Foundation. Their support for online cultural events has been absolutely unwavering and they are, oh my gosh, im so excited to see john nichols. Their support for these events has been absolutely unwavering and they have been so dedicated bringing author events to all of you whether you are watching in your home in madison or across the country or across the globe. Seen an incredible uptick in her audience of people from all over and it is just absolutely wonderful to see the response. Thank you to everyone here tonight and everyone who comes and to all the sponsors who made sure these events keep going. Without further ado i would like to bring john and mary to the screen and step away myself. Larry tye. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. Larry, thanks for coming all the way to massachusetts to be here with us. [laughter] larry is on cape cod as we speak. You have about 100 people or close to 100 people with us and some more may join us as we go along and as was explained upfront we will take questions and i will ask larry questions at the start and then about halfway in we will invite some questions from you folks and wherever you want to take it we are very excited to go there. Let me just say a couple things upfront about larry. First and foremost, he is a journalist and his books are journalism at its very best. We live in a time where journalism is under attack and not only by political figures but also simply by the economic forces of the moment in which we live and the challenges we face. It is a great honor to be with a another journalist and someone who really has practiced the craft and some of the most creative and exciting ways. That is only the beginning of discussing larrys many talents and contributions. I will also mention that we are talking tonight about a new book they put out, demagogue, book on joe mccarthy former senator from wisconsin but i do want to say larry has a canon of books that are worthy of your attention if you have not read them already. His biography of Bobby Kennedy was brilliant and really took to the expiration of kennedys story and journey to some new and exciting places. His biography is of vital contribution not just on sports history but the history of really the evolution of this country and so many fundamental ways but finally, my favorite of his book is rising from the rails which is the story of the sleeping car porters and im of huge film fan of randolph and he was chairman on lots of washington and larry just capture that brilliantly. Its highly recommended of his books and we here tonight to talk about a brilliant new book, demagogue. I wanted to start out larry by asking you and i noticed that in some of your other biographies you have the name of the person in the case of joe mccarthy you chose a word, demagogue, why was that . Before i answer that question i just want to say that john is one of the many people that i interviewed for this book and to think stood out with my interview with him for he was one of the youngest person that i interviewed when i was trying to get a sense of people who really knew the mccarthy era and knew John Mccarthy and the other was that he was among the very smartest people that i interviewed and any of you who are wisconsin readers know his work from the cap times and from the nation and from all kinds of other places he is published. Having somebody who is as tuned in to not just mccarthy but mccarthys contact in wisconsin and the nation was extraordinary. The reason that i picked a one word title that was not mccarthys name was because this is a book that is about americas love affair with the earliest days until today and i felt that the subtitle would capture the sense that it was that front and center in this book was low blow joe mccarthy but that it was also important to see him in the context and the reason we are here talking about him 70 years after his beginnings of his crusade is because he was the archetype for this bully or demagogue figure in American History and that is the longwinded exhalation i hope to keep my other answers shorter, john. We are here to hear what you have to say so a little longwinded is okay. And the title you use the term the long shadow. The life and long shadow of joe mccarthy. Give us a sense of what you mean by that that long shadow . Is of the impact of what he did or is it really this broader notion of the demagogue . He partly cast a long shadow because of the impact of what he did and not just him, mr. Joe mccarthy, but the orchestrator of this whole movement mccarthyism and it is also to say that we just cant stop with his death and we have to look at how we influence demagogues that came after whether they be david duke, George Wallace or people who are in political to context today. I want is a one other thing. The temptation with a lot of the interviews that ive been doing on joe mccarthy is to talk about donald trump and this is a book about John Mccarthy. Donald trumps name was mentioned only in the preface and in the epilogue and yet his story and story of other demagogues is there and wait and every page of the book. As far as you brought trump up i will join you in trying to avoid it a very deep discussion of him but tell me when you started putting this book together it was around the start of his presidency, wasnt it . A week before the election in 2016 i signed up to write a different book and that was a biography of barack obama in the day after the election i realized we will not know Barack Obamas legacy until after the era of trump is over. It also became apparent to me the day after the election that what i thought was the story of almost ancient history in america in terms of demagogue is the story of today that we have not outgrown this affair and attraction to bullies in the ways i hoped we had. So, lets get into the book a little bit. One interesting element of it which is that you take a very casual approach to referring to him and i guess the way to say it is when you read the book which has a wonderful narrative throughout and just a great screen going through it, its a little bit like being, i dont know, maybe sitting out in front