for our prosperity, which is business, is lessened, and our prosperity is it therefore declining as well. economic freedom goes down, so this prosperity. so if the capitalists -- the business people are now willing to speak up for free enterprise capitalism, we can expect economic freedom to continue to lessen an american prosperity will continue to listen as well. we are far from being a free enterprise capitalism system. we are really moving toward crony capitalism where we have got big government, big business , oftentimes colluding with each other. a great example is the fiscal. >> bill that just passed. we look at the need. you see payoffs for politically well-connected organizations such as hollywood to alternative energy. but there are all kinds of special deals being cut. we are moving away from a system where people think it is fair and that this is a system where you can get ahead through hard work and enterprise to where people think, well, the way to get ahead is to be politically well-connected which is the problem. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. join us this month as we read jet bush iteration wars, forging an american solution. post your thoughts on twitter @booktv. in facebook. you can watch the recent appearance on book tv by visiting our website and then join us on tuesday april 30 and at 9:00 p.m. eastern for a live moderate discussion on twitter and facebook. >> you are watching book tv, 40 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. here are some programs to look up for this weekend. today book tv is live from the 2013 and employs book festival. topics to be discussed throughout the day include maryland in 1812, the future of american cities, the war in afghanistan, the will of women in the set of american politics. live coverage ends at 3:00 p.m. eastern and of today's events can be seen again midnight on it to one. tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. eastern douglas talks about his book presents shock, everything happens now. then at 5:00 due to the recent passing of former british prime minister margaret thatcher, a program from the book tv archives about the relationship is between prime minister thatcher and president reagan. .. on afghanistan and pakistan, so i'm going to be taking notes and i hope you'll join me on that as well. i'm going to start by reminding everyone to turn off their machines. our friends at c-span have assured me that if you don't and you ran during the next hour one of the cameras will zoom in on you and everyone watching c-span will know it was you. what we are going to talk about today is not just america's longest war because also i think in many ways america's least well understood war. and i am delighted that we have to people that have devoted a lot of time and fought to helping us understand this very important and very confusing conflict. we are going to start with rajiv chandrasekaran, who's been at "the washington post" for nearly 19 years. his previous book, the beautifully tiled imperial life in the emerald city covered the civilian part of the occupation of iraq from which you report it, and rajiv has also done a great deal of reporting from afghanistan where he focused in the south, and that part of the war very different from the part that jake is going to dhaka that is the subject of rajiv's new book, "little america: the war within the war for afghanistan." and i've asked rajiv to talk for about ten minutes and once he's done we will go to jake tapper, senior white house correspondent for cbs news he has a show of his own account now. he's the author of down and dirty the plot to steal the presidency, and a remarkable book about a very different kind of war van rajiv and is going to tell us about. his book, "the outpost: an untold story of american valor" talks about the extraordinarily difficult fighting on the afghanistan pakistan border in the east of that country. and rajiv, will you start us off? >> thanks, john. it's great to be back here and among friends. john, prior to his current years of the naval academy in annapolis was running the new america for security in washington, d.c. that graciously gave me a home to spend a few months working on this book and jake is one of the few journalists out there and he's actually devoted a meaningful time to covering the afghan war both out on the field, and also as a correspondent and a host of now a great new show on cnn so it's an honor to be up here with both of them. my book focuses on what happened when president obama decided to surge of american forces into afghanistan starting in early 2009? and what i tried to do is chronicled the decisions behind that and the impact of that decision, both on the ground but also back in washington. i spent about two and a half years writing about this for the post, and i spend my time in those two and a half years between the deserts of southern afghanistan and the world inside the beltway going back and forth about 15 times to try to understand how a decision at each -- is made on the ground and what was and was not being understood in washington. but my tale actually begins not with the 9/11 attacks or even with the soviet invasion of afghanistan that led to the support for the mujahideen, but at the very beginning of america's engagement in afghanistan which i think to many might be surprising if you start in the 1940's. the roots of this go back to the holocaust when jews fled europe and many of them came to the united states to be among them were jewish fur traders who settled in new york and needed a large source to make coats and hats to reserve their livelihoods and the traditional markets were unavailable and they turned remarkably to the nation of afghanistan who was held our ground with the sheep and in the late 30's and 40's afghanistan exported between one to 2 million to the united states. the sale of each one but a few more dollars in the afghan treasury so as europe was digging out of the rubble afghanistan was sitting on a comparative windfall of $100 million in gold and silver reserves in its treasury. so he had been very impressed with what the united states has done in the great depression and the tennessee valley decided he wanted to modernize the deserts of southern afghanistan to create a breadbasket if you will by harnessing the waters so he hired the world's best construction company had the time a firm out of center cisco that built the san francisco dam to build in the irrigation canals. in the late 40's there were legions of american engineers who descended on southern afghanistan. it wasn't a foreign-aid project initially. it would soon turn into one as the efforts to sort of build this new farmland turned out to be far more troubled and complicated and then starting in the 60's sucking in the agency for the international development and turning into a very large foreign aid endeavor. and i open the book with a story because it helps to explain the law of america's involvement in afghanistan. but when you go back and look at this history, the history that involved an american contractor essentially fleecing the afghan government trying to do things that were just impossible to do where you had afghan government officials who had been educated in america, who wore nice suits and spoke english towering american officials this is how you fix our country, but these people knowing about as little about the rural parts of the country as we did back then. when you have american officials going out failing to really understand the cultures and traditions of the places in which they were operating its history where if you just changed the dates and the names you could be writing about today. and i just found it completely remarkable. just to fast forward to the substance of the book, i examined the key strategic miscalculations behind the surge, and among them or that the afghan government would be a willing partner, and i think what we have seen coming and many of you have seen through the head winds and the papers over the past couple of years is that the government of parts of hamid karzai has been anything but a real strategic partner with u.s. efforts to try to secure and rebuild the country. we thought that by increasing security apple logo level that then you could help to address one of the key reasons of the afghan people were essentially casting their support behind the taliban which is that the afghan government apple local level was pretty much nonexistent. and in cases where it was an assistant, it was corrupt, it was rapacious and so a big part of the american strategy wasn't just going to be to push the taliban out of areas and protect the civilian population. it was going to be to try to establish institutions of local government and connect that on to the capitol. well, it was great in theory. the problem was they never believed in it because if we succeeded in that endeavor it would disrupt the patronage networks and the deals he had cut with various warlords and power brokers to essentially keep his hold on power and for his cronies to continue to enrich themselves. so they set apart to foil that effort. other key strategic and characterization's involved assuming that pakistan with enough u.s. financial incentives as well as a little bit of a stick now and again what actually start to crack down meaningfully on its own soil. that never happened. another calculation once on the domestic political side that the american people, the american congress would have an appetite for a continued substantial effort to try to stabilize, and unfortunately as our economy has failed to sort of rebound as quickly as many had hoped, the sheer cost of the afghan war -- it costs about a million dollars per year to keep one a service member in afghanistan. that means in 2010 and 2011, the overall tab for the war was north of $100 million. that money equation became a much bigger issue. just even a few months after obama signed off on the troup surge. so there are other issues, but i sort of look at all of the reasons why it was a strategic miscalculation. lastly, to note the book also seeks to look at how it was implemented. put aside the miscalculation there were things that had to be done. we needed to send our troops to areas where the taliban was the strongest to beat them back and protect the population. there was supposed to be a surge of american diplomats and workers to help implement this counterinsurgency strategy, and washington was supposed to get its head around the process to try to potentially get the taliban to negotiate, the reason that you were not going to be able to kill every last one of them. and quickly in each of those areas we really bungled it. you know, back in the summer of 2009 when the first waves of the troops heading to afghanistan the part of the country that was the most at risk was the southern city of kandahar. the country's second largest population center. it is really the spiritual capital for the population to the it was the prize for the taliban. if they could have seized it coming and they were literally on the gates of kandahar. if they could have seized the city they would have a springboard to take over much of the rest of the country as they did in the 1990's. so, you might think we would have sent the bulk of the first wave of troops to the areas in and around kandahar to protect it but we sent them off to the desert of neighboring helmand province where the engineers were in the 40's and 50's that part of the country was the home to fewer than 1% of afghanistan's population. our strategy was supposed to be population counter insurgency. why did we do that? it was because of tribal rivalries not in afghanistan but in the pentagon. that first brigade of troops was comprised of a u.s. marines and i know i'm in an obelisk. i love the marine corps but the marines insist on bringing their own helicopters and logistics units and they wanted their own corner of the sandbox and so we wound up squandering the first year of the surge because we sent a great marine brigade to the wrong part of the country. instead of getting out into the field to work side-by-side with our military commanders we poured way too much money into that country. afghanistan is richly deserving. they needed help. we turned the fire hose on them and tried to spend $4 billion on reconstruction and 2010 far more than the country recently observed and the last point before i turn it over, the subtitle of my book is the war within the war for afghanistan. i discovered in my reporting back and forth that there was a second of war going on and it was within the beltway, and one of the nastiest fights was between the state department and the white house over the topic of the potential reconciliation with the taliban not over anything substantive. the white house and the state department but wanted to try to get to a point where you could negotiate with some elements of the taliban. the problem was personalities. so richard holbrooke of a great veteran diplomat to take charge of the process for the state department holbrook eminently qualified in 1996 to brokered the accords to bring peace to the balkans but he had obeyed the ego, a thirst for the spotlight and he was a dramatic personality in the white house run by the president named note, obama and it didn't go so well on the members of the national security staff to schedule the key meetings when he was out of town have prevented him from using government aircraft and undercut him in front of the leaders. again the consequence of this is that we wasted the first 18 months -- the key moment of the surge when we get maximum leverage when we were sending troops in and not pulling them out to try to chart a path towards possible peace for the taliban. >> rajiv has done a commendable job of summarizing a spectacular book in ten minutes. the gauntlet has been thrown. i'm going to have a little mercy on him because he has written a lot more book but we will see what he can do. >> it is an honor to be here. it's an honor to be here with you and rajiv his reporting i admire in his book is great. before i made the switch to cnn he came on my web showed to talk about his book and i recommend it highly. i it's nice to be here annapolis one of my favorite cities and hello to everybody watching on c-span. so, i am not a war reporter traditionally in the sense that rajiv. i've not made 16 or 17 trips to afghanistan. i've made to. this story of the outpost kind of found me. i have done a little bit of war reporting. i've been an abc news baghdad your note earlier before in 2005, 2006. but i've never been to afghanistan before i took on this project. i covered the war as a white house correspondent from the comfort of the nordhaus. i covered the squabbles that rajiv refers to between the pentagon and the white house and the the data over the surge, how much the surge, how many troops should be sent, etc.. but it wasn't until my wife and i had our son in october 2009 and i was sitting in a hospital recovery room holding jack and i looked up and the small tv in the recovery room and saw this report on this combat outpost that i never heard of. i never heard of the combat post being attacked. october 3rd, 2,009, 53 u.s. troops or in this unattainable vulnerable can't come combat operation. 