Is the politics doctor . I became the politics doctor because people started writing to me as soon as trump was elected and said what can we do. We have to deal with our different politics, so we have written about it a lot and as soon as trump was elected, i started getting letters. We dont know what to do. We are about to get divorced. Im writing you this letter. I saw that you have written somethinhad writtensomething ana liberal. We are having a terrible problem. We met several months ago. It is a great relationship and everything was fine until she happened to see my car was parked next to her and shes all that i had a decal on the back of my car of trump urinating on hillary. It is a joke, but she was outraged and is insisting that i take it off. I think its funny and it wouldnt bother me if she did something similar. What do i do . Saying the hell with you im leaving it on. I wrote him back and they said you should take the decal off and then his girlfriend said thank you this is wonderful and this is how i know that it will still work out. We are talking about your new book i love you but i hate your politics. [laughter] what are your politics click im a kind of gardenvariety democrat im not a progressive. I am middle of the road. [inaudible] primarily on social issues im not a fan of identity politics. I am a fan of womens rights in every possible way. There are things we disagree about. They should be considered and other than that, gun controluncertainly abortionrights, Global Warming before we get into some of those issues, youve referenced your husband a few times and this of course is richard kais brookeor the historian. How long have you been married . 1980. How long have you known about her politics . We met in the summer of 1977, so immediately. Its important and telling that because i think this makes our relationship possible. We met in a group that sings religious music on the street corners for free. Dont take money. And i had in the group a number of times after i got my doctorate and i wanted to do something besides read psychology books. He has a wonderful voice was really interested. I said to him what do you do and he said im a writer. Who do you work for, william f. Buckley junior. Our wedding was quite an experience because of course bill buckley was there and the publisher. And of course russia was one who was an enforcer for mccarthy and the man who gave me a way is one of the first people who lost his tenure position to mccarthy politics in new york state. I knew this was her mentor. Very smart guy, delightful. He would have been killed on day number two. Everybody behaved, and one of our friends said [inaudible] that is how it started. And i have an idea. I started a very subtle campaign. Did he ever try to enlighten you or were you ever in my complex delete the he was much more sophisticated about this than i. Do. I explained things to him. Im not embarrassed about it anymore because i was foolish. There was a built in asymmetry because i was a political journalist, and i have been doing it for years so i was used to encountering people who disagreed with me and use debating them in public forums. I knew politics as a world of disagreement and contention so i already knew this and i had been to an Ivy League School living in the biggest city. My first girlfriend tried to register i have been by circumstance and a liberal world and i knew what that was like and how to navigate that. For you it was a new experience both in politics. It was a totally new experience. I grew up in cincinnati ohio. My father was an eisenhower republican and my mother a democrat but he was pretty liberal on social issues and is the only republican that i had consciously ever met. I went to the university of chicago which isnt exactly a right wing institution, and then suddenly im in the world of william f. Buckley and people who didnt agree with me about anything. It was and education. It also showed me the other side with whom i disagree pretty seriously about an awful lot of things with different people in different circumstances. Over the years what was your relationship with william f. Buckley . He came to dinner here and we have been there so many times. It was like living in a little kingdom. We got very good service from our doorman after that and they made a very elegant dinner. Lets look around. I want to set something up so she suggested to me and then rick suggested that i show the cards that are the same as psychologists used to use all the time. It came up in conversation somehow. So i picked a card. Everybody knows the word but how often do you see the car, it is very rare. So i picked a card and i thought it would be interesting and he saw a particular thing on it and what was interesting to me to come it is a positional because you are not using what is obvious to you. He completely avoided the emotional part. And i think i told him a little bit of what i think he saw. Listen to this model. So that was a neat experience. You have been married for nearly 40 years. 39 this last one. Its hard to imagine. Did a politics that are threatened that relationship . Its never threaten it, but i have to say i was the instigat instigator. Im not the instigating type but on abortionrights i am. Something happened and this was my first and last real misstep. I said this is terrible, this is the end. Im going to have to join a protest march and im not a protest march person. I said a few march i will march. On the other side. Yes. We decided we are going to table that discussion for the rest of the time. We did okay. It took me about ten years. So, as husband and wife, you cant talk about that issue or you dont talk about that issue because you disagree 100 . I started out with this fantasy as i said that i would show ric the truth, and of course he would understand because he understands everything else. He understood me in every way and is one of the reasons i became a professional writer. He has encouraged me in every word i write. Over the years, it became unimportant for me every time something came up to have to Say Something to him about it. It just didnt matter. I knew what he thought and we were not going anywhere but then there was a chain. And this happened recently. I write about this in the book. Before we get to that, if their advice you give people in your