of someones house with a couple lawn chairs, by the beach or even at the end of the bar and someone starts to tell a very long story and you come back to it and its very human in so many ways and i wondered what you thought to do that. I think if youre writing a biography of somebody you have to humanize and you have to make a reader feel like they are getting into the spirit of this persons life and whether the person is somebody who is a hero or villain and they ought to know them and so it was very conscious saying the way Bobby Kennedy i talked about him generally using the word bobby and that was a conscious decision and with this one it is lots of joes and not just mccarthy but it is to try to get in and see him for the inside. What did you see when you looked inside . I saw that on the one hand i want to go back actually to a quote that was one of the reasons i had no mccarthy in the back of my head ever since i did my research on Bobby Kennedy. It is a quote from the one person of the foreign of 50 people that i interviewed from the Bobby Kennedy book that was irreplaceable, a woman named ethel kennedy, bobbis widow. Said something about joe mccarthy that i not get out of my head and it was joe mccarthy might be a monster too much of america but to bobby and to me he was just plain good fun. The idea of joe mccarthy with good fun was counterintuitive to me i felt there was some side of him in the side of him that called wisconsin to overwhelmingly elect him in two different statewide elections that i wanted to understand and so i came out of this book feeling like on the one hand joe mccarthy became much more of a human being as opposed to the caricature that we study in our history books then i had ever realized and he is somebody that i would love to have gone out for a beer and sat down and really, understood all of his charms and all his ability to convince the ethel and Bobby Kennedy was a great guy to spend time with and on the other hand the documents that i looked at made him seem even more sinister than the history books did. The upside was that he became more of a human being but the downside was a lot of the political things he did and his motivation and doing them more we could see the papers that gave a more candid sense of that and made him somebody that if you went out for a beer with him at night that would be fine but if you assure a sack would not want to be on the witness stand when he was grilling you during the day. One of the most interesting things about mccarthy was his ability to joke with the people and about to attack or to jokingly attack them and we remember john times of John Patrick Hunter a longtime political reporter who battled with mccarthy throughout the 40s and well throughout the 50s for sure and when hunter would go to events he said he started to hide behind poles of the events because he knew that if mccarthy saw him in the crowd mccarthy would launch into a rather jovial attack on as the attack on hunter but it wouldnt be, it wouldnt be so meanspirited. It would almost be for the fun and the joking and the crowd and i think there was very common with him. I think that suggests two things about mccarthy. One is that he didnt quite understand how brutal he was being and being there with an angry crowd as a journalist being called out by mccarthy was putting hunter at a risk and i think that mccarthy didnt quite get that aspect of it but it also was that joe mccarthy really didnt see this as a bit of a game. He assumed that everybody was there, journalists or politicians that he was going after would understand that it was a game and they would understand the rules and they would be able to go out after with him and put it all behind them because that after all, it was a game. I think youre right about that and it comes out in your book for quite a few ways. You talk about these relationships that he had along the way and i dont want to take us through the whole narrative of mccarthy story because i do think people should read the book but i am interested in your thoughts about at the start of his career he was a new deal democrat at one point or at least relatively liberal character and that was that near me or merely opportunistic or do you think that is where he started and then evolved into Something Else . You cant talk about much of anything with joe mccarthy laid out the opportunistic elements. Was he really the liberal he started as or ultraconservative that he ended up as and i think that where he started out is where he had the most choice and he wasnt sure what would get him elected and we ran from District Attorney he ran not just as a new deal fdr loving democrat but i think as somebody who was fired up enough about that that he really believed that that was what was best for the country and that was also his irish roots suggested that the party of fdr was where he belonged and i think the only times he questioned his being a democrat and his being a liberal was when he realized he could not be elected from the area around where he grew up and he was game to do whatever it took to be elected and so some night, probably in the middle of the night when no one was looking, he went and changed his Party Registration to republican and, as you know the story, it wasnt just that he became a republican but the opening in the republic of party, the progressive wing of the Republican Party was taken up by Robert Follett junior and the opening was the stalwart republicans and if that was the opening joe mccarthy would take it and if it meant changing his ideology he was going to do that and he was going to do and he did whatever it took. I think that that was, if there is anything that ran throughout his life it was the theme of whatever it took. Were there people along the way who helped him make that change and im thinking of some of the folks up in appleton, particularly bens sister and others . There were a lot of people. He was his best friend and probably say just advisor and he helped steer him. The people of the newspaper in appleton at the post crescent helped steer him. He had lots of people who ended up being his enablers and being his benefactors