14 miles from the pakistan border they faced an almost insurmountable attack you had the high ground. you don't have to be norman schwarzkopf to know that it's bad and they were out manned and outnumbered and people in this country tend to think of that, and as primitive and backward and what ever you think of the ideology they know how to fight and they are very strategic and they went after and attacked the camp exactly as the men feared they would, targeting the mortar pits first and the operations center, targeting the observation post of the top of the mountain. for me it was one of those moments in life that you don't really realize you are having on till you look back in retrospect it was a life changing moment. i was learning about the american troops that were killed that way and there was just something in that moment that changed my life and sent me on the course to find out more of the combat outpost and what was like for the survivors that face the firefight why anybody would put an outpost in this place, and the truth of the matter is of somebody else had written this book i would have read it and that what has been the end of that or if somebody had done some sort of in-depth study or explanation but in the media we don't cover the war as much as we should and those that are i don't fault them for not writing this book first they are covering the day-to-day quite often of what is going on. so i never got the answers as a new consumer and so i ultimately became the writer of this book. a started out of reach out to some of the soldiers that were there that day october 3rd, 2009. ultimately i got a book proposal together and i got a contract with the little brown company. the book was originally going to be about the troops serving in 2009. the black knight troup but after the word got out in the small present notice is that i was writing this book some other soldiers that served reached out to me. first was a young intelligence officer who helped set up the office and he wanted me to know why they have said that the outpost. he wanted me to know who ben was he wanted me to talk about the lit lieutenant colonel and others who had served their and then other tricks who served after that intelligence officer reached out. they wanted me to tell their true story. the book became a much bigger project and i had originally planned on. it ended up being the history of this one out post from 2006 through 2009 right around the time the troops start surging into afghanistan so this is the period in which they are very undermanned and afghanistan. and one of the reasons, well, the reasons are the decision is made the white house and the pentagon at the time which was in 2007 there were 20 times as many troops in iraq as there were in afghanistan. and writing this book was an education for me on a lot of levels. i was able to see how the decisions made by bush and rumsfeld and leader obama ann gates de merkley had an effect on what happened to win an individual private and forgotten corner of the world. when you don't send enough helicopters to a country like afghanistan that means that decisions have to be made a round of the lack of helicopters. that means, for example, that an outpost will be put in the part of the world that i'm writing about. this is eastern afghanistan at the base of the mountain range. in this part of the world you are either on a mountain or you are in a valley. and because they didn't have enough helicopters, the decision was made they had to put the outpost in the valley next to the road to the camp could be resupplied by the convoy to the so when people ask what was the outpost put their, one of the reasons was there were not enough helicopters and afghanistan in 2006. the book took on a special meaning beyond the intellectual exercise and understanding have how what i cover as a white house correspondent was related to four in troops and if one can win the war in the common sense of the word when. it also became an awakening about something i knew in my brain but i didn't understand in my heart which is what it is exactly that our troops and families go through. the book does not take a position on the war and it doesn't take a position on a surge. the book takes a position that these are people that have volunteered for the service and they deserve better from - in terms of civilians paying attention to them and in terms of who we elect to supervise these people and make sure they have everything they need to do this job. we talk a lot about the 1% and the 99% but for me the 1% and the 99 percent is the one person to serve this country and sacrifices for this country and the 99% of us and at par to don't and who are able to go about our lives and not think about afghanistan or iraq or the sacrifices that are made. i came to know these people come and became a very emotional mission for me to tell their stories just so people could understand who they are and why they do what they do and one of the most rewarding things about this project for me it's nice to see it flattered or get a nice review from both bright part which it did which is a phenomenon that i can't really explain other than to say i tried not to take a position for or against the war but to tell the stories of the troops about whom i think everybody can agree liberal or conservative or in between that they deserve better. but also, just the most important complement's for me in the book came from the troops who fought that i did do their brothers and sisters proud by telling their stories pity and that meant the most to me. since having nothing to do with the book, since the book came out one of the troops in the book reserved the combat in the outpost and was one of the heroes of that horrible battles on october 3rd was awarded the medal of honor often dhaka in february and just as an aside i started at cnn the day after the inauguration and two or three days later needless to say i'd been in afghanistan but it never been to north dakota. interviewing plant he would be the medal of honor, interviewing him about the book and we did this hour with him and because i knew him for three years and told the story and i didn't -- i wasn't a fly by night reporter just learning about the story. he cared about the story and he knew me in the interview ended up being pretty good because he was comfortable with me and i knew the story better than i could have better prepared for anything in my life to it i worked on it for three years and i called my new boss with cnn and i said you have to give me an hour as opposed to just a five minute clip. you have to give me an hour not really realizing how audacious might demand was considering it was one of the first conversations we ever had. but he did. he said let's see how good of the material is and he said okay and he gave me an hour and a rated pretty well. for an hourlong special about a war that nobody really wants to talk about. and so that was a very nice beginning to my time at cnn being able to tell a little bit more of the story, not a happy story but there are some inspiring parts especially when it comes to the people we have serving for us and what they are willing to do for one another so that was a nice way to start my new job at cnn. >> thanks for telling the stories so quickly. i'm going to invite those of you that have questions to line up behind the microphones and am going to ask you to state your name and to have a question and to ask it as succinctly much more than they spoke in the same spirit in which they spoke. i'm sure your colleagues at the post several times during the iraq war per david petraeus ask himself the question tell me how this end, so i'm going to ask you tell me how the american war in afghanistan is likely to end. anybody that claims to know what tennessee is going to look like in a couple of weeks let alone a couple of days is pretty much full of it. but i will take a stab. i am not as critical as i've been a certain policy decisions that have been made in decisions on execution of those, i'm not inherently a pessimist when it comes to afghanistan. i think certainly what our troops have accomplished over the last three and a half years has been remarkable. parts of southern afghanistan that were horrendously and secured are not places where people are living as close to a normal life as possible. the much maligned afghan army it's still a raggedy institution, but they are stepping up to do, to take on more of the fighting. sometimes they are paying very heavy price is. the taliban isn't entirely beaten back. they still maintain a lot of control, remote villages and valleys and they possess the ability to strike viciously at times. it was a pretty savage attack in western afghanistan just about ten days or so ago which 47 civilians killed, and so their ability to continue to strike that way i think will continue for the foreseeable future. >> if i could interrupt for one second. the afghan national army compound in kunar province was over run by the taliban pumas >> this was among the most highest rated as capable of operating independently. so it shows the trouble is that even the best of the afghan units face. i think the chances of trying to get to some sort of grand peace deal are going to be very, very slim. i think that the foreseeable future will be one of the sort of chaotic and messy and the bloody muddle through. i think the afghan army and the afghan government will be able to maintain control of the key population centers of the key lines of communication as the military calls them the roads and such, but other large swaths of the country will be in taliban hands and there will be medium grade insurgency for the afghans will fight with limited international assistance for some years to come. it could turn worse if the afghan military splinters and we sort of default into a bigger return to the civil war. i think the bigger question -- i know i've been rambling on for a second the bigger issue i know there's a lot of talk in washington about what is the size of the force going to be, which means once the bulk of the conventional troops come out at the end of 2014, how many troops do we leave behind to help train to continue training and assisting the security forces to continue pursuing counterterrorism missions against senior taliban leaders and any al qaeda operatives that sink back into the country and conduct other intelligence gathering missions to the military would like to see about 13,000 u.s. troops and the white house would like to see a substantially smaller number. i actually think the bigger question is one of money. it's going to cost about $4 billion a year to sustain the afghan army at its present size. other amounts of money to help support the afghan government to buy humanitarian assistance it is going to be a big chunk of money. now, our allies have agreed to pay for part of it, but the principal burden will fall on the united states and it is going to be a larger amount of money than for instance israel in any given year. to do so, our leadership have to convince congress and the american people that it makes sense to do so and it requires talking about the war. i will leave you with too little thoughts. a dust instructive seen as the last scene where they had been defeated and charlie is sitting in the committee on capitol hill fighting to get $1 million for the afghan schools and he can't get it. it's also worth noting that when the last soviet tanks left afghanistan and 1989, the communist backed government didn't fall overnight. it didn't fall a month later or even a year later. it fell in 1992 when the soviet union collapsed and moscow was no longer able to write checks to its government in kabul. as of the big determinant perhaps of inability of a mom taliban government. it will leave the willingness to continue to spend money on the afghan military in a time of economic crisis at home here. tell me that the soldiers that fought the risk and it doesn't end for the soldiers that fought their. dozens of them on facebook regularly i see that every day. the war long after we had withdrawn every last troops from afghanistan which might be another decade or two for afghanistan right near a whole bunch of countries we have a lot of interest in the war doesn't go along not only obviously for the moms and the wives and husbands and kids who lost loved ones there and not only for the ones who have wones that we can see but whose stories i tell in the book and also i see it everyday the troops that are still fighting whether it is post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury that they didn't realize until a year or two after they returned from afghanistan or something worse. there is a soldier in this book to i hope you read the book but there's a soldier in the book to survives but before the year is true he overdoses at his home in north carolina. there are a lot of people struggling, and look the veterans administration, my mama worked as a psychiatric nurse and i have a lot of respect for people who work there. they don't do it for the money were the glory. there's a huge problem and backlog and we have a public health crisis people don't like to talk about. people have served in iraq or afghanistan coming back home a lot of people need help. i hope that this country realize is that issue as well. first question, please identify yourself if you what. >> there's been a lot of excellent reporting on the political, diplomatic and the military aspect especially from the american side, and the question that keeps coming back to me is how do the afghans look at this and it is not just one voice obviously of all afghanistan people, but especially from your research, and when you go especially beyond the tactics the different groups use what are the social causes that just won't go out and how do the people in afghanistan look at the future with different groups and why does it keep going on? >> there's an enormous degree of trepidation among the afghans and dangerous grounds that sort of generalized, but among afghans in various parts of the country i talked to from different ethnic groups there is a lot of anxiety about what 2014 brings as the mission ends. we haven't been entirely clear in our government in terms of communicating to the afghans what is the allied commitment. there have been ground to the grand platitudes about the continued engagement but what they want to know is how many trips he will leave behind and how many dollars are you going to spend? the afghans are very conflicted. on the one hand, they are deeply patriotic nationalistic people who jset the presence of the foreign troops on their soil, yet they also know that their security forces are not entirely ready to take on the challenge and they recognize the face a fairly pernicious insurgency. among the afghans you will see them at certain points saying go home and leave it to us and then at other moments people will say look we need you here don't go you are the only honest broker in many of the world's community i've spent time in the local government is corrupt and ineffective, and abusive of the people come and in some cases turns people to sort of turn to the taliban for every sort of rough style of justice, but one that is actually administered as opposed to what the government does. but many afghans lived under the taliban in the 90's and really don't want that alternative either. and so, they look to the americans and other foreign troops and say look you at least represent the best shot at something different and better, and now has that mission is changing and we are consolidating our bases they are really concerned. they don't feel totally confident that their military is going to be able to take on the challenge in the force and they are also very apprehensive of what happens with the political leadership. afghanistan will have presidential elections next year. karzai has pledged to step aside and it remains to be seen if that will happen or if there will be some sort of funny business type of thing that you might see where a puppet is installed. who knows coming and that weighs very heavily on the afghan people. >> what has to happen in terms of the afghan afghan society for things to really change? we look at things from the top level but from the bottom how does the society really have to change what you might call the civil war for this to change what happens in a society? >> the changes are to be revolutionary. it's not going to happen overnight we are talking about a generational shift and a population that in many parts of the country is 90% illiterate. you don't have the sort of structures, governing structures, other things to create those changes frequently. so, we should -- we shouldn't be under any illusions that this sort of development can take place perhaps even in our lifetimes. >> thank you. >> why didn't they have helicopters and if they did, how much will it cost? >> that is a great question. he was asking a follow-up to what i said about the helicopters. why didn't they have helicopters and how much would it have cost? they did have helicopters but they didn't have enough. they had one brigade worth in 2006. and the reason they didn't is because we were fighting, the u.s. was fighting the two wars at the same time and for whatever reason, the decision was made by the president bush and the joint chiefs and secretary rumsfeld to send more troops and supplies which include helicopters to iraq and afghanistan. there have been three or four different iterations and phases of the war in afghanistan, the first one going in, getting the taliban, getting al qaeda, then kind of all right, part number two what do we do now? that is when president bush and his team decided they would increase to an extent counterinsurgency work to simplify the nation-building helping to build up the nation so that it would no longer be a place where al qaeda would go and be able to drive. they didn't do that very effectively for a long time and then there's phase three. rajiv's book tells how the surge has several different phases but i am talking about phase number two when the u.s. is trying to do the strategy of building of the locals so that there is no longer a place for bad guys to camp out in a plot to attack america or anyone else but