Tonight and get you home in time to watch the last word of the evening. [applause] its very important that we end on time to talk about the new book playing with fire theyve had several interesting careers back in the late 1970s and the wrongful death and Police Brutality and the plaintiffs lawyer made into a movie and they told me its actually going to be reissued soon. So if you dont have a copy. Then they got into politics for a time working for senator Daniel Patrick moynihan and as the staff director of the Environmental Public Works Committee and later the finance committee. After that he found his way into tv. Along the way they did some acting on some shows. I mentioned that they won an emmy for his work on the west wing. That is the last thing that he won until this week when he made it into the hall of fame. [applause] luther king and the Democratic Convention in chicago and the nomination fights in both party all against the vietnam war and civil rights movement. Its a watershed event. We started to talk for those of you that are regulars you may have noticed earlier than usual because he does need to get back to the studio for his show so to keep things moving along when they reached the signing he will not be able to provide a personalization that he is looking forward to being here this evening and answering questions. Thanks for your understanding and please join me in welcoming lawrence odonnell. [applause] thank you very much. Standing room only, this is amazing. I cant believe it. Im going to be quick because youre standing back there youre going to get aboard more than these people will. So because we have to be heard way back in the standing room we have a live tv show and a little over three hours and tonight, just tonight, dont judge tonights show. Its going to berat be written n about eight minutes. Its going to be something off the top of my head. The unfortunate thing tonight i wont be compared instantly to the greatness as some of those specials it wont look quite as historically unprepared as it actually is. But i couldnt be luckier to have her there in front of me because obecause that would strh things out to be in the great anxiety of the control rooms involved in the minute i get to talk with rachel every night whewhen shes as good evening te are my favorite minutes a day and they always have been budgeted for one minute. You can see whats going on there. Thats just me and the latenight phone call desperately trying to keep her on the phone. And then she does an goes and io go to the show. I couldnt be luckier to have her. Shes setting new records and cable news this year so she is frequently the number one show in all of cable news and i get to be the number two in msnbc and i believe ive been asking can we change the name of the show and shoves you send it accurately for what it is which is riding the wave with richard odonnell. This was the first one that i was alert for. I remembered zero of the 1964 election and i remember flashes of 1960 because it was a great deal for the Irish Catholic boys in boston one of us was on the way to winning it and its hard to believe this now but in those days we lived in a certain old ghetto culture notioorderto go t couldnt happen. As you know our political history for the decades preceding that and others you couldnt elect a catholic and that was all transcendent and exploded in one night in november and 1960. The world we were looking at in 1968 when i could finally Pay Attention to what this was with the world coming apart in the United States, the vietnam war is raging at president johnson was elected in a landslide which was obviously more important in on the way to an easy overwhelming reelection again and was very likely to be facing someone very good at losing president ial elections. Richard nixon who had the distinct history at the beginning of 1968 of being the very first Vice President in history to lose a president ial campaign. As the years began, it was back in that age when someone said i am a democrat or republican you didnt know is that person a liberal or conservative. Liberal republicans are among the front runners for the nomination at the beginning of the year. George romney and Nelson Rockefeller and there were still plenty of conservative democrats in the senate was filled with conservative Democratic Senators from the south. It was the year when the revisions between the parties that we see now were first walked in the cement and we saw the more poignant scenes in the book with literally became the last liberal standing on the Republican Convention stage in 1968 and is the moment when the mayor of new york was forced at least half against his will to second the nomination to be Vice President of the United States after lindsey himself wanted to get that nomination even to second that nomination that was the last time, a National Republican of significance stood on the Republican Convention stage as a liberal, and john lindsay eventually left the Republican Party not long after 1968. So now we have a world in which when people hear you are a democrat or republican, they think they know everything about you. Its not just that they know you are liberal or conservative, they think they know everything. And 1968 has more drama than chaos and other madness as a president ial campaign than anything we have seen before. And in 2016 it was in fact a perfectly normal standard of president ial campaign with the example of one candidate. But if you look at every other moving parts of this campaign, it was all operating according to the way it always has. And on the democratic side, what we are seeing is a rerun of 1968, which was the liberal insurgency from the left which starts out at about 3 in the polls and challenges the overwhelmingly safe establishment favorite