Watch the communicators tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan 2. Announcer this week on q a, author and Real Clear Politics Washington Bureau chief carl cannon. He discusses his book on this date from the pilgrims to today, discovering america one day at a time. Brian carl cannon, your new book on this date from the pilgrims to today, discovering america one day at a time. What is it . Carl it is a snapshot, it is a morsel. Like tapas. A morsel each day from january 1 through december 31, an essay on something that happened in American History on that date that tells you something you may not know and gives you an understanding of this country you did not have. Brian how do people find it . Exactly how do they find it . Carl how do people find my book . Brian no, how did you find the essay topics . Carl i do something that relates to whatever is going on that day. I have been doing it for 5. 5 years now. It is just a rambling thing. Brian for somebody who is not real good on the internet, they go to realclearpolitics. Com. Carl they go to a. M. Note, and they click on it. If they like it, they can get it in their mailbox. Every day, five or six days a week. Brian what about the archives and all the 5. 5 years of these . Carl we go back and forth with our i. T. Guy. That is the sore point. I wish you would not have raised it. Thats why they need to buy the book. Brian lets start with the first one. January 1, 1915, everybody stopped and stared. What is it . Carl the first female cab driver in new york. These essays are about 400 words. You can use in economy of language. Tell a story in 400500 words. This woman loved cars. She was a mechanic, she loved cars. This woman shows up on the corner and the first hurdle is, are her papers in order . There is a patrolman there. One up new yorks finest. He looks at the papers. Her papers are okay. The next hurdle, what are the male cabdrivers going to say . They go to the opposite corner and they caucus. They say in my mind one of them knows her. Whatever happened, they decide to accept this. We wont make trouble. We will be good about this. The third hurdle, and all of this unfolds in chapter one, how will the public it is a service industry, driving a cab. What will the public think . A few minutes later, someone gets in and she asks where you want to go and they say, we just want to ride in your cab. And in way, and that little incremental story, progress takes place. Brian how many essays . Carl 368. I do it every day, plus leap year. And a couple days i did a few of them. I guess it was my signal to the reader that you could have picked any of 1000 days. On one day, august 28, i could not decide and i sent three of them in. Brian how long does it take to research and write these . Carl when i do my Early Morning note, i get up early in the morning at 5 00 a. M. I Wander Around my library, come up with a subject and research it. They take about two or three hours to do. When i made this book contract, i thought i had already written a book, i would just take my notes. It turns out, i had to write a book. It took a while. I had to rereport and rewrite all of them is what i am saying. Brian i want to pick something right in the middle of the book. It was interesting how many chapters you devoted to the uss indianapolis. The first day i found was july 28, 1945, the secret mission. Carl most of these are one page, two pages. 450 words. I think one of them is three pages. I have to or three things i revisit. This one is five days running, the first one is the first week of august 1945. It is so many stories wrapped into one. First of all, it is a tragedy. All these guys are thrown in the water, world war ii. It was a big ship. Navy ship. A cruiser. It comes out of San Francisco. It had gone there for repairs. There is a secret mission. What is the secret mission . There is a thing loaded on to it, very heavy. It is uranium. It is the component of the atom bomb. It is so topsecret that the navy does not do the normal things. This ship, after it delivers its cargo, it has to rendezvous for what maybe is the battle of japan. It doesnt get an escort. Not many people are aware it is missing. It is sent to submarineinfested waters and they go into the water. 900 guys go into the water. Nobody is looking for them. What happens to them . The story is they drown. They die of dehydration. Sharks eat them. Its horrible. It takes five days in the book, but it took years for this story to resolve itself. The caption is courtmartialed. He is movie starhandsome. The men love him. He was a scapegoat. Years later reinstated by the he never recovers. He takes his own life. Years later, theres a boy in florida watching the movie jaws. In the movie, quint has a soliloquy on why he hates sharks, he was on the indianapolis. Many people who saw jaws in this country had never heard of the indianapolis. Brian why did you pick it . Do you remember . Carl i picked it because at the end of the five days there is a kid in florida, he thinks the captain has been railroaded, and he wants to do something about it. He does do something about it. I will not give away the whole story because it is a fun one, but Joe Scarborough has an interesting cameo and eventually the navy admits the captain was blameless. It matters to those people who were on the ship, the handful who are still alive. Brian out of all the years, did you have one they got the most reaction . Carl people grab the book if their name is there. That is why Richard Ben Cramer in what it takes did not have an index. He wanted people to look through the book. People look up their birthday. Individual people have different reactions to it. One of the reactions i got a lot was to august 28. The one i did two days. It is the second one, the Martin Luther king story. I do not write about the speech, i write about a kid who was railroaded for a murder that day that he did not do and how that speech played in interesting roll it in him eventually getting him exonerated. Brian how did it play a role . Carl he was africanamerican and he was accused of this murder and he did not do it. He was convicted. When the case was reopened by a crusading New York Times reporter who went back and looked at it, his alibi checked out. And the reason it checked out was his 10 or 11 africanamerican friends all remember exactly where they were and that he was with them because there was the Martin Luther king speech and he was watching them with it. The chapter is, they had a dream, too. Brian here is one, august 21, 1959, this is one of those universal news reels. We will just watch less than minute of it and you can tell us the rest. [begin video clip] it is made official at the white house, president eisenhower congratulates the new representative of hawaii. Adding the 50th and southernmost part of the United States with a population of 600,000. During the signing, the president was flanked by Vice President nixon and speaker of the