they are not setting have enough supplies because the u.s. has launched this other war and the decisions are made to send more troops to the other and more helicopters to the other war to read these logistical decisions about helicopters don't get a lot of coverage because they are not yet -- it's difficult to understand why can't you just send more helicopters to afghanistan, why would you put it -- its on things like logistics that the army's either rise or fall. one of the things i heard when i went to afghanistan in 2011 to research this book one of the things i was told by u.s. troops was they felt the army would be okay by the time in the u.s. left within the next few years but they were really worried about the afghan devotee to provide medivac helicopters and provide supplies and ammunition and food and that stuff which is and as immediately interesting. that stuff is really a ultimately what would determinism because of the soldiers are not being paid because the money isn't going through or it isn't being flown, the soldiers leave, they go back home. does that answer your question? thank you. >> my name is jeff norris from annapolis. why hasn't this been controlled on the money trail? tel dan has it, why haven't some of the tribal leaders. where does this out into that equation? >> that is a dirty good question -- very good question. and helmand province and not on part of the country where the engineers were way back when, in 2006 and 2007 it produced more opium as a precursor than the entire world population of junkies could consume in a single year to the afghanistan is off the charts when it comes to drug production. there have been efforts that were undertaken in the early years to try to chop down the crops to burn the fields. it turns out that doing stuff like that just turns those farmers into enemies because that is their only four of subsistence and it pushes people into the arm of the taliban. and new approaches have been tried in recent years to try to wean the afghans from growing opium to grow other crops. part of the problem is others don't always produce as much money for them so there is an economic disincentive. it turns out that the drug networks actually have a pretty good system going for the farmers. they won't deliver the seeds to the farm, they will give you credit up front so if you have to pay for your daughter's wedding they will do that and give some advice on how to get a higher yield. the traditional extension services that are provided by the universities and the american midwest it will come to the form and pick it up. it's a great economic model. >> for afghanistan it can work well. >> one of the efforts that i chronicle in little america that is just sort of mind blowing was the request by the afghans held for the united states to go to afghanistan to grow a crop that they grew on their fields well before they started turning to the poppy which was caught cotton. it's something farmers know how to grow and a gross very well in those conditions that the agency for international development refused to help them. first to say it's not in your comparative economic advantage, the nation's like uzbeckistan and pakistan grow cotton more efficiently. it was never going to export. they do a lot of that in afghanistan. and then usa ied said even if we wanted to there is an act of congress that was passed in 1986 by then a senator of arkansas designed to protect the caught in the united states that protect u.s. taxpayers' money and other countries' industries. you know, u.s. aid could have gone to the white house to get a waiver but nobody wanted to take it on so you have legions of the farmers say we want help growing this. american bureaucrats say sorry we will help you with this. >> this is so much a part of the history of afghanistan. as you know when he was referring to the great movie charlie wilson's war seeing it come right before my favorite scene which is when charlie wilson is talking to sitting on the balcony of the watergate hotel talking to the cia agent and this is a scene that is and in the book of the director added it is the lesson of the master which is a boy gets a horse and everyone in the village says it's wonderful he got a horse and than the master says we will see. then he falls down and smashes his leg and cripples him for ever and they see this is so horrible and he says we will see. then the war breaks out in afghanistan. and everyone is conscripted except for him so he can't fight and everyone says it's so wonderful and he says we will see. this is the lesson of afghanistan. we don't have the opium story in my book we have the timber story which as in 2006 because there was so much illegal deforestation and afghanistan and an outcry by the international environmental groups karzai made illegal chopping down timber and exporting it she made it a crime and that didn't end it that just meant that all the people that were selling timber were all of a sudden criminals and to cause they were criminals, they all now had to deal with other criminals and in that part of the world a lot of time the criminals and the taliban it's just what you call them that particular day and became a mutual assistance situation people with a small timber out of afghanistan and pakistan and the same mules and smugglers would come back with guns and the money from the taliban and pakistan karzai was trying to do the right thing but ultimately it helped some pretty bad guys. islamic like the slave trade in annapolis. >> we have time for one last question and the young man with a good haircut. >> good afternoon, gentlemen. i have a question specifically for you. you seem a very optimistic about the future. as the money dries up from us in the west over time as i believe it will, what do you think the prospects for increased regionalism and more likely the war lord as some are seeing some instances in the west with people, the word about people like muhammed coming back and is the afghan national army raises loyalty against the weakening the government what do you think -- i mean it seems like all of the ingredients are there to go right back to 1990 all over. >> that is a very plausible scenario that you could die fall back into a 1990 state of civil war. certainly in the north and in the west, those powerbrokers, those warlords if anything the influences grow over the past decade, and afghan military units in those areas do fall under the sway of those figures. though in my mind the bigger question is what happens in the south and east. the influence of the afghan government is marginal at best where you have in some pockets warlords and power brokers, but not to the same degree that you have in the northern parts of the country pity and you have a population that is very ambivalent they don't want a taliban backend. in some cases they fear their own government to date and that is really where if you are going to get back to the full on civil war, the insurgency really needs to get a degree of popular support across the south and the east as they did in the 90's. and i am not sure that you will get to that point. so, i think -- i don't mean to be optimistic. i certainly don't think that the years of continued essentially, you know, if you can get to a point you can have the columbia insurgency, that would be a good thing for afghanistan. i think there will be an unacceptably high degree of civilian casualties. i think the afghan army will continue to take terrible losses like it did just the other day but that is going to be perhaps a weekly occurrence. but i think it does come back to the question of what degree of international assistance, and how much. i am not trying to set up here and advocate a certain level or a certain number, but what is that level that is sustainable for the united states but enough to help provide a nominal degree of assistance to the afghans recognizing we are not going to be able to drive the trucks to get ammunition to every outpost or fly the helicopters everywhere. the too will have to engage in a very triage physician to figure out what is the most important area for them to secure in the areas they will leave essentially to the insurgency to fight another day when they are stronger in able to do so. but i think this will all play out just fine. there are way too many unknowns and i just think that it's a shame to be in that position after the hundreds of billions of dollars hour nation has spent the personnel that have been killed there, the tens of thousands that have been gravely wounded. we've paid an enormous cost as a nation over the past decade. the longest war the nation has fought and i think it is a tragedy that we are not any better position today, and we can't speak with a little bit more certainty and optimism about the outcome as we look ahead. >> any thoughts? >> are you in annapolis right now? >> i move on the academy. i work at fort meade. >> i was just going to thank you for your service. >> i was assuming because of the hair cut. [applause] >> thank you. >> i was wondering what you thought the odds are in the next four or five years domestically for maintaining any sort of support domestically is going to be. they are controlling everything all over the place. >> i am very discouraged by how much i hear our leaders in the white house or capitol hill or the romney campaign or whomever talk about our troops and talk about the war. i feel i was flabbergasted at how little the day debate there was last year and when there was a debate how shallow it was. i think that there is a -- it's probably not fair to call it isolationist but it is a non-interventionist wing of the republican party those are both ron paul last year and rand paul this year and whether or not the that is a good thing, i fear it might be part of an overall neglect for troops for what ever mission needs to be carried out so that we are not just leaving and running in an irresponsible way. that isn't to say let's we should say. i'm not taking a position on the policy, but i don't favor and irresponsible withdraw. i have to say the fact that people read my book and rajiv's book indicates that is a degree of appetite among the american people for information about this war. there is a lot of great reporting being done but it isn't nearly enough on tv and it isn't present enough or given as prominent a place as it should be in print, and to be perfectly candid, i wish the appetite was stronger among the public not just for these stories but for accountability by the government for what happened to the troops and their families. so, in terms of -- i can't gauge it seems to me like the american people several years ago turn the page on the war and don't want to hear about in general. they are not paying enough attention and i hope that continues and grows stronger. that isn't based on any science. it's just my feeling going out in the country and talking to people, and i just -- it is discouraging to see how little we pay attention to this war and to the people who served. >> i would like to thank all of you that have spent this hour talking about the war and those watching on c-span. please join me in thanking. [applause] >> thank you for joining me and please join us in the music room where they have agreed to sign copies of their book which will be available. thank you very much. >> that was a panel on the afghanistan war from the book festival. we will be back in a few minutes with more >> iowa rise [inaudible] my first boss in the navy met me and when he took me to stay she had this fantastic house and she took me and i had flown 17 hours across the atlantic and we ran out of food of course [inaudible] spent the night at this extraordinary house and then she put me on a plane. the tears were pouring down his face. and of course when i got to minnesota i knew with a bottle of brandy was for. [laughter] we had this wonderful little house and i threw open the windows and my husband said you can't do that. he said the whole thing is frozen not. and then very, very different. , to a fish casserole. i had never seen to in a fish or casserole. a friend of mine who is now in california and we were laughing at that the other day because it was to house's upper but it was all right. they took me to the pigly wigly to buy food and the winter of 46 there was nothing in the shop, you couldn't buy anything. i'd gone into the pigly wigly and i was completely overcome. i couldn't cope with all of that packaged food. i had never seen canned chicken packed up like that to be the chickens are running around in england. [laughter] i had no idea what to buy. the woman was a pediatrician and the man next door was a texan and he wanted to take me fishing and so as i was leaving his house the night before he was going to take me fishing at five in the morning i turned to him and he said there is nothing i would rather do. [laughter] .. the two authors take part in a panel called "can women have it owl or do they already? " >> hello, i'm stephen wrage and aim here to mott raid the discussion between hannah rosin, and sharon lerner, who have written two interesting books of some importance to the current situation which has been brought tolight light by well-nobody articles by an marie slater and by sheryl sandberg's book, but these women have gotten the story of what is happening with the genders in america, particularly the time when it seems as though people feel themselves under pressure from social change and economic difficulties difficulties and lack of work opportunities. these two book, one titled "the end of men and the rise of women," an alarming title to men, and if you glance at it wrong it looks like the end of me. i will not vanish as part of this presentation. and then sharon lerner's book, "the war on moms: on life in a family-unfriendly nation." both authors have done a great job of reporting their story, their work has happened frequently in slate, where handin rosin is the founder of a section on slate called "xx" a reference to the female genome, and her work has been in the new yorker, the new republic, the washington post, and a senior editor at the atlantic. sharon lerner's work has appeared in many of the same places, in the new york times and the washington post and in slate. she'll be speaking to us first to give us a sense of her book, the war on moms. >> good afternoon. can you hear me? thank for coming here. i'm going to talk about my book and hannah will, too, and then we just want to have a conversation with all of you about this topic. i believe the official question on the table today is: can women have it all? my book is actually a little older. it's been out for three years now. and when it first came out i was doing what hannah has been doing, which i going around to different cities and talking and reading, and when i was in buffalo, buffalo, new york, i was about to give a reading, and i think because buffalo is a pretty small city these days, there was a story about it on the front page of the art section, and so there was my book, and possibly my face, and the topic, which was the war on moms. and across the page there was another story, the end of men. and apparently -- just then, hannah had come out with a cover story in the atlantic that was about this imminent end of men, and we were literally across the page staring at each other, and a few years ago, today, too, posed as being on opposite sides of the question of women, work, and the future of women and work. and so there is some truth to that, i think, that we're coming at this issue from different places, but i think as you'll see today there's also quite a bit of overlap, and hannah, as you may have guessed from the title of her book, is talking about women on the ascent, and i hope i didn't give anything away there. and she'll talk about that more later. i am sort of saying the opposite. i talk about women, and in particular mothers in this country, as being stalled, and i kind of started from this point of looking at a lot of demographic data, which hannah does,, too, and all sorts of daa points. one of the findings i use to jump off from was that on a handful of really major indicators, women, who had been on the ascent in many ways for much of the past 50, 60 years, seem to have stalled. one of the big places was in terms of their participation in the work force. and so it's not exactly a question of, can we have it all? i was sort of looking at, how are we doing? , and how are we doing seems to be not as well as we could be. so to very much summarize my book. not as well also we could be. i think that we agree that the big story -- one of the biggest stories of the past century in terms of women and work is this incredible increase in women in the work force, and women's power that comes from that. so i completely -- i