Guest i think often times the conventional wisdom is wrong, and the conventional wisdom in money and politics you essentially have good intentioned government officials who who are being influenced or attempts to influence them by corporations or public unions and if we can only figure out a way to seal off essentially these Public Officials from this outside influences, everything would be great and so i call this the Jimmy Stewart mr. Smith gooas i call this the Jimmy Stewart washington scenario and that does happen. You have wellintentioned politicians being tempted by outside forces but my experience in the washington politics in the writing is so often not the opposite is true but you have a lot of corporations into a lot of entities that essentially want to be left alone by the federal government and the executive branch looking for ways in which to have their needs to get the corporations involved. The hightech industry as a classic example if you look back 15, 20 years ago the company is like google and microsoft have a lobbying presence in the United States and it is essential they are off doing what they are doing and we have a series of actions taken that have essentially forced those companies to set up lobbying operations, so my view is often times what happens in washington, d. C. Is left to do with bribery and more to do with extortion. They have important issues are caused not being used as bribery or extortion. People would be surprised if you look at a lot of you know major u. S. Corporations, they tend to get two people recommend the politically. So they would give to democrats who perhaps are not predisposed to support their position. The money times often times acts as a means of access or a gateway. They were went back through the high gasoline prices and one of them even called for the next potential nationalization of u. S. Oil companies. But after that meeting that very same elected officials might consider organizing a fundraiser for them. If you are an executive and you just heard this sort of threat that we should try to nationalize and then there is an attempt to say that you raise money for me to me it is hard not to see that some sort of a practice. You said you want to believe that your based on knowledge expertise and background but a member of congress will end up on the powerful Committee Like the house ways and means committee. Only if he were she can raise the money the more powerful the Committee Assignments that more money they are expected from the industries that they oversight or regulate. Host guest i always assume a member of Congress Gets elected and maybe they are a distinguished attorneys that they are going to end up on the Judiciary Committee or served in the military so they will end up on the armed services. The shocking reality is in both Political Parties. It functions as a price list and it is deemed to be a powerful committee from which you can raise a lot of money. House ways and means for example, which has oversight on wall street and the banks those are in committees. You have to raise somewhere on the order of half a Million Dollars in the cycle to actually go to the Party Committee whether that is the republican or Democratic Congressional committee and if you dont raise that money there will be threats and if you continue to not raise that money you can be booted from the committee and put on a socalled Fee Committee. The Fee Committee is one that you cannot raise enough money from the people tended to not want to be on them. The Veterans Committee which does important work in making sure the veterans are taking care of in their needs but is considered to see committee because apparently the ability to extract money from the veterans were from an industry connected to veterans is not being so great. So the sad reality is that the Committee Assignments in dc are determined by this price list and your ability to raise money and if you dont raise the sufficient funds for your committee you will be removed and put on a lever or considered lesser committee. Host among the many books youve written on Ronald Reagan have you ever met him or did you meet him next guest i met Ronald Reagan after he left the white house in 1994 at his office in los angeles. I think looking back certainly saw a little bit of the forgetfulness that came with age or alzheimers. But we had a 30 minute meeting that came as a result of a book id written on Ronald Reagan and the cold war called victory. That was one of the results of the book being published. Host what was your impression of him . Guest he certainly co. He certainly has presence. I have met other current president had corresponded. He certainly has presence. He was very engaging and certainly still had an understanding of i think sort of the core issues. Ronald reagan struck me as someone that had a sense or understanding of a few very important things. I cited actually one of the books from oxford he sort of talks about the way people think they know about a lot of things that you can look at somebody like Richard Nixon and say they understand the minutia of a lot of issues is that you have the foxes and the one hand, hedgehog on the other created they are people who know about a few very profoundly important things, so i would put Ronald Reagan as a hedgehog. He wasnt a technocrat or detailed guide that he understood human freedom is human psychology and i think i made all the difference in the world into the type of