book i love you but i hate your politics . If you cant talk about it, dont talk about it. Some people can find a way philosophically, but this issue i was too passionate about. It was too essential to me and we couldnt talk about it. It was the only thing i think in the whole world we can talk about. You also make the point sinc spinnaker doesnt mean i cant talk about it with anybody. It just means in my own home i give up freedom of speech. That is your psychotherapeutic advice to people. Yes. Although it has to be conscious and mutual, and we have to stick to it. I couldnt take an article at breakfast and say read this. Everybody does this and it never works. Or send it to my inbox. I revised this just isnt the way to go. The wild thing was this one of the most precious things that ever happened. I was editing and i said its so hard to edit like this. Just like Mary Mccarthy said, anna rick said finally coming you are prolife. They were having a laugh, not about abortion, but we were laughing about our differences. And thats a very important distinction, it isnt laughing about the issues of contention over the issue. We thought look where weve come. I was astonished that he said this and that we both thought it was as funny as we did. Are there other topics that you dont bring into your home . Thats the one we dont talk about. We disagree on many other things, and you can talk around them. That is another strategy that we write about. One strategy is to do it as a horse race. Your side really bungled that issue, or my side really got a goal on this one. You can do that. You can do the politics and the horse race of it. If people are more intellectually, they can talk about the background of these issues and why people take the positions they take some of the sociology history of it or Something Like that. So, there are ways to talk about things that are talking around them without actually going head to head on the case. I have to tell you the most wonderful thing for our marriage has been the election of trump. Rick is a conscientious object objector. Reading the New York Post since 1977, i followed his entire public career. I understand how wonderful it is to agree about something so political. We stood in line at the polling station [inaudible] Ronald Reagan of course one may. George h. W. Bush passed he had many limitations as a politician but also some positive qualities. I knew him a little bit and wrote speeches for about six months which meant i would get notes for him over the years. He must have had an address list a mile long and he took that very seriously writing to all the people that he knew even if he only knew them a little that it was to keep the contact. Rudy giuliani was a great mayor of new york and i thought he might be a president. I was wrong about that. What is it about donald trump does not excite you . Let me answer that backwards. What he ibut he is probably at s selfpromotion. That is what made him a success before he even ran for office. Hes not a Good Real Estate guy. Hes pitiful, ran through a fortune. Whe when is the last time that you were on the shuttle forward to the taj mahal . It was airplanes on a run by but we wrote the book andsign the buck about the art of the deal and he made himself a personality. Thats what he did. It was a very successful strategy to. He knows how to use the media of the moment. Now people talk about all that kind of stuff and its brilliant. This is a 70 plusyearold man who is doing what teenagers do. He sucks the air out of the room and makes it all about him. The third thing he does is to means supporters. And im not talking about the people that vote for him. Im not talking about that. But the people who become his advocates have to make themselves a small. He requires them to be small. He cant have large allies or large advocates because they might take attention away from him. So, if they have elements of importance for greatness themselves, they have to ship them and giuliani is an example. Great mayor of new york. Its a very sad thing but that t is the kind of ally donald trump needs. Im not talking about someone like nikki haley. A lot of them maintained their independence and their distance. But if you are their clothes, you would have to be small and hes very good at achieving that. This raises a very interesting question how important, and i know we dont have an answer to that yet, how important is the presidency [inaudible] that nobody is. How does the judge presidencies, obviously we judge them on the president himself. James buchanan had been the worst president in history if he had served at some other time. Itsay lincoln had come along wt he has been a figure that he now is. He may get reelected so there will be time to make judgments. We interviewed you over a year ago kind of a preview interview for the buck. When the confirmation hearings were going on, i got another list of emails. My sisterinlaw broke her engagement over kavanagh. Its gotten more insane by today. The day. And it comes from both sides. Maybe even more from the trump side and the pro trump aside. I read a statistic that people are not going to fight with each other. There was a piece in the times on the 17 things to talk about at thanksgiving other than politics. They needed something to talk about at thanksgiving. Its gotten worse and worse. As a psychotherapist, did you see this during the george w. Bush administration or the Ronald Reagan administration . A guy who lived in he was transported. He did hook it down off his dating profile because no one would look at that. He really liked this woman who did talk to him. If her friends said how could you do this . She walked out in one state. I asked, if you had a chance, would you talk to her . She was very thoughtful. She said, why . I consider them the antichrist if they are for truck. After we had a long conversation, and i wasnt trying to convince her to go back to him, i said before you ever in a situation for somebody who you are with didnt treat you with . And vice a versa . I told her that this is a chemotherapy test, when you are lying on a hospital bed, would you want this person can give direct . Having been in the bed, thats what is to me. Who passed that for you . Rick passed that test. I got chemotherapy and rick was there. She came and did my laundry. My closest friend at