think it's hard to deny. right? we've seen this major influx of women into all industries, and we've seen -- and that's been happening for so long. the tipping point was 1980, when we had 50% women in the work force. so, i think that we completely agree on this bigger picture, but my question again has to do with what happened after that? what has been happening recently? and why? and my interests, when i look at these issues, is just sort of how i'm oriented and where my curiosity lies, is structural. what are the laws and policies that make the rise of -- our lives the way they are, and i ended up in my book focusing on child care, flexible work options options and paid leave, which i end up thinking make so much of a difference on this question for both men and women but particularly women. so, i -- this is just to introduce my book to say i think i'm very interested in the bigger question of where we're going. i think we can't -- we're reporters and so we're looking at what has happened and what is happening. and to a certain extent it's anyone was guess what will happen next, but what -- the way i've seen the trends that we're going to be talking about over the past few years, is this real stalling, which i attribute to a lock of structural support. so, i'm going to pass it on and we'll talk more about that soon. >> thank you. hi, everyone. it's really, really a beautiful day and this is one of the nicest schools i've ever seen in my entire life and i'm really jealous my kids don't go to this school. as for the question that is dominating -- that frames the panel, i think maybe we can all agree that it's a trick question. the obvious answer about whether women can have it all is no, because nobody can have it all, and i'm sure if you good about your lives you have had moments and days days where you think, e everything today, and then it slips through your fingers and suddenly it's not there anymore. the way the truck is set up for women, i've learned in talking about the books, we set it up as a kind of perfect happy. in even when i'm describing the rise of women in my book, they haven't risen in terms of happiness. if you measure women's happiness in 1970 and now, they're in fact less happy now than they were in the 1970s, and i think happiness is a complicate question. i think that has to do with choices. the more choices people tend to have, the more areas in which they can find themselves wanting, right? like now it's not only that you're not -- you're also not the best employee and you're also not enriching your children in quite the way you want to. so when you set it up, can women have it all. you're talking about a kind of nirvana that is unattainable and more distance as we strive towards it. that's a different question than sort of power, economic power, cultural changes. these are all separate buckets and i would say in some of those buckets women have made kind of shocking remarkable changes and even sort of reverse things we never thought possible historically, even if they don't feel on any given day they've had it all. i start that way because i think one thing i have run into with my book, i don't think of myself as describing a feminist triumph or feminist nirvana. if you read the stories of the people in my book, they're complicated. they're difficult, especially the single mothers or the women in a southern town who are suddenly find themselves being the only steady breadwinners in a family which -- in a culture which believes the man is eternally the head of the household. so that's complicate because the woman is happy and feeling her power and has never earned money before and has a husband who is probably feeling slightly strange about this situation because for 30 or 40 years he was the stead where bred winner in the family. so there's no sense in which there's this unambiguously happy, but now they have economic and cultural power she didn't used to have before. so let me start by talking about what has changed. this book started for me as an economic argument. i was doing much of this research in 2009, which was a critical year. that was the first year as the women were roared as the majority of the american work force, which is quite amazing. when i was a kid and the working woman was still an interesting enough phenomenon that there were lots of sitcoms devoted to her existence it was like, how, a woman carrying a briefcase. so cool, or wearing a pants suit and that's so interesting, and now you have women as the majority of the work force, that's gone back and forthbut they remain just about 50%. slightly less, sometimes, lightly more. the reasons are structural. we have lost our manufacturing economy. it's not coming back in the way that it used to exist. never going to come back in the way it was. it comes back in different forms. and so the sense is from economists that women are better preparing themselves for the future, not that they've sort of won or have everything but because they're willing to adapt, they're willing to adapt to what the marketplace wants and needs, and more i specifically, get the skills and education they need for the future economy. so that's a lot of what this story is about. the rates of graduation between men and women are skewed everywhere in the world and women get more college degrees. it's extremely skewed in community colleges which i write about in my book, where you think of is the places where people get specifically trained for jobs, you have vastly more women than men. and so that was how i initially started. and then i didn't -- i don't so much address the structural questions, which sharon is excellent on, but i started to become much more interested in the cultural question. so now that you've got these economic changes, what does it mean for my first chapter is about the decisions that young people make about sex and relationships and what does it mean for women's power on college campuses and how they think of. thes and then what does it mean for marriage dynamics, and in every chapter i try to follow a couple, either a married couple or engaged couple or young dating couple, and see what does this do to their views of each other, when the woman might earn more money. how do they feel about each other and how does that upend dynamics either in a small southern town or an elite business school. has different implications depending on where you go, and it looks very different depending on which class you're in. so the more conservative classes, which probably believe more strongly that a man should be the head of the household and a woman should do certain things are ironically the places that are feeling this upheaval the most in which women are in fact carrying their families in ways they never have before in which you have a huge explosion in single mother mood and i call an ambiguous independence, and i talked to lots of single mothers. i start my book with the story of a couple in which the woman basically says about the father of her child, and this is a long, slow story, but i'll tell you the punchline, basically he is just another mouth to feed. why would i want to live with that guy? a phrase i heard over and over again. another mouth to feed. it's incredibly insulting but the fact is it explains the human statistical shift in the country which is that so many fewer people, particularly in the noncollege educated classes are getting married. you couldn't say this was a choice but it's something that is happening. women are choosing, in quotation marks, to raise children by themselves, to work, to get themselves educated. it's an incredibly hard life. we were just talking in one of the enduring images of my book is a woman who fell asleep in the elevator of the community college between the seventh and eighth floor because she is so exhausted raising two children and going to school at night. so is it good? no. but it is. it's a new situation in america of women -- when you look at studies of families in the 1930s it's assumedded the man is the bred winner and carrying the family and if that's not true, that's an anomaly, and enough that assumption is pretty quickly fading. so i just want to read you -- it's actually something i haven't read before. this is -- speaks to my point that in no way die think that men and women just switch places. there's discussion, are men every going to do housework, vacuum, ever see a commercial -- we are starting to see the first commercials of men doing laundry but they're fairly woman. are women ever going to be ceos? there's a sense in order for this to be fully accomplished men and women just switch places? i don't think that's ever going to happen. i think we're entering a new landscape where we don't know what it's going to look like. it's not that all the women are head of the fortune 500 companies and all the men are getting the dust mites in the way you would want your man to do. not going to happen. and so i think -- i've been thinking about that lately and i'm going to read a quote from a woman named adrian. at some point in researching this book i did a study of bread winner wifes relationships, in other words, people in which -- the couples in which the wife was earning more money than the man and in some cases vastly more money. in this case this is a woman in florida who is an unbelievably successful real estate lawyer. her husband makes $100,000 a year. be fine for me. i'd marry him. but she struck it rich and she makes a huge amount more money and i want to read one bart of her quote. she says in many ways we still fill the traditional roles. i still have to say, honey, pick up the baby, need your help. he still expects the house to be clean and make dinner. he is jobbing but says a woman's place is in a woman and any kind of social setting i still smile, look pretty and support him. the typical man-woman relationship and i love it. makes me feel more like a woman. i wouldn't feel good if i didn't control my kitchen and look cute at parties about he feels more of a man being married to a woman like me and definitely more man than all those sucker who are not married to women who make a lot of money. so you hear all the different feelings flowing around, pride, ambiguous, independence, things that are complicated in the scrambled up moment we live in. >> let's start with the cultural and then move the structural. let's start with the changes in the relations between genders and then move to political issues how changes could address those, and then help out the case of the women who might almost feel that there is a war on moms and that it's an unfriendly -- family unfriendly nation. what i'm doing here is it was my idea for the panel and i thought these would be good panelist so i got to be the moderator. i bring no special knowledge here but i was struck when i came across this passage. i thought i was kind of ahead of the game for having read "the second sex" but that was 1949. so that's true lay lifetime ago. and the point in hannah's book is that second sex no longer. that actually women or the lead sex in many respects and there is something like the end of men. here's a guy from her book who felt that and he is a great character. a great doctor, apparently, who was doing research on gender determination in pregnancy, and he finds that the xx sperm, the one that will produce a female baby, is a little larger and has a longer tail and so it moves a little slower and so he finds that if he sets it up so that the sperm have to swim for a long time, you can increase the chanceses of female babies. and he happens to be a texan who, instead of wearing a lab coat, wears cowboy boots boots d cowboy hat to the lab, and in 1969 he lent out his ranch to the marlboro people so they could do the commercial on his land, and he walks around saying this is a way to live a life, breakfast at 5:30 in the saddle by 6:00 no room for mr. limp wrist, and when he gives his lectures he uses a pointer made out of a cartilage from a bull's penis. at any rate, now he finds in some clinics he has found the ratio of preference. more girls, more boys. what do you think? two to one. two to one more requests for girls than boys. and he finds it in an array of clinics, the girl requests run 75% at a new process, not his, called microsort that is approved by the fda. so here he is, years later, talking with great pride about his 27-year-old granddaughter, tall, slender, brighter than hell, take no prisoners personality, biochemist who is working on genetic research. i say to the boys don't screw up and crash your pickup truck and get some girl pregnant and ruin both lives here. at any rate, it really resonates with me because now he is saying women live longer, do better in the economy, most of them graduate from college. her book, and sharon's substantiate all these things mitchell boys used to be taught, we have who guys graduating this year with a line that girl goes to college and get more knowledge, boys go to jupiter, and get more stupider. kinda. kinda the theme here. >> is that old? somebody tweeted that to me the other day. has that been around for many years? so people have said that for a long time. >> i think so. at any rate, now this guy -- ericson was telling all boys at his elementary school he's going to get a sex change operation. so trying to set it up here. we have a huge cultural change and this is more than the downturn. this isn't just since 2008 and 2009 people found themselves in big economic difficulties and a lot of the good jobs men used to have -- >> i think i started my reporting at a time when you could see the changes more clearly because we were in what people called the man session. that at the time i start mid reporting, the recession was hitting men's jobs so much more than women's jobs. later in the recession government jobs got hit, and government jobs are women's jobs. so if you look at the big trend, what you see is complicated, it's that men's wages have been slowly declining over the course of 40 or 50 years. women's wages are still not caught up to men there are many jobs where women get paid less than men. so there's lots of different complicated trends happening in the economy. i'm sure that is some of what you look at, sharon, that women's -- like there's some situations, for example, where you take -- i would give this example. there's some towns -- people looked closely at towns where there's a lot more woman working -- let's take the job like copy editor. it's job i know. so starting out job, you're a copy editor there may be 20 women working at copy editors and only one man. so on the aggregate you have more women earning salaries than men but all of those 20 women are making less money than the man. each of them has a lower salary than the man. and we're on cultural territory, women not asking for negotiations territory, lingering sexism territory, and all of these things are in the mix even as women are doing better. >> right. and tears gender -- there's gender segregation, and one of my young sons somehow we got talking about optimism and what it is, and i was explaining glass half full and glass half full, and i feel like we're looking at the same glass and i'm afraid i'm a pessimist. in terms of the number of jobs, women are now in lots and lots of jobs and we're looking at 50%. but when you talk -- you mention there are all these -- that the growing professions are mainly dominated by women, like healthcare workers, and home health aides and teachers. but unfortunately, -- those are very gender segregated professions. >> and a lot of those professions pay terribly so we're having more and more women in the workforce doesn't necessarily mean our wages are going to keep going up or we're going overtake men. but because of these complicated shifts, i fear being the pessimist, that we're going to talk about -- we're going to see a lot of people asleep in elevators bass they're working so hard -- because they're working so hard and for so little money and trying to do everything, and my point to summarize is that ultimately it's not possible to do everything, and certainly not possible to do everything on minimum wage. go on. >> sure. the example hannah gave us gives us a sense in the household where the man has done pretty well, 100,000 a year. she gives us a good example. she goes to report from a place in kansas city where she goes to a court sponsored men's support group, where men can go to prison for -- to jail for failing to pay support or take a class and the class is being taught using these teaching materials where you read a thing called quenching the father thirst. the guys there, some looked like they spent the last night out on the street. they're not big for the exercises but the guy who teaches them, 30 or so men in a classroom, downtown kansas city school, he comes in