leader that he was. Host one significant moment was his meeting with Mikael Gorbachev in reckoning and he walked away from that meeting. Why . Guest he walked away from the meeting because ostensibly it was to come to an arms control agreement. Possibly seeking the Nuclear Weapons which had been a concern of Ronald Reagan for a while. A lot of people who understandably see him as very hawkish failed to recognize that he had concerns about Nuclear Weapons and said he was prepared to potentially come to some sort of an agreement on the eventual limits and elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The problem is that the Mikael Gorbachev goal was to end the Missile Defense system and that became very apparent when you look at the russian transcripts of the meetings that was gorbachevs objective and Ronald Reagan wasnt prepared to give that up because he couldnt understand why the concern was up a Nuclear Weapons capability, by gorbachev would want to get rid of a Weapon System that would prevent ostensibly Nuclear Weapons from being used against civilian positions. Host after this he said the following Ronald Reagan is impossible to understand outside of his battle with communism. It was a struggle that consumed more of his attention that any other endeavor and touched the center of his life. It cost him his first marriage, brought in his second wife damaged his relationship with his children and brought on the threats sitting at a nice garden with his kids into the 32 caliber pistol. Tropin three assassination attempts, a fourth ranged assassination of John Hinckley took them an inch from death and Ronald Reagan came to believe that his wife had life had been spared by god for a divine purpose, defeating communism. Guest this is an interesting turning point. While reagan is a leader of the guild and voted for fdr four times. Voted for fdr four times come and i think that the turning point or the Tipping Point for Ronald Reagan came to the political philosophy has less to do with tax rates and some of these other issues although they did influence him and i think it had more to do with a violent strike that occurred where there were elements within the Screen Actors Guild who were supportive of the communist party and were members of the communist party and these individuals have a very, very violent strike and Ronald Reagan wanted to reason with them and was shocked to the extent that they were willing to use violence to expand their agenda. And i think that had a profound effect that shook him to his core and led him to become the communist party was and that related to transform the fundamental way. This book is a fun book and i was asked would ask about his upbringing because he grew up in a troubled household and he did have a sense of humor. Guest he grew up in the troubled household his mother very much. His father had a drinking problem and had fits of employment in the times when he was not employed and whats interesting is the way that he dealt with that. He essentially dealt with that by becoming a man of strong conviction in sort of a light touch and by that i need he used humor in a way not only to sort of life in the moment but to convey. It was a ludicrously of the problems that you have in the soviet system and gorbachev wouldve laughed and was a moment of lightheartedness because the jokes that had certain truths that i think we designed to convey the views of communism. Host we are in the very beginning stages of the 2016 campaign but certainly jeb bush is front and center and your book, the portrait of a dynasty. I want to share part of what he said in the cover of the book but you said blood runs thicker than politics of patronage. John adams called it a families. A family spirit a desire to promote the essence of our family for the bush bushes it is deeply ingrained in the earliest longtime Family Friends to note that they present a strong tribal sense into domestic instinct that drives them and get as you talk to other candidates to be passed from one to another clearly are referenced. Guest could have a lot of admiration for the family and they do have a strong sense of civic duty but it is troubling to me that we have a circumstance where you have the names that have taken over american politics in the Republican Party and there is a sense of the brand of representing the future of governance. It would have enormous respect for nobody in american politics is irreplaceable. The notion people would have in the Democratic Party right now that Kerry Clinton is the only democrat that could govern us and is the only one that could win and likewise saying that i just dont think American History bears that out. I think that it bears out the unexpected, the potential for people that look like ordinary leaders to be great leaders during times of crisis so i think the reliance that we have that we have to go back to another family yet again for another leader strikes me as something that isnt particularly american. But im saying the American East Coast is about new blood and new leaders. Host that was to continue for five weeks. You have a son on the phone with the officials basically saying whats going on here. We have George Herbert walker bush looking on carefully and then we have george w. Bush in two can almost read his mind saying whats happening. Host one of the things i respect about the family is a sense of loyalty that transcends politics. They have an amazing ability to convey