All these whites have it in for you and that is why you are doing badly. I had done badly in harlem and i overcame it. Reporter what happened there . I graduated. I thought you said you went to howard. I was going to howard in the evening while working fulltime during the day so at harvard i was a fulltime feature first time in 10 years so that was what years did you go to harvard . I graduated in 1968 so you can understand, talking about recently a black man in law school was told professor x never takes black students and he got a b plus but there was great consternation but it is truly criminal what goes on in terms of using and manipulating students to serve all kinds of external things. Host give us an example of what you are talking about. Guest political purposes, the investment campaign. The administration, the whole thing. They are threatened with violence. At stanford the hispanic students have complained the hispanic establishment has threatened them with what is said and done. Only 15 advance, ever attended a single event. It speaks boldly in their name and so you have this kind of thing going on. Once you let in students who cannot meet the epidemic standards, you have to create courses. Host correct me on the names. Doug bell. Guest harvard law school. Threatened the law school if they didnt hire black women. Is taking unpaid leave until such time as they hire a woman of color and he also has said he does not mean in color, those who are really black, not those who think white and look black but what he is really saying is you want people to hire. That is not uncommon either. I know a black woman for example with a phd, a book published, she has taught in a couple nice places, teaching at a college. And they dont like her ideology with law school, a woman for a tenured position, she does not follow radical feminism, you get an ideological test so at the very time all the mouthing of the word diverse city, theres this narrow ideological force where people have the power to enforce it. What are your politics outside the races . I am biased against politics. I been a registered member of any Political Party since 1972 and i really am quite this should with politics. Really just by following what they do and how they work, they make quite clever things they do but that is not just race issues but all issues. Has it changed over the years . If it has changed it has been for the worse, people talk about limited terms of congress. I would like to see it limited to one term. If you are going to allow a member of the house of representatives to spend four years in washington i would rather they change that to one four years are rather than two, two year terms, the problem is reelection and as long as they had to be elected and raise all that money, they will sell out the Public Interest because of the money, really quite simple. Industry like the cigarette industry, congresswoman appropriate enough money for the cigarette industry to pay them back 1,000 on every dollar. You cant get the return on your investment in many places so theres no sign they will start doing that. Either they stop offering the money or congress. Giving the money. Host looking at the cover of the book preferential policies, an International Perspective with our guests, in history who are your favorite, not politicians but your favorite people . You mean historic figures or people i looked up to when i was growing up . Who have you followed, Winston Churchill types. Winston churchill was the greatest man of the twentieth century. I find it horrifying that most American High School students do not know who Winston Churchill is. What is so great about him . If anyone man could be said to have saved western democracy, he did. He saw the enormous danger of world war ii, warned against, there might have been 40 Million People who lost their lives but even at the eleventh hour, had britain not pulled through, the United States would not have pulled through and we would not be sitting here alive. Who is your favorite american president . That is a tough Abraham Lincoln i guess. Ashamed to go all the way back to Abraham Lincoln to find a president that really inspires a qualified way. Among the modern people, in different respects i would say fdr, john f. Kennedy and ronald reagan. They recognize an International Danger and save the life of this country without which all the other issues wouldnt matter. Cspan you have an ideology . Guest i am a great believer in maximum freedom. The American Civil Liberties union i dont believe children should be kept in school because of the constitution, people have to recognize all people know their lives to society they cannot simply demolish it because it is unjust because everything human has always been unjust, what you got to do to make it better has to be within that context so my tendency is to want more freedom for the individual and less i dont want people making decisions to dont pay the price of their decisions and that is what politics is all about, you dont pay the price. One reason we had a jim crow era in this country was because the politicians and pay the price of that. That was costly to the black population but politicians who put that into and pay any costs. They through their full salary the respective of all that. I want someone who discriminates to have to lose money discriminating. The examples i gave in this book people tend to back off when they lose big money. Harlem was an allwhite community, became a black Community Despite efforts to keep blacks out because people were losing money trying to keep it away from us and people in the Civil Rights Era did not