So in other words if he looks good on tv you are learning about his ability to be president. Turns out that worked really well. Kennedy begins a huge change in our politics along with the debate with nixon. The other big change, clinton uses talkshows in a way nobody used them before, going on jack par and used the internet very well. The fundraising piece in the outrage peace. Twitter interested me because donald trump is not able to use the persuasive power of twitter for any of the programs he promotes whether the dismantling of obamacare, building the border wall or the tax cut. Those are more unpopular after he pushed for them than before. It is not successful in the unifying tool of his base is successful but doesnt have the power fdrs fireside chats did so to control the media and throw distraction up he has been singular in his success doing that. To distract us from one story to another. It doesnt count on any reporter writing what you say. Heres a question from tomoko who writes which president surprised you the most . One thing that happens when president s right speeches . By the time this happens we figure it out. You start out maybe you think you know what the book is about but by the end of the book it is about something else. Talk about surprises what surprised you . A fantastic writer that if you write something and dont discover something along the way that kind of turns your head and makes you go in a different direction as a warning sign. That is what we get into this, the joy of surprise and the joy of finding something out and that made this, working on this book a delight. As you know, good luck, final strategy with you are writing now but it is in your head and you cant just say door is closed. Im sure you are still thinking about barbara bush and how do you see the world . Eisenhower interested me and surprised me eisenhower is considered a bumbling kind of mike greenside wrote a book called the hidden hand of eisenhower. The corridors in washington have an inflection point. There is another side of the, something that is much more engaged in his presidency than people thought but he thought he gained power by not being seen all the time talking about it and his power came from that restraint so as i have said inking about eisenhower i became fascinated with the way he thought about the way he did things in the book is an exploration of why president s do or dont do things. Also i found carter interesting. Carter a lot of good theories how to build an organizations. It didnt work out. He built a team for governing and they went all the way through his campaign so he could be ready on day one to have the ground running and get things done. Probably there was a huge crackup with conflicts with the Campaign Team but i was struck by the way carter thought about the job. And he has really done that but that wasnt all you need obviously because it didnt work out for him and there are moments the presidency pushes, George Herbert walker bushs restraint i became more familiar with. And communism he was accused of not having a vision as you well know but his sense of restraint is part of this too. And i think those are some of the ones that surprised me. Things are popping up in my head that i can think about. Thinking about president bush answering eisenhower, the president is not, turns out to be the person for the moment. We were lucky, you disagree with George H W Bush ideologically. In the class with the soviet union. You describe your self in this department . In the room where, there are resources tell me about the process you followed, get up at 3 00 in the morning, tell us about how you managed to do that. It was in my head all this time. I remember talking to you over breakfast at one point about these ideas and the challenges to the office and in the conversation talking about the Trump Presidency you were talking about the responses to it, you might have mentioned the number of women candidates who decided to run as a reaction to donald trump and it was one of the times i kept trying, working on the book to open the aperture if it makes sense. Is there anything i was looking at, the point you made for me was to think about the president does x and why but it has an effect over here to change the political future of political dynamic, in this piece of paper, and may be get to an outline i kept which ended up being about 300 pages long which was basically my thought on how it would work. Only if i force myself to go to the stories that are part of the book, i had the whistle stop podcast originally about campaign and then became about president ial moments and i loved doing it because it is basically storytelling which i love but also forced me to look at individual moments and say why are these important and that is what i do throughout the book so i gave myself a test along the way and i got up early in the morning on cbs this morning, 3 30 or 4 00 and after i left cbs this morning i wrote nonstop for about a year or more reading and doing interviews and also when i was working on this on the atlantic piece i was running these ideas through a realtime filter. Im sure on a panel, part of the thinking that leads to parts of the book. We have two questions that have to do with transmission and the first one came from let me find it, now i cant find it. The second question about transitions came from transitions where every question is and also a question of whether we should put how to do a better job on that. The partnership for public service, there is no turning around is i have four books on president ial transitions and it is an incredibly important question and max stier tried to get it put into law. There is now an obligation for president ial campaigns to start working on their transition about right now. Which means the Biden Campaign is talking about Trump Administration and i became obsessed with transitions, it is essentially what would happen in a campaign although virtues are more orderly, you would spend years with teams of lawyers and people already in place, you would understand the organizational chart. The company would have had some to be up to speed a little bit, given two months between victory and stepping into the job and no organizational chart, they make it up as they go along so congress tried to get to the start earlier but you need a president committed to the transition, you need to get the right soil, hold the field and continue your gardening metaphor from there but you have to do careful preparation for the job, donald trump told Chris Christie i dont want to hear about the transition. It is bad karma. Mitt romney ran the state of the art version, you would pass laws and do all those things, i would make it not only so the candidates took it seriously but also the part about questioning to get them to talk about their transition, you talk about your presidency you are measuring the drapes which is what president s used to do to move in to change that the core of the white house and the idea that if you think too early about your presidency then you are being excessively prideful. Ronnie came at this with a business background. Working with big systems to figure out how to take them over but it is not like getting elected. Here is a question