the time, who was a political democrat never showed up. I also had a remarkable story that i tell in the book, what is a core value . Core values or not, its who you are. This is a young woman who i know well. They have been important in my life. When he died, he had five brothers and sisters. Serious progressives. None of them, her uncle, an ex marine converted evangelical, he helped with everything. She did something almost nobody else would have done. She apologized to him. She had been bickering on facebook and saying all this stuff and she said, you are the only one who came through. You seem to be taken aback by some of the results you got in your book. Yes, i was shocked how outrageously some of them were. This woman in california, for her friends to say, if you bring him to dinner, i will get up and smack his face. These are adults, who does this . I was shocked by that. Im not saying the right doesnt do that but give examples of the right as well. Absolutely. The people of the left of the out party. Right. I was kind of shocked also because i have been treated with Great Respect and consideration, but the temperature, good gracious. Would have thought been historically in this country as high as it is today . Yes. We had a civil war. I hate the phrase, old civil war. You probably see that a lot. We had so many die in the civil war. I know the historian who did it, heres a demographic historian. He just looked at the census and said, we are missing 103,000. So thats 7,150,000,000. We are not there. I dont think we are at the level of the founders were. These great men whom i revere, they went berserk in politics. Thats a big difference, they killed each other. He wasnt the only one. I just wrote a book, one of his colleagues around the supreme court, republican appointee, he killed and shot the guy in the groin. It never came up in the confirmation. [laughter] this is what gentlemen did and that was it. Poisonous political atmosphere at the beginning of the country. Vietnam, iraq war. Assassinations, kennedy, Martin Luther king, riots. That was worse than now. Partly because media has changed. Thats true. We are looking to media of how to conduct conversation in our bedroom. This is the worst its ever been. Is also because there can be media in the bedroom. Thats right. Social media, do your own tv show, every little tweet or instagram is your very own tv show you can do anything with. There are vicious things going on between parents and children. Between siblings let alone a couple of friends. I think the way it permeates everything. Also, social media is a huge thing. There was no unfriending the e end. You cant read friend. If you do that, it leaves a scar. I only interviewed one person who did that. How did you find the people in your book . How did they know to write to you . Ive written about it a lot. So it comes up on google searches . Guess. I wrote an essay called love and hate politics. That was published in the wall street journal. We are known as the go to couples. People kind of think of us for that. People were desperate. What i did is, everybody i knew i felt would talk and then i went to my friends there. One person gave me i think eight people. You posted for a call for subjects. Yes. They wanted to talk. People wanted to talk. They told me stories i would have been embarrassed to tell. If i said a Powerpoint Presentation saying that this hero has died, who would do such a thing . Is crazy. People do it. When i mentioned in the articl article are rachel and britney friends again . Yes. Except, they dont know what will happen next election. Shes expecting another powerpoint. Are aaron and george still together . Oh, you mean harry they are good friends. They are my favorites. They fight constantly but they fight with graciousness. Harry did something, if you ever want to give an article to somebody, he wrote a note, harr, he said harry, i have an article i would like you to look at. Would you read it if i sent it to you . He said of course. Ill read something you sent me also. And i guess they did that. That is my model of how you conduct a conversation. Work week old able to hold these conversations 20 years ago that we essentially arent able to today . I think more. I think there was kind of a bubble of civility of a pearl harbor to vietnam. That was because the National Unity for the most part world war ii, it ended the split. The beginning of the cold war, though we had disagreements about how to proceed, united on the corporate i think before and after was pretty contemptuous. Theres something now, if i tell people that im married to a republican, even though im quick to say hes not a trump supporter. Do you feel a need to say that . I think i do sometimes. Right now, people arty know but people are astonished. They say, how do you do it . Like its an astonishing feat . How do you go to dinner, how do you do that . I said simple, i stand up during the innovation but i dont clap. You can figure it out. I try to find common ground. Have you ever brought him to a hillary rally . I did go to one myself but i did bring him with one of my colleagues. There was a lot there was one person who called rick a crypto nazi. He thought he was saying it jokingly. I went into attack dog mode. Its one of those things you never do. I said, rick is very gracious, i said to him, i want you to retract that. Its an extremely serious accusation committed to my husband. He doesnt deserve it and i dont want you to say. I said it like that. I feel this is essential to do because if your spouse is good enough to be your spouse and spent the rest of your life with, their opinion deserves respect. I think it is essential. If you saw somebody walking down third avenue, wearing a Great America again cap, would you show judgment . Probably but i wouldnt walked up to them. I would say okay, you want to make a statement, and there are a number of people who are my friends who think trump is great. Not a lot but i have some. People will leave their therapist if they think that. I had a situation where this guy was going to lose to canada and i said, why . This kind of stuff didnt happen before. It becomes the center of conversation. This is what people think about. Political affiliations, its the same thing. Not terribly successful. Yes, idiotic i would say. [laughter] you may get some