try to promote more free markets because that makes discrimination the most costly it can be. Cspan one of the most interesting sentences in the book is about india where you say they are the most diverse country in the world with 180 different languages, 500 dialects. Are they more of a melting pot in the United States . Guest no, they dont melt in the slightest. They are polarized. One of the tragedies, we have organized groups in the United States trying to balkanized the United States, created the United States the enormous handicap under which india is laboring, many parts of Subsaharan Africa are laboring due to all kinds of historical and geographical reasons and now the United States having escaped all that, having blessed with having one language and culture over distance that in europe would go from madrid to moscow, having had that. We are now going to pull that down the drain and go for balkanization not being aware of what has happened in the history of the balkans or what happens when you have people who speak different languages and radically different beliefs trying to be in the same society. Cspan you said relations are bad on campus. If this keeps up what is going to happen . Guest there are already skinheads on college campuses. There are already harassments of minority students on a scale and seen 20 or 30 years ago. Then there is the reaction on both sides to escalate because what you do is give a lot of leverage to the crazy elements in all of these groups, picking an International Example in israel someone said on the radio, and television that because this is really man as killed 7 arabs that any thought right now of the norm between arabs and jews has to be put aside. One man has the leverage to prevent millions of people on both sides from working out some livable arrangement and once you get this racial hype, you put that power into the hands of demagogues to prevent vast numbers of people who may be decently disposed not to be able to do anything because they are polarized by the relative handful of crazies or whatever. Cspan back to campus again. What is creating the prejudice other than the elites that you talk about, what is it that creates the differences they dont get along . Guest differences they got along before. Blacks and whites were victims at harvard but you didnt find the black students huddled together at the lunch time at the end of some table the way you do on campuses today. All the black students i knew had white roommates, they were all popular other than me but that is not the situation. The fact that you do have those elites to have their agenda, the black students are forced to come out and whatnot, the fact that you have students there tremendously alienated because somebody finds themselves in a situation where academically all they can do is keep their noses above the water and someone there to tell them this is due to white power structure and they are sick of hearing that. If you cant hack it that is your problem. That is called insensitivity. It is self reinforcement. There are reactions that are self celebrating but some defeating each other. In a great racial incident happens on campus, invariably the first thing, you must have a large photo of minority students and minority faculty and we must now subject the white students to sensitivity courses or ethnic courses or what have you, otherwise they are not really necessary, that will not make it better, that will make it worse but as they get worse you keep doing that. Is an upward spiral and i dont know where that spiral can end. It legally to bad things. Cspan what would you do if you were administrator of a college or university . 20 years after they have gone under, 20 years ago i said dont do it, 20 years ago i said if you do it this will be the consequence. I wasnt the only one it people simply did not want to hear it. Im very on sympathetic to the administrators. You made this mess, you get out of it. Nobody wants to hear what i have to say now so its not a live issue for me. A gentleman wrote me from Princeton Associated with the university in some way. I come to princeton to confer with this or that person. I said no, no one has ever asked me to come to the university and do this. There is not the slightest interest in anywhere in the the ideologues have the truth and the light and dont want to be confusing the issue and the others are afraid of the ideologues. Now making an unnecessary trip across country to chitchat at princeton. To watch the other booklet interview or other interviews with thomas sowell, search his name. We opened our archives to look at other programs with fellows from Stanford UniversitysPublic Policy think tank, the Hoover Institution, next, historian Neil Ferguson discusses his authorized biography of Henry Kissinger who is also a fellow at the Hoover Institution. Mister ferguson appeared on booktvs Weekly Program after words in 2015. Reporter this is the start of a 2 book authorized by, not only was it written with Henry Kissingers cooperation but at his suggestion. How did that happen . Authors ought to be nervous a bit because it implies that he had some control over it but when he suggested this to me which was more than 10 years ago i said, yes i will be willing to do this but on condition i have a completely free hand, you have to accept it if you ask me to do this and give me access to your private papers i will write what i think is the truth, which is the basis on which i had the previous book, the history of the rothschild family. He agreed to that. Theres lots of it but he doesnt like and i wouldnt have taken it on on any other basis. How