and being his guys and he was willing to take advice from anybody who was willing to serve the ends of joe mccarthy. And they like that . , that made him appealing . They love that. I think ben was a extraordinary character and from the comments he made over the years to everybody from journalists to authors to his children they suggest that ben truly adored joe mccarthy and he understood mccarthys flaws and shortcomings as well as anybody did but that he was a loyal friend and stuck with him and never publicly repudiated mccarthy even when his temptation was to do that and even when he was telling his kids that mccarthy had gone off the rails again. I think that was a lot of people had a lot of loyalty to joe mccarthy, including somebody whose entire family was representing the iconic liberal first family of america, the kennedys. Bobby kennedy remained loyal enough to joe mccarthy that he, not only never publicly questioned him, but when his brother jack said stay away from mccarthys funeral in appleton in 1957 bobby said thank you, jack. Thats interesting advice that he flew into appleton with all these republican congressional people and on the one hand he went up in the choir loft so no one could see him at the funeral and at the Gravesite Service he stood off to the side where no one could see him but after the funeral he begged the journalists who were there not to put his name in those stories and not get him in trouble with his big brother jack but until the very end and until today for ethel the kennedys and generally and bobby specifically stay very loyal to him as mccarthy for all his flaws was the guy who inspired on a personal level that kind of enormous loyalty. Its also notable that john kennedy really danced around mccarthy rather than standing up to him. Don kennedy had a different relationship. Bobby was a more straightforwa straightforward, less plotting guy than john kennedy. John kennedy was always thinking of his next step and im convinced that the David John Kennedy was born he started plotting his president ial campaign. I think his father was doing that. His father did that absolutely but jack caught up quickly and in 1952 when john kennedy was a relatively unknown and unaccomplished congressman from massachusetts running against the very powerful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to take that seat away from the republicans the poppa joe kennedy had one big request for joe mccarthy which was stay the heck out of massachusetts. Joe kennedy had given enough money to joe mccarthy that wherever he asked mccarthy was likely to say yes and joe kennedy was smart enough to know that if joe mccarthy came to massachusetts and campaigned for the Republican Lodge lots of Irish Catholic voters who loved joe mccarthy, whether republicans were more likely or democrats would do what he said to do and jack kennedy ended up winning that senate seat by just the Percentage Points in a year of an eisenhower landslide where eisenhower one bite nine points and i think joe kennedy and jack kennedy were right. Mccarthy staying out of massachusetts ensured that jack kennedy won that seat. Jack kennedy, for the rest of his life had a certain kind of loyalty to mccarthy and when mccarthy was censured the only senator in the senate at that time who, not only didnt show up and vote but we dont know how they would have voted was jack kennedy, not exactly the kind of profile that joe kennedy was famous for talking about. I thought you would take us to that term right there. You know, you are from massachusetts and weve already spoken far too much about massachusetts here so lets talk about wisconsin. In that 1946 campaign that brought mccarthy to the u. S. Senate he took on senator robert the follett junior who would come back into the Republican Party after having out of it for a dozen years with a leading figure in his brother and the progressive party. Mccarthy obviously was making an opportunity to run and had the backing of the party establish meant but the follett was an epic figure in the state and it appears that at least early on he did not take mccarthy seriously or did not take them seriously enough. You just captured what is the through line for all of mccarthys campaign and his opponents seldom took him seriously and tom coleman who was the dean of the stalwart republic is in the state never took him fiercely as the guy to carry the cudgel against lafollette and tom coleman stream and im convinced its kept him up at night was somehow beating lafollette and joe mccarthy would be is the vehicle for doing and if its something he did not accept and he watched mccarthy and watched mccarthy go out and hustle the all of the publican activists, especially young republicans in a way that finally called him to be convinced that this was a guy so determined to win that he was a guy you got to get behind. The way i think that joe mccarthy beat laval it was partly what you were suggesting that look follett beat himself. It was almost like he was surrendering. I think he was getting older and have been in office long enough and his health was a great and im not convinced that he was sure he really wanted another term or lease not wanted enough to fight hard and to fight dirty like he was going to have to do to beat a guy like joe mccarthy so mccarthy raised legitimate issues in the Campaign Like whether lafollette had been captured by the rolling in astonishment and whether he still had the kind of rootedness in wisconsin that voters in any state want to see when they are electing somebody but also fought dirty and he was raising issues like the fact that lafollette owned a home in virginia and mccarthy was suggesting that that was a mansion and a place that will follett consider home and that wisconsin and if anybody should not have had to show that they had deep roots in the state of wisconsin it was someone whose family had given up as much as look folletts hat and serve the state, not just for the long time but really well but at the time will follett came back and started campaigning hard the campaign was essentially over and mccarthy one by, i was hustling his opponent in a way that