of the Democratic Party in this case Hillary Clinton. Then it becomes a challenge and wins a bunch of states. Thats exactly what we saw happen in 1968 when Gene Mccarthy made it this historic decision without which this would be a very different book. Gene mccarthy made a decision thathe decisionthat changed his. He decided to challenge an incumbent president. We have never seen that before. Bobby kennedy thought about it before mccarthy which is something i didnt know. He actually thought about it and decided not to do it. Then jean did it and won New Hampshire and then bobby decided to get an. I didnt know. It was decades after 1968 when i first learned Gene Mccarthy actually came in second in New Hampshire. But for a High School Kid consuming the news it felt like he did so shockingly well in coming in a close second and that changed everything. Its nixon and the likelihood is johnson would have won that race but as we know the outcome wouldnt have made a difference on which one of them won that race. This isnt just one for the history book. For many sections of the book i dont always identify the accounts. I was sitting on the floor at home and my parents and my older brothers were sitting in the chairs around me as we were watching the convention and watching the rioting in the streets. I was watching that so these accounts are things i saw in my own eyes looking at the Research Material and remembering what i saw and the thing i can never forget from that convention was the moment when the mayor of chicago was running that convention is standing and yelling antisemitic profane slurs at the senator because he stood up to nominate George Mcgovern and said if George Mcgovern were president today, we wouldnt see this gestapo behavior in the streets of chicago and that set off Richard Daley. I can read his lips. I know what those words were he was saying it for anyone that cannot read his lips within an hour the Network Stack julie had with readers on telling you what Richard Daley had said. The Richard Daley moment of the Chicago Convention would have been the most dramatic moment of any convention in our lifetimes. Just that one moment. It is but a moment in a week that was just a stunningly out of control week for americas political system which believes that everything must be controlled. I want to read you a passage or two from this book and yesterday i was in Harvard Square during one of these appearances and i have with me this wonderful guide to basically guides people through the book to her stuff and this is what she does in boston and i asked for advice on how to handle these things and what about meetings from the book and she said with nonfiction you dont really want to do that. I said okay i dont have enough material if i cant read from the book so i violated the rule and reached for the buck. I wanted you to get the feel for people that havent had the chance to get a start with the book. There are some really personal observations and personal experiences that go into living through the 19th Isabel Allenda and life in 1968 and i want to give you a bit of that and give you time for questions as fast as possible. I would like to learn some stuff i might be able to steal and then use on tv. So, 1967 is the year he spends thinking of running for president and deciding against it and everywhere he goes, whenever he gives a speech anywhere all he hears is run, bobby, ron. Undermining the speeches was a force we have never seen before in american politics into something we have never seen since, something shakespearean. When he stepped up to a microphone, no matter how sunny that day or wide smile, it was always framed in the tragedy. The personal and National Tragedy of the assassination of president of the United States on november 221963 his audiences knew his team because they all felt their own version of that pain on that program this day in 1963 that shook the country to its core. In his hometown of boston, it felt as though the world stopped. I was in Elementary School in boston when they got the news that the president had been told. The first catholic president something they never expected to see and now they outlived the 46yearold Irish Catholic boy that made them so proud. The sisters of st. Joseph with the strongest women i knew that this was too much for them to bear. They simply couldnt carry on. They closed school early and sent us home. We had never seen him cry before. We were both crying when they got us in line to march up the sidewalk. Everyone we saw was crying. Every driver stopped at every traffic light, many carrying two bags were crying and briefcases, boston cops were crying, subway cars were filled with people who left work early to go home and cry with their families and watch the kennedy familys ordeal unfold on tv. We watched bobby holding his brothers what does hint at night when she went back still wearing her bloodstained clothing and watched her holding their hand at Arlington National cemetery and nothing could have been in this world to make us forget those images which were only 4yearsold in 1967 and the audience started chanting random bobby run. He had a movie star smile but audiences believe that they were seeing a grieving man smiling through his pain. He was the only politician who smile could make peoples eyes teared up and with tears in their eyes when they looked up at Robert Francis kennedy, they were always seeing John Fitzgerald kennedy and for them, justice demanded that they take the seat behind the desk in the oval office. History demanded it. They never had suc have such an advantage or such a burden. Theres a part of the book that we go in to great detail about the decision david was going through, like hell to decid to e of this and its fascinating was in favor and who was against