and starts saying, look, i grew up watching bill cosby, living behind the metaphorical, white picket fence, well, that check bounced a long time ago. let's see, he continues reading from the work. four kinds of paternal authority, moral, emotional social, and physical. we haven't got any of those. you're the paycheck few you aren't even that. if you try to exercise your authority, apparently physical authority, talking about she'll call 9-1-1. and how does that make you feel? you're supposed the be the authority and she says, get out of the house, bitch. she's calling you bitch. so the exchange goes. pretty startling stuff to me but the point comes down to, who is doing what? what is our role? everyone is tells we're head of a nuclear family so you feel like you got robbed. it's toxic, poisonous, setting you up for failure. who is the man? everybody in the crowd thinking, she the man. what do you think? did you find -- is that alarmist? >> that's unquestionably happening in america. here's the place where sharon and i are on totally the same page. the great problem is the increasing class divide in america, and when i -- one of the things that was a surprise to me in researching my book, i was looking at marriage patterns, as i said, how the genders are reef lating to each other, and it's not that i found that elite, meaning college educated marriages and noncollege educated marriages are different, it's that they are opposite. that we right now live in a moment where the college educated in america are living the most happy, settled, kind of stable marriages that have been around -- for decades. right? low probability of divorce, low probability of raising a child alone, and for everybody else, marriage is disappearing. so it's not that there's high divorce rates which there are. the divorce rates have remained the same in the 70s. it's like they're not getting married at all. marriage is not an interesting prospect because of the scene you described there. the women are chooses to go it alone in low-paying jobs and community colleges and not judging men in their lives to be worthy of marriage and the men have lost their paycheck row. it's been this -- it's like we have this sexual resolution that was good for some people -- >> more than that. you find looking at young women in college calculating at the age of 21 that actually could be too much distraction, too much burden to be in too serious a relationship with one of these guys that wants to spend a long time together and talk about a future together. >> they eventually get married. that's like a luxury. if you're a college woman living in the hookup culture and you're choosing not to get -- when i was in college, don't think i explicitly thought of dating this way. i think it was just sort of -- when i dated someone i had somewhere in the back of my mind, could i marry this person? that wasn't -- i'm not a creep. i didn't say that on the first date. but i kind of had that somewhere in there in my head. and i think now because marriage happens so much later that's -- you can create whole other kind of relationship in which that's not on the table. eventually women in college tend to get married, by their statistics. >> i feel like just adding to -- i feel like you're saying -- and if agree -- that basically the marriage patterns that used to belong to poor people, are trickling up. and they've switched places. used to be if you were working clays you would stay married and then have the 70s explosion of divorce. enough it's the opposite. >> i also feel like that when we're talking -- if you talk about the '70s, the women, single mothers on welfare were poor, and you have -- now you have all these single mothers in the in the middle in the economic middle, and i guess just -- we'll get there but we also have all these other problems that used to be associated with poor people. poor people's problems of not being able to find child care, not being able to afford the basics, are happening to this big -- anyway. >> right. i feel like the next great wave of thinking and journalism -- should be our next book can -- the problems we idea to think of as problems of the poor are trickling up. so i chose an alabama to an all-white town because i wanted to -- an all-white middle class town, stable middle class town and what happened in the town is what happened in inner city detroit in the 1970s. the factories left and the men lost their jobs and i came just after that happened so you can chronicle just after it happened, and you see slowly down the generations people losing their sense of family stability, paycheck. the women deciding to go it alone, the men not finding their place because they had the anywhere head the kind of job they were posed to have and it's not there anymore. so that's what america is increasingly starting to look like, and we just have to accept that. like conservatives say, everyone whoa just get married. you know what? not happening. so let's -- go ahead. >> i would just differ with what we just have to accept it. yes and no. you can affect the economy. we have to recognize it is happening, but this is how i'm inclined -- there are ways to address it. ways to address the -- to raise the minimum wage. but to sort of take -- we do need first to assess and see that this is going on. but then to actually say -- again, i jump ahead, but the other developed countries deal with it this way. they subsidize child care. they pay for workers. if everybody is going to be working you have to figure out a way to have workers take leave if they happen babies, sick relatives. >> the crux of the mutual problem we describe is that the american workplace has not really accounted for the fact that women make up such a large -- such a big part of the work force now, and we still operate like it's 1962, and there's one person at home and one person working. so, that's how the workplace operates, and that's unusual to america. other countries don't behave that way. they recognize people -- i don't know which one is better or worse. there's evidence on -- well, you know, we're getting ahead of ourselves but theirs, mid evidence. countries with extremely generous -- >> wait a minute, wait a minute. hold on. i have to interrupt you because do you know that -- first of all, fill disclosure. hannah has been my editor when i've written for slate and you are quoting an article that i wrote and you edited. so, d. >> excellent. >> so we have now merged. >> you're jumping in. >> she was going to say in countries with vary long maternity leaves and it's really parental leave leaguely -- -- legally -- there is not the same evidence of benefit also there is in countries with relatively shorter leave but that is a real tiny little red herring of a point. >> i think this is really interesting. there's been a new study. i wasn't quoting that. a new study by francine, and they did a big study which just came out a month ago, and the idea of it is that in countries that we wish we lived in, that we often talk about, like -- >> sweden. >> sweden, and all the people are more beautiful and they all -- in sweden, where they have very generous maternity leave there's more gender segregation in the workplace. >> i have seen that. >> we have to realize -- >> women in jobs and men in jobs. >> the point does be somewhat moot for our country. just because when you take the big picture, sweden has 18 months of paid leave for -- >> 18 months. did you heared? 18 months. >> so when you look at the rest of the world that's -- i think that's the very longest. but we're not talking -- we have not -- when you look at the range of other countries, you're talking an average on the low end of six months and nobody is finding -- gender segregation in all countries. >> let's talk about what is possible -- >> maybe we should -- we digress. >> want to take questions from the audience. just quick statement from each of you. what is possible now? we have a guy in the white house four years now, four years more, who was raises by a single mother, who has two school age daughters, who is married to a woman of considerable amibition, accomplishment, depend heavily on his grandmother. if number should get it should be obama. what's going to happen in this country in the next four years that addresses these things you're talking about? >> if i may, if obama were single-handedly making these decisions, i'm quite sure that the country would look fabulous in the regard you're talking about. he is not, obviously. there have been -- there's -- he's made a huge announcement with the state of the union address about prek for making a national initiative that is historic and that will change things because in addition to being an educational initiative it's going to make a huge difference for parent office -- parents of four-year-olds who have to figure out something to do with their kid during the day. but i'm hopeful that will make its way through. and then possibly a paid sick days initiative could make it through the next four years. don't know that much else will change on the federal level in the kind of initiatives that we're talking about. >> i actually have a cultural thought and not a policy thought. my cultural thought is that how can we get this country to recognize people who are -- who have children together but are not married as a family? that's something we're terrible at and yet it's a reality in our country, and i think everything we could do, even like marking them down on the census as a family, like anyway way we can culturally acknowledge three people with a child is a family, we would go a long way to having them psychologically think of themselves as a family and help them glue together, married or not. so that's my thought. >> let's hear some questions from you. we need to stop at ten of but we have almost 15 minutes for your questions. is there anyone who would like to raise something? jess yes, please. [inaudible] >> thank you for those nice words about the key school. also the head of the key school, that was appreciated. secondly, simply an observation that the times when there have been tremendous impact on the lives of children is because there's strong advocacy, there was a movement that was a precursor to the feminist movement in the 70s. the betty and the gloria steinams they coe lessed together in a message that resonated. what do you see in young women today to have clarion calls not for a place in the workplace, in that sort of second tier, but in real positions of power, of influence, and i am not sure i am seeing that element, but perhaps i'm living in too much of a cloistered environment. are you seeing that? i think thin lies -- therein lies the hope of attitudeal and structural change. >> i have this -- before i-and-have great yearn for the '70s feminists. i loved simone debouvirer this raeal radical structural feminists. i miss them because right now i think we actually do talk more about kind of workplace tinkering and sort of policy. i think that's where the conversation is going now. so sheryl sandberg's book is about what women can change internally about -- essentially training young women to think of themselves as leaders early on in their personalities and i guess effectively training society not to punish them for those kinds of behaviors which are seen as dominant and aggressive. so maybe that's the next phase, the cultural phase, when a woman speaks up or asks for michigan something shouldn't say -- we should teach them to behave that way. women demanding things they actually need in order to make their lives liveable if they are going to make it to the next -- >> it's interesting. in terms of the workplace, a lot of the issues i talk about, certainly feminism is a huge driver, and when you look at the people who are leading the efforts to make change on these fronts, like the national partnership for women and families, it's women. but i do think part of the -- what is tricky about these issues is that in order to actually make change, it has to involve men in the change-making. so, it's about feminism but also about men becoming feminists and then maybe -- so i feel like it's about seeing these issues -- when i'm talking about workplace issues and come boundarying, for instance, care and work, as an issue that men and women both have to strive to address. that's what i would say. >> please. >> what do you think about the -- excuse me -- what do you think about the impact of the increasingly large amount of wealth as evidenced by the one percenters, what impact do you think that will have on the other 99% whose income is not keeping up with the cost of living and in fact sometimes is less than it was 20 years ago? what impact do you think this will have on families and in women in particular? >> you can go ahead. it's our biggest disaster. >> it is the biggest disaster, and i feel like when i look at people falling asleep in the elevators that is so much about this -- there being overburdened by -- and underpaid. so you see people trying to work two jobs and also taking care of children and it's not possible. it's not possible to do it well. it's possible to do it because people all over the country are doing it, and i feel like so much out what we're observing and talking about has to do with the shift of wealth. when you talk about why people aren't getting married, it's because they can't afford to get married, and that is, as we're saying, a disaster, and i feel like we -- we need to address it that way, and the impact on the family and then overwhelmingly, because of those trends we're discussing, women in the family don't have time to forget enjoy themselves -- to live in any sort of decent way. >> almost any problem you look through, if you put it through the class lens it just explains it. it looks like a tremendous disaster. like the displacement of men -- used to be fine to be a sort of noncollege educated working class, used to be able to earn enough money and support your family, and now it's just this chasm and now the .1% are -- the finances years are all men and you have men at the extremes of the economic inequality scale and women struggling in the middle. >> one way you can try to work at these structural issues and change people's minds is through a school like this one. i'm at the naval academy and always puts on a conference. two years ago the speak egg war sheryl sandberg and she gave the kind of speech that gave the views that she writes out. and the next year we had hillary clinton and you can imagine she gave another speech with many of the same messages, and tuesday night we had admiral mcraven, the chief seal, the four senator charge of all the special operations forces. the joke was he ends up giving much the same mission, much the same story, he said, finally i got a movie made about something i had done. zero dark thirty. he says and i get to dep ash not me but an actor for about two and a half seconds. and it was if you think about it an incident the movie when a guy in camouflage gear, with a little tag over his picket that says mcraven, he does get to appear in the movie but when the hero of the movie steps forward, jessica chastain, they need to identify the body, he gets to lift up the sheet, and she looks and nods and then he puts the sheet back and that's it. and mcraven was funny about it, saying, i did more than that. is what he is trying to say but that's not the way the movie put it across. so, we can do things at the university to bring in spookers and movies are doing something to put across you can tell the story very effectively from the point of view of the women who had a major partner hunt. >> that's like the seal equivalent of a man in a vacuum commercial. cleaning house. >> yes. >> i have a comment and then a question. so my comment is, when i hear women who have a platform, who create a platform because of their wealth, to speak about feminism, sheryl sandberg talk about how she didn't realize how important maternity leave was or how important a nursing room was until she became pregnant. i have a problem with men and women who do. they can't emfa thighs with the workers until it happens to them. that's my problem with sheryl sandberg. and the other women, melissa meier, i think her name is, at you yahoo, whoa is creating a thousand dollar nursery for her child, but women have to come in to work and ignore their children. because she wants them there. that's my comment. my question is, do you see any evidence of, with the class shift going on in the past 20 years, do you see any evidence of women being idea to depress wages? it's happened historically with irish and african workes, especially african-american male workers, with the dissemination of the unions. have you seen any evidence of being women used to depress wages? >> it's -- yes. in the sense that, for example, on this one town i report at in alabama, it was clear the reason the women could get -- when you live in small town with no industry you have two jobs left. you can work for the government or work for the health complex and part of the women take all the jobs once the factories leave is because they'll work for lower wages and you can keep the wages low beneath what man would consider worthy of himself as the 20 year bread winner in the family, only the women will take those jobs. so that's a funny moment, it that's empowerment for the women or just a moment when they got to do something? somebody has to feed the family. and so there's definitely that kind of thing going on, where there's a flood of women into the economy, and particularly in the healthcare field because healthcare is a hugely growing industry and the fact it's dominated be women is one of the reasons that keeps the wages low. >> we have time for one more question, i think. >> okay. i work as a consultant and a lot of my clines are federal clients. there's an enormous debate about teleworking. 