did it happen . Did you mail them beforehand . How did he find you, what was the moment . I met him, he read my stuff. We met at a party in london. I tell the story in the preface in the spirit of full disclosure and we were talking about one of the books i had written about the First World War because he had read it and we were having a conversation about that so we met on that basis and i forget exactly when but sometime after that the subject came up. He was restricted the idea of a scholarly biography being written. I wasnt the first person considered for this job but when he put the question to me, initially said no and he wrote me a very Henry Kissinger letter. He didnt do email and the letter said it was a great shame, just when i have decided you were the ideal man to do this and just as i found 150 boxes of my private papers in the loft, i suppose a week or two days, looking at those boxes and papers and looking at the stuff i decided i should do it. I was a bit daunting before hand. It is a difficult life to write for a range of reasons, it is controversial, very well documented, a difficult thing to do but once i started to read these papers, the early correspondence, within a few hours i thought i have to take this on. This is not a man who has been undocumented. Hes written his own memoirs extensively. Even longer than the book. So why do you think he wanted he has also shared some information. He spoke with Walter Isaacson for his biography. Why do you think he wanted this book written . He is by training a historian and historian knows the memoirs are different from the histories, the biographies. These volumes cover most of the government, next to nothing before 1969 and for half of his life in effect he hadnt written a Walter Isaacson book which is very good is essentially a journalist book based on interviews and relatively few documents and i think the idea was somebody should write a scholarly biography based on archival sources because that didnt exist although there are a bunch of books you can find in libraries that are thought to be biographies of kissinger, not based on much more than he has said. The argument for a scholarly biography of a major figure is a compelling one. As it turns out the material was very good and very rich and i was lucky because that whole period from his earliest days growing up in germany right down to the moment he was offered a job in National Security and largely been neglected by previous writers. Host you are described as a conservative historian. You think he chose you for that reason . The other unnamed person would also be considered a historian . Guest it was. It is more important that i am british because theres some advantage to that in writing about American History. One characteristic feature of Henry Kissingers life has been the extraordinary political controversy dating back to the early 1970s that raged incessantly and in some ways the controversies, off of the generation of 1968, the generation that came of age during the vietnam war. I am somebody who can come at this as history. I dont have memorabilia from woodstock in my attic. On the question of conservatism it is worth adding a footnote because conservative means Something Different if you have grown up in the uk. Its not republicanism, the us version and i am not by any means a republican in my politics now that i live in the United States. Im a conservative in the way that Henry Kissinger was a conservative as a young academic, a european conservative you. You almost feel like a liberal if you are a european conservative in the United States because things american conservatives say would be shocking to you. In the same way that kissingers conservatism is a european variant so is mine and that may be one reason he thought it would work. You say things you find shocking, are they in the National Security realm or social issues . Social issues, those things i regard as not being in the domain of politics that are in the domain of politics in the us, National Security issues. It is often the case that people get confused into thinking theres some kind of punch and judy show argument going on about National Security. I was very critical of president obama and his predecessor in the book losses published in 2004, i was extremely critical of the invasion of iraq and the way the occupation was handled. Part of the reasons for doing this is i have been drawn into a debate about us Foreign Policy from the moment i set foot in the us and i probably approached it rather naively thinking i criticized both republicans and democrats. It is hard to be in that position. You never expect to be on one side or the other but on National Security issues i am more independent. Host there is no question theres been a convergence since the end of the cold war if you look at issues like bosnia or iraq itself, there were people on the left talking about humanitarian challenges or people on the right who were isolationists, certainly true. Im not sure what an independent is except somebody who goes casebycase. Or somebody who recognizes there cant be a simple party line on these National Security issues and wont be bound by party line on social and cultural issues. I found kissinger, the young man was in rather the same position. He thought of himself as a small d conservative. He didnt self identify as a liberal in the 1950s in 1960s harvard but when he encounters real american conservatives, Barry Goldwaters supporters of the 1964 Republican Convention he was appalled, had a very uneasy relationship with the right of the Republican Party and conservatives as well. That is one of the inte