it. His wife was in favor of it and Jackie Kennedy was in favor of it although jackie when he finally did decide to do it did privately tell someone that she believed that this would end the same way it ended for jack. At the assassination cloud was in bobbys head all the time as he was trying to make this decision and also it was just the tactics of it that had never been done before. This is crazy i cant win and no one wants sharper about it. That may have enabled him to run for president. Bobby knew too much and was a realist first and politician second year as audiences urging him to run for president he knew he was hearing dreamers but it wasnt so much a restoration of the presidency. They want to put their shattered dream back together. He knew what he wanted was impossible and maybe even political suicide running against the incumbent president for the nomination was madness. For the nomination that he owned it was something more than that ms. The most ruthless democrat and republican feared that dream of the kennedy presidency has to gd all the other republican president ial hopefuls. Bobby was almost certain that the challenging johnson was hopeless, but it might be the only way to put pressure on the president to de escalate the vietnam war. The antiwar democrats privately urging him to do it to get him to think about it. It was a rerun of the way that he approached running for the senate three years earlier. At first, he resisted and then he wavered and then resisted again all th of the wild johnsod nixon and the others being needs the help history in his hand. In the nuclear age, all were by implication at least about life and death because the commanderinchief of the power to start world war iii in minutes by launching Nuclear Missiles at the 1968 election was going to be about the life and death of people the new. In the spring of 1968, my cousin graduated from west point before he shipped out to vietnam to. We worried he would be an easy target in vietnam. In the korean war record it fill up their homes with 26 awards and combat veterans including a recordsetting eight silver stars. My oldest brother showed the draft notice which had just arrived in the mail and he was worried. He didnt want to go to vietnam. No one that we knew wanted to go except for johnny. He wanted a career in the military like his father and combat was part of that. The best way to avoid vietnam might be to voluntarily enlist before being drafted because then you might have a better chance of assignments. Getting drafted was the first group to vietnam. Johnny earned a silver star in four months. On september 8, 1968 today that he was killed in action dot the funeral was the first that i had attended. Tragedy has many faces but none quite like a general audience including his sons coffin. It is another day in the life of america in 1966 but the president ial election could end all that if he ran on ending the war in vietnam and ran as the antiwar democrats were assuring him he could. I never heard my brothers and their collegeage friends. Life was a shortterm gain for many as 1968 it was as if they were prisoners who could only begin to think about life on the outside when they were outside. It walked their hopes and dreams. The president ial election could end all that. It was a matter of life and death for all the people we knew and that meant it didnt have to be about ego is could be simply a matter of calculation and it wasnt just about what was good for bobbys future in politics, it was about life and death. What he thought about was his own. He worried about announcing their candidacy was driven more by matt us than logic and maybe getting the second on his way to the presidency would capture the assassins twisted imagination. He was the only potential candidate who had to worry about a copycat assassins doing for another kennedy. So his thinking about running was muddled and slow. He was leaning against running most of the time as he thought about it keeping the manager of the winning president ial campaign to see every detail of what could go wrong with his own. But he couldnt yet see what it was going to be about, life and death. So he held history in his hands for so long as someone that couldnsomeone thatcouldnt seeo be about decided he couldnt wait any longer and he grabbed it out of his hands. Someone that no one expected to see in a moment until he did. And that was the pebble that started coming down the mountain that created this avalanche in american politics. Theres much more to say about this. Much more of you know more than i do and have lived through it and i would love to hear from you on your questions and what you might want to eliminate on this or anything else. If you could make your way to the microphone. The transformation into what he had become. Was and he kind of these ruthless guy in the 1950s and become this liberal icon by the time hes running for president , and the answer is the 1960s. The part about the section of the career is very brief and he despised him every moment so it was a. That they were looking to get into washington and jack was already there and he got out of it in less than six months. What i trace a he wasnt the same person that he was in 1961 and no one in the country is. There were segregationists who were not segregationists in 1968. Bobby kennedy is someone who changed an average amount for someone with their eyes open and period of time. There were people who went through much more dramatic changes and that is something i get into in depth about how the 60s changed everyone. Gene mccarthy and everyone in the senate except for one senator voted for the gulf of tonkin resolution. That was the resolution used to wage the fullfledged war. Gene mccarthy wanted it back a few years later. Gene mccarthy ended up ru