from mary beth. Is a too early to judge barack obama against the standards of the office that you outlined . How would you say that measures are preliminarily . Its too early. One way i think about that is this is preliminary. George w. Bush is i will read robert drapers book in july. Donald trump says the decision to go to iraq was the worst mistake in American History and he should be impeached for it. People, it is not just what he will never recover from. In summer of 2005 he came to the white house after reading the book on spanish flu in 1918 and said to the advisor i want to plan for dealing with a pandemic and i wanted soon, comprehensive. Lets imagine the pandemic had hit. He would have been prepared, and there pandemic. My point is sometimes president s do smart things, not just shortterm oriented for which they get no credit, how do we way that . Thats not in the same category. We think about presidencies, president s in their time and you evaluate helping to diminish the number of aids cases and orphans who had aids in africa and others who had it as well with extraordinary and successful in humanitarian gesture so i am still coming to a theory how you look at a presidency and weigh the various elements when you have such a big thing as the iraq war, that is a way of talking about barack obama. Bringing the economy back from where it was when he took over, how big, i have to think about that, you have to measure it against the weight that was on him in the series choices he faced early in his administration but he made the same mistakes with respect to isis as people who worked for him who worked for bush, recognized bush was learning on the job with respect to how to handle the war on terrorism, im not picking bombing targets and deciding over time he needed to be more involved and more rigorous in libya has to be wrestles with with president obama. Do you measure president obama and Race Relations in america in the abstract a relative to what happened with donald trump and so i dont have a preliminary view. I dont think you could start for another 20 years or so . That the point george w. Bush makes all the time, history that he says, this may or may not be true he doesnt he has not dealt with these questions about the iraq war, it will take a long time to come to its conclusion and we are not there yet. That is a point to make. In this moment in this country it is an example of what you write about in your book the hardest job in the world the american presidency. Donald trump is now dealing with a pandemic which he did not discussing the campaign in 2016 and this incredible protest about Racial Injustice that just erupted. Maybe his presidency has some in the fact that there are Race Relations but these are huge events, and we expect the president to deal with it. Race relations in america there are different ways of dealing with, lets pick the race question. These are complicated questions meaning the president who represent the whole country has obligations to a variety of constituencies but also an obligation to hear the agony of people who are not in his Political Base and what i really found compelling as i was thinking about what needs to happen that gets defined quite differently in the campaign and his argument is selfcontrol and empathy. Taking into account the rights of other people the president s, whether lets start the clock two weeks ago, the president has an obligation to respond with that response, the agony of a portion of the electorate. That is a part of the job that despite the politics of policing in america, responding to that agony is part of the president s job and that is not where he spent his political capital. He spent his political and symbolic capital on the law and order message and that is something he can do today and on covid19 he could speak to that agony in response to what we see in the street he has not come up with an answer yet. The criticism barack obama got for not solving the bp oil spill, he didnt start the bp oil spill nor did the government have the capacity to manage oil spills. It wasnt in their core competency. What the federal government is supposed to do and the president as people saw Barack Obamas obligation to solve the bp oil spill. A lot of americans feel pretty battered by being confined at home with your children or working in development in the nation. Having finished this book and thinking about heading into another president ial election unlike any other that we have had feel fundamentally optimistic, this is another problem we are facing or do you feel more pessimistic, a greater sense of concern of whether weve gone fundamentally off track . Depends if i have been on twitter or not because if you spend time in the most corrosive social media places where public ideas are, fortunately twitter is not america as politics is not america. All those polls and discussions are a broader part of america show a country that is fool of people are not as quick to judge who tend to have great experiment and delivered of democracy that when you put people together in a room and present them with issues they become less fixated on their original positions and behave the way we were taught to behave growing up and when you look at the response to George Floyds death which has been an outcry from a huge portion of america at a feeling that something has changed in a fundamental way which humans are treated in American Culture that represents an instinct and a fellow feeling that is a source of anguish but also a feeling that people are moved because they feel something is wrong and in that they have a better vision of america and if you look at what people have done with respect to the covid19 response, they did what they were told for a long time because they believed it was worth doing. There are places of hope as you can find, they put in a mood to seek when you spend a lot of time in the political field because it has become so much more contentious, point scoring in the debate, remember when you covered your First Campaign there would be a long political debates. Now is just depressing pretty quickly. Your wonderful new book is such a pleasure to talk about. The hardest job in the world the american presidency, everyone should read it. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for your wonderful questions and friendship and your example. It has been great to talk to you tonight and thank you. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure to have you. Thank you to John Dickerson and susan page. By a copy of the book if you havent already. We will include an autographed bookplate particular checkbox. The authors coming up including tomorrow night, you can check out our calendar. When the time comes we look forward to welcoming you back into our historic sanctuary, good night. Booktv on cspan2 has top nonfiction books, coming up this weekend, sunday at 9 00 pm eastern on afterwords, Stephen Leavy discusses his book facebook the inside story. He is interviewed by author and Financial Times columnist, at 10 00 pm eastern former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich offers his thoughts on trump and the american future, solving the great problems of our time. Watch booktv on cspan2 this weekend