loyalty but also to have an innate competitiveness within the family which i think has made them so successful as a political dynasty. Its very different. I draw a contrast in the book between the kennedy dynasty which was more top down. You have joe kennedy calling the shots as long as he was able to interact interacting the courier in steering the careers for jfk and ted and bobby. Its this expectation that you are to contribute in one way or another and there is a competitiveness between them. So why are they love each other very much there is also a fierce competitiveness to be the one that extends the Family Dynasty or family brand as it were more than the others and its a unique and very effective model as far as dynasties go. Host he was the one i was supposed to land in 1994. Guest very interesting how that worked out. Coming back now these decades ago, he was running for governor in 94 and everybody in the family knew he was going to run and expected him to and they thought he was going to win because he really is a policy guy that eats and breathes policy and understands it very well. He is the one that when george h. W. Bush was running for president or for congress was involved and engaged in the campaigns in a way that george w. Never was a kid in the same year was running for governor in texas against ann richards who was a very charismatic campaign governor of texas. So when i interviewed family members and ask them what did you think was going to happen they said chad is going to win george w. Isnt going to win because even though hes more of a hothead of course the opposite happened. So, totally changed i think the dynamics in the family. It led to a lot of soul searching because everybody expected him to plan and he didnt, and i think it led to george w. Being recognized in the family as a way of having political smart but maybe hadnt been appreciated before. Host you write about this in the book the selection of the running mate. It was a decision made late in the process by todays standards. Obviously it had gone through the whole vice presidency coming back. Walk us through that decisionmaking process and how significant that was and is in the relationship between Ronald Reagan and George Herbert walker bush. Guest is a great question because now in the recent political elections the tendency is to pick somebody on the outside for the Vice President ial running mate mate but maybe he wasnt running against you but its going to add something in terms of the state they are from or the demographics. In 1980 it was unusual because he won the nomination of george h. W. Bush was the runnerup and george h. W. Bush became the selection after this internal debate within the reagan camp and essentially it rested on two things. Number one, george h. W. Bush had a lot of knowledge. He served as the cia director the u. S. Ambassador to the un. He has served as the envoy in beijing china so they have the expertise but more importantly than that they recognized they had a temperament of being a team player. In other words the belief that he wasnt bigotry to undermine Ronald Reagan and wasnt going to try to crab glory for himself and so that became the two qualities i think that led him to be the choice. That was not without dissension. It ends up being an excellent choice and they have a very good relationship. They were not close or powells. These were very different people. People forget culturally they came from very different backgrounds and they have differences. Ronald reagan was the antiestablishment republican potentially looked at running and 68 against nixon. The nearly lost so he was the antiestablishment republican and george h. W. Bush of course was an establishment republican having served even the chairman of the Republican Party itself. I wouldnt say that they were close but they worked well together and it was a Mutual Respect on both parts, which i think was a key ingredient between the two and they have different strengths. George h. W. Bush is not the orator orator or the visionary that Ronald Reagan was. George h. W. Bush understood the mechanics of the government and how things work and so i and so i think that they complemented each other very well. Host you also get a sense versus 1976 when gerald ford selected bob dole and the moderate senator to be his running mate and went on to serve as the secretary and his administration. But that has changed over the last 15 to 20 years. Guest in the case of the Republican Party has become more activist. Its become less establishment. And i think that is theres a number of currents that run through that. Part of it is geographical area that used to be the main state or the Republican Party was like pennsylvania which republicans dominated for generations. Not so much anymore. The New England States of course prescott bush, george h. W. Bushs father, pretty rare when you see republicans having a statewide office in some of the New England States. As of so the party migrated south and it migrated west. And i think thats contributed that contributed to it. You also have the wise activist wing of the party. You have 15 pretty strained. And even before the tea party became involved, you have conservatives that Ronald Reagan very much nourished who were not part of the Republican Party establishment that became the precinct chairman and state chairman and Committee Member so this is a more conservative party than it was 30 years ago and i would say pro