20 years ago i was a vice president at a firm and i had a life threatening illness and my bosses were great. they put a computer and a printer and a fax in my house, they sent someone to work with me, and when i got back i was invisible. and i really want to know, have you looked in at all to this -- there's actually an executive order pushing it, so how particularly will will be affected by teleworking? >> you mean you think it's a bad thing? the teleworking? >> when you went back -- >> when i got back i was out of favor because i wasn't there. >> being in washington, dc, this is something that whenever i have an event, government workers come and say that for whatever reason, teleworking is not accepted in the government andmer -- melissa came up and said in exactly the industry you think teleworking would be seasonable, she said it's not really acceptable. sharon thought about this -- this is something i only started to think about which is the cost of the policies we're begging for and asking for to make our lives family friendly. the cost in terms of amibition and career and whether all these things we're asking for to make our work more family acceptable. in my mind, there's only one answer, which again sweden has come closer to than anyone else, which is that they have to be gender neutral. that i wish we would skip over the maternity leave phase and start talking about the child care phase. swede endid this, forcing men to take paternal leave and then the employer looks at the man, oh, hayes going to be gone for four months. >> if have something to say. a couple things. the come. of course when we're talking about, for instance, paid leave and telecommuting, of course we're talking about gender neutral policies but not talking about gender neutral uptake. but even so, with paid family and medical leave, which is what it is, passed in california and new jersey, right? what is really interesting is there's actually data in california now that show they have six weeks paid d woo-hoo -- which is a big deal for this country. and it's knew -- now been eight years and they have done research into what the uptake has been like, and the percentage of men who were tallly taking leave for bonding with their infants has shot up considerably. so it's not -- these are gender neutral policies which doesn't speak to the telecommuting aspect but i would say, we spoke earlier about momentum, and what might we be looking that the next four years, and already in the past few months we have seen on one front some real progress, which is paid sick leave day laws which are a couple of cities and states have passed and that has some momentum right now and you can tell that those are the one piece that might actually move up to the federal level in the next few years. >> then there we have to stop, i'm afraid. we've been talking to -- [applause] >> sharon lerner about her work, "the war on moms" and to hannah rosin about her work, "the end of men." thank you very much. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] an important book in the sense it tells you how the court works. thursday so few good books out there that explain the process. how do they go about this? how do they decide these cases? what are they saying to one another? we see these cases that split foe court five to four. that would they really think? do their personal feelings get into it? it's a book about lou the court operates. >> host: when you dig into the noteness the library of congress, the memoranda, the notes back and forth between justice that are available and a lot of stuff is available. you at least -- i'm not a lawyer. i plead not guilty. no lo content day or whatever you do. but i was just fascinated by the human side of it in many case justices have reservations about capital punishment. >> abc news veterans martin clancy and tim o'bryan on the capital punishment cases that it defined the supreme court tonight at 9:00. >> mother reap beesly is a prefer at the university of maryland and has written a new book called "women of the washington press." what was is like to write for the was post in the 1960s and 1970s. >> i was there from 1963 to 1973, and that's what prompted me to write this book, because i remember that there were a group of us women there, and i remembered how hard women had to work. some women were so incredibly talented. i knew the struggle they had to get assignmented that were equal with men. i think it's interesting that tonight we are here at the national press club, and you are interviewing me right under the infamous balcony where the women were pinned up during the 1960s. they were not allowed to sit down on the floor with the men and eat at the luncheon tables, even though the government had main speakers her at the press club. the united states government had a policy of having foreign dignitaries speak at the press club, and so women who were assigned to cover these people were cooped up here in this hot, miserable balcony where they can't eat and they could see men colleagues on the floor having a nice lunch. also, they can't here -- hear up there they couldn't take notices. miserable. but that was indicative of the state of the women in those days. a woman at the washington post i knew well, who is in this book, she was taken off the prize civil rights assignment at the post because the people who were involved in this civil rights protests were going to have meeting here at the press club, and because women weren't allowed in the press club, the post, instead of complaining about this, just said, oh, well, we'll assign a man to it. that's the way things were. >> what was your beat at the washington post? >> i had a variety of beats at the post. i covered the suburbs, the city of alexandria, and i also then later covered the court of general sessions, now the superior court, and i covered welfare, and i covered education. dc public schools. >> not only were you a reporter for the post but a journalism professor at the university of maryland soover been following the field for a long time. what is the difference now for female reporters than in the 1960s and '70s. >> there's a lot of differences. actually i'm still at the university of maryland. i'm the undergraduate director of the merrill college of journalism there. women have many more opportunities now than men do but i still think it's harder for women to crack the glass ceiling. one of the things about this book, though, that i end with, is how ironic it is that now women have the chance to be the leading figures in journalism, and they have a chance to be editors of major newspapers. they have much more of a chance than they used to have of probably in television even, although that might be disputed. but certainly in print they have more opportunities. however, the business is changing so. they got to the top of a field and then the field crumpled away under their feed. ... the former chairman of the republican national committee from 2009 to 2011, and we will certainly get into a little bit of what i discovered as the chairman of the party and some of the things that we did as i like to say to turn the elephant between 2009 and 2011 which seems to be turning itself back for some reason. the author of a book called right now to deal with this age we find ourselves where the political landscape is shifting almost daily. the attitudes of voters are much more open as we've seen recently and the thing that confronts them the most and that is citizenry who are actually engaged and know what's going on and are developing a political mind of their own and a new form of activism. i'm very honored to be joined by a dear friend and colleague i will let him go into the details of his background but needless to say she had the presence of mind while in congress and has the presence of the voice today to really like a path because the future growth of republicanism and the republican party and as he will tell you and share his journey unlike not that different from mine has been a little bit more interesting at times, but mickey edwards is one of those great voices out there and so it's a real pleasure to welcome for an mickey edwards. >> thanks to key school having this event getting a chance to come and talk. it's a privilege because mike has been a good friend of mine for a long time, and i like to share the stage with him. so let me tell you a little bit about my book. it comes at this a little bit differently than what mike does although when we sit and talk about issues we think very much alike. i have this new book out from yale university press, and the title to give you a little bit of an idea of where i'm coming from is the party's first is the people, yet it has a subtitle. parties versus the people doesn't sound really terribly exciting what people usually get most entranced by is the subtitle of the book the book started with an article in the atlantic magazine coming and the subtitle they put on the article is now the subtitle of the book is called how to turn republicans and democrats in two americans. and when i first heard that it sounds pretty harsh, and the others said did you read one you wrote? and so where i am coming from and the talk that we just heard, one of the authors talking about the issues talked about structural questions. i actually talk about it as systemic issues. when i left congress i was there 16 years and a member of the republican leadership in the house coming and then i left and i went to teach and i taught at harvard for 11 years ended in princeton and one of the things that happens when you teach is you have a chance to step back from the daily grind. you are on when you are in the classroom, but then you have time to think and reflect and undeserved and decide what you see happening. and what i saw is no matter what the issue was and this is true whether bush was president or obama it didn't matter whether you're talking out an economic issue or a cabinet appointment or anything else. republicans were all on one side and republicans were on the other. it no matter what the issue was our government had become more like the nfl, not like americans sitting down together to say here are the problems let's beat them and talk about them and solve them. instead of was how can i d.c. q? how can i teach you because you belong to a different club, you have a different label on your head, and i start thinking about why that was and how did we get to that point. if you read the papers every day coming you see here's two or three republicans talking to two or three democrats about doing something together, and that is front-page news we've actually got republicans and democrats working together so why is that the way it is? i go back and i thought about to the only thing i ever found that our first presidents agreed with each other is don't create political parties. washington, adams, they don't create political parties. they had them but they weren't like these. me against you just because you belong to the other club. why did we get to that point? and i concluded you all know there is the role of money and i'd like to talk about those who but i want to give you a couple of examples on the political system we've created triet so i was giving a talk to the american academy for the advancement of science, and i know nothing about science, nothing about technology. i should admit that since i had to vote on issues about science and technology which i didn't understand, but i looked at -- sure is a starting point. what does the constitution envisioned in terms of how we as a people are going to govern ourselves? one thing coming it envisions that because the power of this country is not in the white house, the power is in the congress, almost every major power, war, spending, taxing, uprooting trees, the cabinet appointments, everyone is a congressional power and the power was put there where the people themselves could control the outcomes so the idea was the people are going to go to the polls and elect their leaders. well what happens if it's not the voice of the people? that's being heard so i want to give you two quick examples of the party system that we created and what happens. when joe biden became vice president there was an opening now in the u.s. senate in delaware. everyone knew who was going to be the new senator, it was mike castle, former governor and members of congress, and he had challenged in a primary by a lady named christina adamle and she beat him. two things happened. one, there are 1 million people than delaware. christine o'donnell only got 30,000 votes. so why didn't he just beat her in the general election clacks because delaware has a crease dewaal it's called the sore loser that if you run for your party's nomination and you lose your name can't be on the ballot in november. those 30,000 people kept all of the million people of delaware from choosing who they wanted in the u.s. set. so go over to utah where senator mike castle was running -- you should have put him in the senate, like steel and mike castle, i'm not going to give you those, robert benet was running for reelection of the senate in utah. they have a convention. there are 3 million people in utah, 3500 were at the convention. 2,000 voted for other candidates other than robert benet. because of those 2,000 people, his name couldn't be on the ballot in november for the 3 million people of utah because they had this sore loser law. how many states have this? 46. 46. here's another provision of the constitution. every senator and representative must be an actual inhabitants of the state from which they are elected. the idea is if i were running for congress year i would know you and the people of an adolescent or economic interest, you know me and my reputation in the community, that's the idea. but what happens when you allow the political parties to control redistricting? if the idea is that congressmen and women are supposed to know the community so frattali person paucity i am a city guy. i've been on the farm once or twice. i had no idea what i was looking at and i am a republican that was selected in a district that hadn't elected a republican since 1928 and there were 74% democrat. democrats couldn't figure out how i want. my mother didn't know, but i did. so the other party at that time controlled the state legislature and the graybill to regional my district from the middle of oklahoma, all of new england, it's not just a small place, from the middle of oklahoma all the way to kansas, halfway across to arkansas and what happened? i was now representing wheat farmers and cattle ranchers and i didn't understand their interests and i couldn't speak for them. they were entitled to somebody that cut the both of those examples i gave you of because allow the political parties to control our electoral process and that we wonder how come our congress is controlled by the hard-line ideologues from the cyber partisan who promised never to compromise with the other side. it's because they know that if they compromise they are going to get primary and. they are going to get knocked off in a primary where small numbers of fighter partisan ideologues dominates the outcome. how did we allow these political clubs to be a will to control who we vote for? and with the district -- i was an active republican and the party. i ran and started thinking leader what have we done to ourselves? when you see a congress where people will not sit down and talk to somebody on the other side of the it's because we set up a system that elect those kind of people and gives them the power so just one more quick thing and then we will get into this conversation. then you get elected to congress and you take the oath of congress which by the way is not an oath to be loyal to the president and it's not to be loyal to your party leaders or to your party it's to be loyal to the country. and you they are elected at the same time i was. i thought now we are all together. the parties that is that here we're all members of the united states congress that lasted about three minutes until we started voting on who would be speaker and who would dominate each committee in congress. if you have been to the house floor or if you have seen the house floor, if somebody speaks here without this panel, you have a lectern. they're already is. not in the u.s. house. there are two lecterns, the republicans stand at one to talk to republicans, democrats and another to talk to democrats. if you want to go have a cigarette or eat a sandwich or make a phone call you go to the cloakroom but there isn't one. there's one for republicans and democrats can we operated the united states congress the branch of government with all the power that is supposed to make decisions for the country. we treated as rival clubs. at the bottom line for what i did in my book is not electing stupid people we are not electing and patriotic people. we are electing good people who are trapped in a system that we have created the three words and stability, rewards intransigence , that punishes cooperation and compromise and then we are shocked at the result we get so that's what my book is about and i am glad to talk about that. i want to hear about my next book but that's where i was coming from. >> that is pretty scary but that's our congress, that our government and that's part of the political process. now, has mickey was laying out in the first scenario, the race and the christine o'donnell race, both of those happened on my watch as national chairman. and i remember meeting with a group of very, very excited and some argue excitable republicans about a month after i had become chairman who were laying out for me a new strategy that was beginning to emerge from iran of the country and they called themselves to a party years. i said what's the deal and they were very clear about the focus that they wanted to bring to the discussion come to the debate about the role of government, the size of government, the expense of government. so we met and at that time they began to talk about being outside the party to read and part of my responsibility as the national chairman looking at the political process to elective individuals like mickey to the congress is to make sure we have as queen of the process as possible that we don't cut our nose off to spite our face in the effort to getting to victory. in other words, but the race that matters, about all that matters is the one in november, not in september or june or february, meaning the primary process. but what i recognized very early on a new but is this tension that was beginning to build within the political structure at the primary level. at the popoff point, the volcanic moment was new york 23, the 23rd congressional district of new york, the spring of 2009 where the party officials of the local party decided to go around the ordained a political process in other words having a primary, but instead takes their nominee for the frustrated voices of activists within that particular congressional district. he was put on the ballot as a republican nominee and that was one of the key turning points politically within the gop of activist tea party voices raising up against the system. part of my job as the national chairmen, and something that i wanted to capture and i thought and i believe i captured in the book was coming out of the system that we had already watch and witnessed devastating losses in 2006 of which i was one of the casualties in my senate run here in maryland. in 2008 presidential the party had lost its brand, it had become tarnished to the point it was basically sound. we had to be put on the table whether it was philosophically, politically, policy lies, our donors were beginning to dry up the conference by holding back their checks because they denied the party the direction was going to be the republican as some had began to take hold in the last term of the bush administration. so a lot of the economic conservatives who would eventually form themselves into the tea party really begin to figure it out and find another way to assert pressure back on of the establishment of the party to read as the grassroots activist, i found myself in a very interesting position because lenders to both sides to the establishment to sort of protect the status quo and other words the process to get a clean primary to go fight the democrats in november and the frustration of this new emerging voice of activists who were upset that the party had rolled back on its principles to the economics. not social. one of the big misnomers about the tea party is that it is somehow the social conservative movement. it is not. what it has morphed into and has subsequently become is very different from the first meeting i had into a fury of 2009 as they were beginning to emerge from the country. and does use all played out in the town hall meetings that summer. you didn't see or hear these voices raging on abortion or marriage or social issues. they were raising against the violation of the constitution, the proper role of the congress to come to the table with a budget to manage the spending of the country etc. so you have these different dynamics that were beginning to emerge in some cases sub merge and part of my responsibility as the chairman is to try to figure out the best route to win in november so in looking at the potential candidates to help me make the argument that the elephant had to turn and focus on what the citizens of the country wanted done and to of those individuals that summer happened to be chris christi of new jersey in the bob macdonald of virginia. when you look at where the party is now and where it needs to go, those governors i believe are examples of the future direction in many respects. you have a blue state like new jersey with a governor, republican governor-elect christie who was able to navigate but more importantly on a foreign policy position to take the full use of the party, articulate them and translate them into the policy while is very, very smart and reflective of what the people want. however you have a competing interest that's grown in the two years between -- since 2011 that pushed back against that because it's now become intertwined with a social agenda, and it's kind of lost some of the economic edge with the success of obamacare and other successes the administration had so politically the party finds itself against the proverbial wall and the direction it takes in my estimation will determine when or not it goes the way of the whigs, or it actually becomes a party that competes for a governable majority were in the future and that ties back to what mickey has written in his book, and i think his book really reflects the attitude of voters out, this idea can you as an elected official be more like us where i am sitting on the political process side, the party organization and structure, the challenge is to create a structure in which the voters feel that their ideas and their views are respected and heard what as they go through the overall process of running for office and talking about message points and stuff like that, so it becomes a very interesting dynamic for the political party that largely helped sway in the 1980's and 1990's and much of the first part of the 2000 s, at least 2,004. 2005 is when the wheels began to come off and since then, they're has been a massive struggle as we see get played out from candidates who talk about vaginal probes and legitimate rape verses those that want to talk like a chris christi on how to govern a state in the country in these changing times. so what i tried to do it in my book of the political strategy standpoint right now is to get the party to focus on both its challenges and opportunities right now and the like any good 12 step program you have to begin with acknowledging you have a problem. and our problem is us, largely what we think of ourselves, what we value, how we articulate those principles and ideals that are part of the famine organization of the party in the world that looks vastly different if he entered the republican primary today, he would lose. so for all the stock and embraced of ronald reagan they are doing a disservice in my estimation to his honor and his memory because they but not elect him today given his stance on immigration as president and governor of texas taxes and some of the other social issues and goes to the heart of the struggle that mickey and i had to deal with the inside of the party trying to get the elephant to recognize its core and therefore word in this world is changing around us. and not necessarily throwing your finger up to the wind and testing the waters every 30 minutes, but standing on firm principal ground that recognizes the value of the american dream, that recognizes that these lawyers of those that ought to be part of the dreamed whether they are here now or coming in the future that understands the direction demographically that this country is taken and 30 years it will be a majority minority country. what does that mean? held to the political parties deal with that? the licht surface to the minorities that frankly what you don't believe me the change happens around, not within. the gop instead of throwing black faces and hispanic faces up their saying we know who won, too, should be embracing the movements going on in the various communities. in other words, shut up and listen and pay attention. so, for example, when my friend senator randy paul goes to harvard university, you don't go to howard university and tell them what they already know, you don't insult their intelligence that way. you bring them why they should listen to you what value are you offering, how will you make there opportunity to access the american dream as they have defined it real? the political parties find themselves and i think the democrats are going to find this when they get to 2016 particularly if hillary is not the nominee of the party those tensions that exist within the party began to get exposed. it will be on the left, not the right. moderate conservative democrats will tangle with the senate deacons senator flatted progressive democrats just as you have seen in the republican party since ronald reagan stepped off the state and since that in blue is no longer there, but ideological glue he was able to bring the right, left and center reasonably together. you see now with the crackings that occur as the foundation. so the political party for the challenge right now is how you begin to mend those before the foundation completely breaks in light of the demographic political economic shift that is occurring in the country. right now the goal is to recognize the challenges, had met the feelings that we have committed and then begin to turn the elephant in a direction that points to the future standing on a foundation that is all about individual opportunity, of of individual traces and freedoms and decisions. we cannot be a party that says we are about individuals making choices, but then we want to limit some of those choices. we cannot be the party that says we are about creating economic opportunities but then not put policies on the table that basically even surgery to those economic opportunities particularly for the poor and those that are at the margins. we can be a party that speaks to a limited role for government without being anti-government, without being disrespectful of those institutions that heretofore have been beneficial in helping people get up and move forward. the challenge than for government, sure you saw this in the congress it has the tendency to throw stuff out and then not follow up and not manage the opportunity, not managed responsibly their resources and that creates the tension we see today where we are not going to spend one more dime until you cut and we aren't going to cut until we have the resources come so the back-and-forth has now bled into the political what was policy has now become more political which makes it much more difficult to do policy. >> i agree largely with mike in terms of changes the would be good for the republican party to make. i can think of changes that would be good for the democratic party to make. i really don't care about either one. i spent my life -- and jerry -- the life i was telling before about how we run our primaries, how we ll the ideologues of both parties to control the outcome has driven me in a different direction and while that story that i told about the examples of the 46 states that allow underrepresented minorities to be on the delicate and so forth and naturally optimistic. 40% of americans today register as independent. usa today had a big article about the american people are fleeing from the political parties. in 2006 from the people in washington state were to have a petition and the constitution. the people of washington state having followed all of this, having followed the republicans versus the democrats on everything, there is unity. all the republicans agree on one thing they are against whatever the democrats are for and all of them agree they are against whatever the republicans are for and the people in washington state said enough of that nonsense and they went to the polls on an initiative they created what, and they got rid of the party primaries. and they got rid of the ability of the political parties to control what congressional districts were shaped like. 13 states have now done that. that was in 2006. in 2010, california did it, california got rid of party primaries and party control of the redistricting. the bill to do it in texas has been reintroduced. it's been reintroduced in arizona. but the people are saying we want more democracy in our democracy. we want a system that lets the majority of people that want candidates to have to appeal in order to move forward to all of the electorate not just the ideologues, so i think the people are finally getting that point, they are fed up to here as i have become. i am republican. always have been one. i have a lot of friends who are democrats. i love them all, and i want them to sit down together. we want you to do something for this school which deserves whatever good you can do for it. if you want to do something good for this school, a new facility, a new building, where should it be, how much should it cost, what should you do in the building, how many rooms, what equipment coming you all get together and form of group and say let's make a decision and not one person in this entire room what say okay all the republicans sit over there and the democrats over there and let's come up with different plans and fight it out. we don't do that except the way we run our country. and we cannot continue to do that. so i hope that the republican party does make the changes mike talks about and i've talked about, but i hope ultimately our decisions don't get made by what's good for my party, both by what's good for my country. >> we have some time left for questions from anyone in the audience if you have any. there is a microphone right back there if you could advance to the microphone that way they will take it up. >> i would like each of you -- me you can start first with your thoughts on citizens united, the short-term and long-term. >> citizens united. i have to be careful. i am a lawyer so i don't know if i'm allowed to say that the justices for smoking something illegal. the only thing i will say about that is if corporations are people, give me a break. first of all, i am not going to challenge the knowledge that supreme court justices have about the constitution. but they obviously skipped corporate law because corporate law makes it clear that there's a distinction between corporations and persons. i have a chapter on this in my book, and i probably have one of the more extreme positions coming and that is that when you go to cast a vote, there is nobody in line with you accept another human being. and that when you give money to the campaign there should be nobody giving money except a human being, no corporate money, no labor union money, no political party money, no money except from human beings in limited amounts cannot casino owners in las vegas but putting tens of millions of dollars into a campaign that's the way to fix the money system. >> so, how would you address what the mayor is doing in new york right now? basically threw his pack, based on what you are saying that he would outlaw something like that. >> i think what mayor bloomberg should try to do is encourage as many people as possible to individually give money to defend the people he's trying to defend. i'm not trying to take people out of the system i just want it to be people, and i don't want -- you know, i agree with bloomberg, but i don't think it should be okay i've got more money than you so i'm going to determine the outcome. he is an articulate guy. going to the states and say i want you to put the money of to help elect. >> the citizens united case, again it is one of those things that happened on -- what happened when i was rnc chairman as that also happened during that time we had a case before the court as well as a thing apart from citizens union as companion or sister case which spoke to a lulling the parties. our argument was a third party entity pact shouldn't be the source of campaign funds but the money should be back within the political parties. mccain-feingold did that if you have unlimited wealth and you want to share that with the political parties you could only to the extent of $30,000 a year before mccain-feingold that money that we see getting poured into the packs, millions of dollars in individual could write. the difference was writing the check to the political party you have full disclosure. we had to record the date, the time, the amount of the job, etc. to get all of that pertinent information and then put that on the public record within 30 days. citizen united says okay not only is the corporation a person for purposes of campaign finance law, but we will let that person do what no other person in the country can and that is to give unlimited amounts without any record. unlimited amounts without any record. so there is no way of knowing that you just wrote $25 million checks to a pack from a democrat republican, doesn't matter, they know you wrote it but we've the citizens don't. they claim we will disclose that information. okay, selectively because if you say don't disclose i'm not writing a check, what do you think they are going to do? so i think what you are going to see is over the next couple of years the congress particularly if the republicans lose the house next year, the congress will proactively go after citizens united and put in place some of the controls of the notification identification and record as i think should have been done in the first instance. yes, sir? >> it's my view that political divisiveness, especially hard line political divisiveness has increased in direct correlation to the incessant pounding of talk radio. i'm wondering if you have any comments, role of talk radio and the formulation of policy especially within the party itself. >> there is no doubt that talk radio has been to the political process and certainly to the political parties. the growth at least from the republican and the conservative side really hearkens back to the only viable outlet that a lot of conservatives felt they had to express their views on a lot of issues and hence you see for example the success of the conservative talk radio in various forms and the failure of the liberal talk radio and america and other efforts it is the way that the political process for those activists unfolds itself. they want the issue and to count, count compound. a lot of folks on the left its more visual and television oriented. if you look at msnbc, my network where i looked it's much more oriented that way. the impact however on the political process has been profound for both the radio and the television aspect, and i think you see now both fox and msnbc and cnn to a certain degree trying to adapt to this landscape that we have already talked about in terms of the attitudes of the voters being less edgy and much more looking for the conversation. i don't want to hear you yell and scream and shout and talk over me. i don't want to hear you have to agree with me. i want to ury solution to the fact it's been unemployed for 18 months. for $50,000 versus $20,000.10 years ago. these are the new realities i think we are beginning to shake some of that. we have the edginess of the conservative talk radio with rush limbaugh and a few others, and i think that hasn't been helpful as we have seen the case is a good example of not helping the the date from the talk-radio standpoint simply because it puts the party and a cut the candidates running for office in the position of having to go out and either slam rush or do the right thing and say he is bonehead and stupid and we saw how that played out. we saw how that played out in that case. that is a real dynamic within the party to contend with also i will say it's getting less and less so. >> i want to have just one thing. i totally agree, talk radio and talk tv or a major problem. they just high cut the anger and the instability a lot. we don't do a very good job of putting the blame on the people that own those networks and make their money off of touring plays into the political system, but its more complicated than that. they are a part of the problem that there's been a lot of studies that show with the exception of the party in this room while all of you are not part of this but everybody else you know talks only to people who think the way they do. you and your friends generally all watched the scene shows, read the same columnists and read and watch in order to reinforce the positions you already have rather than open to listening to different points of view with somebody who thinks differently than you do and that's a real problem. that's what gives talk radio and tv the immense power that they've got and so we would like to reform that but we have to reform some things in the culture so that we have more critical thinking that we have more people who understand six and are willing when the year a different point of view listen instead of just forming a rebuttal in their mind while the other person is talking so talk radio and tv are not the whole problem. >> i occasionally talk to people whose ideas are off-the-wall. do you listen to fox news all the time clocks and then i stop my conversation because these people aren't looking at the norm. they're looking somewhere appear with their ideas. my next comment to mickey, michael, i watch you all the time on msnbc and sometimes i wish you could get a chance to finish your statement. when you are speaking about bipartisanship i remember when tip o'neill and ronald reagan were good friends that by partisanship always started at the water's edge and they're used to be a lot of bipartisanship and it's only recently that this debate are not increasing the national debt and turning the whole country upside down. i think the u.s. to agree on the national debt and then he changed his mind on that. so, what do you see happening in terms of getting -- and i say the republican party closer to the minimum where it used to be. i come from new york and we have seen so many good republican senators to washington. >> let me disabuse folks of one particular idea and i will be interested to get mickey's review on this one. i've come to the conclusion as a native washingtonian that grew up in washington, d.c. who has for me my local news was national news, it was what was going on in washington. it was not national. it was backyard stuff. and i agree with you, i have watched that transition away from this idea of bipartisanship. the last truly bipartisan era for that we had was with clinton and gingrich and we saw what could be accomplished. it started off a little rocky but both sides recognized very quickly that if they were going to tackle the debt and deficit, if they were going to try to work towards a balanced budget, if they really wanted to begin to work at the water's edge on entitlement reform for entitlement programs like welfare they would have to do this thing called a consensus. they would have to find that sweet spot. in 2000, all of that change. we became red states, blue states. the strategy implemented by grove and the team and the presidential cycle said that this paradigm of us versus them, read a verse is blue, conservative versus liberal. overlaid with this idea of compassion conservatism but the underlying was really in your face your mama, too to this alive concluded that in the last ten, 12 years this bipartisanship no longer exists. when you hear members of congress talking by partisanship they are lobbying. it's not going to happen because they are not going to do it. as mickey illustrated the system does not allow for that anymore. what you see now that i think really speaks to this next stage of where we need to go is consensus and we begin to see it on an issue like the guns where you have senator pat to me from pennsylvania and joe manchin from west virginia find the consensus, the sweet spot on an issue that no one in washington thought we could get anywhere near some resolution what the script on immigration reform what happened there. everyone at the beginning of immigration reform thought this train was going to rollout and we would get it done. they haven't been able to nail down the consensus yet on what to do and where that is going to go. succumbing you still see on the right and left that sort of well i'm not sure. so that's what i think the new dynamic is, whether the leaders, and i use that term loosely can find that sweet spot consensus, the point that says i know you've got to give up something and i've got to give up something. it's not about party or anything other than the people. the space in the middle of the sweet spot it may be center-right or center-left, but it's in that area that people want us to be. that, ladies and gentlemen, you should pay close attention to to see whether the white house, the senate, the congress can find that sweet spot on these complicated issues as we have began to see emerge on things like gun-control. >> mike and i both agree that on the republican party, our party, we do have the problem. the democrats do, too. we used to call them old evils, the conservative democrats are all gone. max baucus found that out very quickly and others did as well. the same thing has happened in both parties there is focus on republicans, but the democrats have lost their conservative and to become members of congress, too. i was in congress in those days. now we can look back and talk about bipartisanship at the water's edge. it wasn't that way. it wasn't that way in vietnam or the issues in central america hitting if you know, in nicaragua, el salvador. it was those kind of foreign policy issues. there was a speech given by a senator saying that by partisanship ends the water's edge but it was never really true so we have always had those divisions. what's different now is that we always had some people in the house and senate that would reach out and bring people together so they could say how can we move the country forward? you and i have strong disagreements that we have to make sure the water stays pure, we have to mature the bridges don't collapse and our troops get their supplies. that's missing now and it's because the primary system if you say look we disagree about a lot let's find the area where we can agree then we are both going to get attacked and our primary fox so that's the real problem that i see to it >> one last question. do you think obama has gone a long way in his budget proposal by curtailing some entitlements and so forth to get the conversation started again or is it dead in the water? >> i gave him props' the other day because it puts them in a box right now to have to begin to negotiate the senate finally after four years has come to the table with a budget. the white house has a budget, republicans have a budget so we have the makings of something getting done. i think the president talking about the change cpi which is indexing the indexing of inflation becomes a good starting point. the president is asking for $600 million of additional revenue getting post a $400 billion of revenue in january there is no mood on the republican party for that at this point which is we see how the spending side places itself out of the debate. thanks very much. >> yes, sir to be a >> i am a senior and captain at ki school. congressman my dad served with you in congress. >> a great man. absolutely. >> i am a democrat but i followed with great interest the candidacy of inglis kaine who was a republican turned independent and he seemed to me to represent the idea of post partisanship working for the people. but even though you said 40% of the registered voters in the united states are independent it's incredibly hard for them to get on the ballot. i think one of the down sides of the primary system in washington and california is that a completely shots out of them in the general election and so i am wondering over the next couple of years what you see as being the volubility of independent non-partisan candidates and how do you think if they are to become viable. i know you have to be very proud it's hard for somebody as a green party libertarian much of independent party to have much chance to succeed and the system that we have. but what has happened with the california and the washington primary, so even if you end up because it is an attorney general election in a very liberal district to seven in california the berman race, the liberal district it's not ever going to elect a republican but those that end up in the primary in this case both liberal and the democrats have to appeal to the third party. they have to appeal to independents and appeal to libertarians and green and so forth in order to win. totally change the dynamic in that race and it's done in washington. so, i do think that is one of the things. but in this can -- there is a very positive, they have a little bit of a - that comes out of that, she was a good guy and it's good to see an independent elected as an independent running as an independent. the problem is he said absolutely. he had to caucus with the democrats because the parties controlled the system and if he doesn't caucus with the party he can't get a committee assignment and he can't get -- we have to break that, too where it's not party leaders that decide whether or not you can get a committee assignment. >> that's the key from the political side of this i've always said we will not have a viable third-party movement effort in this country if it is from the top down. we've seen them pass, people running for president as independent and things like that. it's got to be organic from the bottom-up where the citizens decide i want you, sir search or the independent activist to be our representative and then that begins to form an organization around them that begins to crack at the gop and the democratic system which is deliberately designed to keep everyone else out. >> whether it is on redistricting, whether it is on getting on the ballot, it can be a nightmare and help you if you want to try to petition something to the voters referendum. again, the system is designed for very limited access, very few players, and those who are players in the system already are protected by it. incumbency has enormous value. until you begin to break that, very little will change and the way you do is from the bottom-up with activists pushing up the system. we saw bipartisanship in california and washington. the republican leadership and the democratic leadership came together to fight against of the one time they wanted to be about them. >> thank you kevin >> yes, sir. >> are we done? i think we are done. >> we just got the cut off. yes. we want to thank you very, very much for coming out. [applause] we've got our books on sale if you have a chance to kick up right now, and it's available and mickey, your book is out. [inaudible conversations] >> that concludes today's coverage from the 2013 and apple less successful in maryland. you can watch a rehearing of today's programs. we will have that at midnight eastern time and also online at booktv.org. join us this month as we read a news editor at town hall and the author of fast and furious barack obama as bloodiest scandal and shameless cover-up. can you tell us where we are currently in the fast and furious? >> currently we are caught up in the court system where think is the justice department wanted it because the questions at hand are the executive privilege president obama asserted over documents last year, june of 2012 and whether those documents have to be turned over to congress and whether the executive privilege stands. now there are still thousands of documents that have been requested that are still sitting in the justice department that aren't being turned over and the court will decide whether those have to be so that's kind of where we are in the battle trying to come up with a deal what needs to be turned over and what can't be turned over. so you're ki

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