house sam rayburn. This is a historic occassion. For the second time in a little over a year, a new state has been admitted to the union. [end video clip] brian how big a deal was that for president eisenhower . That was a big deal. He looks happy and he was. That is not fake. He referenced a year and a half early. That was alaska. He was seething. He wanted hawaii. He wanted both. He got his way and pushed for it hard. When ike got angry, people came around. Like most American Military people, hawaii had a dear place in eisenhowers heart. It had been attacked. Pearl harbor took place in hawaii. Everybody in the United States took that as an attack on the United States. Some of the southern democrats argued it was a tactical one. Eisenhower would not have it. You can see he was happy that day and that was genuine. On that date, i write in my book the congressman who lost an arm fighting in the famed 442nd regiment. I consider him one of his guys. Brian Richard Nixon on the right, eisenhower on the left. Do you have any personal recollection of rayburn . Carl i think about rayburn and eisenhower and lyndon johnson. Ike was born in texas. I think of these three guys sitting around in the white house and running the world. I do not want to go back to the days when three white male from texas ran the country but back then it seemed like a better system than we have now. I think of them sitting over their bourbon and branch water and running the world. I dont think we want to go back to the days when three white males from texas ruled the country, but sometimes i get nostalgic. It seems like it was a better system than what we have now. Brian heres another universal newsreel. This one is from october 19 57. The best thing is comparing what has happened in the world since this was made. How much more we know about this kind of thing. [begin video clip] today, a new moon is in the sky. A metal sphere placed by a russian rocket. Here is an artist conception of how the feat was accomplished. Its weight estimated at 50 tons. The artificial moon is put to speed counterbalancing gravity and released. You are hearing be signal transmitted by the satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age. [end video clip] brian one of the first things i want to ask you about is not in the book but the handling on that was reds. Why would we not see that headline today . Carl we might. We have this russia scandal with the donald trump. Now it is the democrats. We are talking about russians again the way we used to talk about them then. Actually, sometimes what goes around comes around, and that is a deliberate pun about sputnik. When sputnik is up in the sky, it sent shockwaves through this country. People thought it is not just the soviet union doing this, the country thought, they are superior to us. They have a technological advantage over us. They are in the heavens before us. It was a shock. Eisenhower, were just talking about a minute ago, demanded to know about it. Why he did not know. The New York Times demanded the same thing. Congress demanded the same thing. Lyndon johnson raised hell about it. This was a big deal. A radio commentator said, listen now. That sound for evermore separates the old from the new. That is what he said about sputnik. Brian page 289, the headline is ground zero. The sky was that same unbelievable blue in new york city to use springsteens phrase. It would be eight decades later on 9 11. Almost instantly, the air was black with smoke, the street red with blood. What were you getting at with this one . Carl this is a bombing on the wall street by anarchists. We do not have a better word now. It was a terrorist act that killed a lot of innocent people, mostly working people. It did not kill wealthy one 1 ers or whatever the phrase was at the time. Widely condemned. I used it to show we have had these attacks before. There are three or four themes in my book, one, if things seem terrible, momentous inconceivable to us, we have had , them before. We had one in new york. People did not, talk about the wall street bombing. The bombing backfired on the people who did it, it humanized wall street. It reminded people these were human beings. It was an event that brought people together in the end. Brian 38 dead. Carl no warning of any kind. All of a sudden a bomb goes off. People in the street. Blood of running in the gutter. Brian they say the crime was never solved. Is it still on somebodys radar screen . Carl good question. I dont know. Maybe my book could be the next time, 385 unsolved crimes. Brian do you have any idea why it wasnt solved . Carl it was widely considered a political act. World war i had been this cataclysmic event. It had unleashed forces. The bolshevik revolution had taken place. People were questioning capitalism itself and were thinking there were a lot of people in this country, i do not want to say leftwing or right wing, but they wouldve considered themselves leftwing. They thought the United States had entered world war i and people had profited from it. There was a lot of hatred on the left toward wall street from people who thought this way. That is why said this helped humanize wall street. It helped dissipate some of those feelings. Brian i am jumping all over the place. October 5, 1947. Page 309. Guns then butter. You talk about the first tv address of president truman. To address a looming human catastrophe, the u. S. President employed a new technology. The first televised address from the white house. Anybody watch it . Carl yes. It wasnt like now, people did watch it and talk about it. From the beginning of Television People when it those things in their houses. They were expensive. They were black and white. President s embraced technology. That is one of the things we know. They embraced it so they can communicate. A lot of of people look askance at Donald Trumps twitter habits. His impulse to reach as many people as he can without a filter. It is an impulse all the president s have had. Truman was not the first. In this case you had a collection of forces coming together. The Marshall Plan. Herbert hoover once again coming into Public Service to organize relief efforts in europe credited with saving lives. One guy, herbert hoover. Truman tapped in. Second time he had been tapped by a democratic president. When i was a young reporter, he would still talk about hoover at these democratic rallies. Hoovers legacy is much more complicated than the president who did not do enough after the stock market crash or during the depression. Herbert hoover, Woodrow Wilson center. His efforts saved many, many people. He did the same thing after world war ii. Brian you talk about the Marshall Plan. How important was said and what was it . Carl the Marshall Plan was a plan to offer relief. Food, housing, medicine, clothing. Other things, too, but mostly food after the war. It was sold as an anticommunism measure. Greece was on the verge. Other countries, too. Eastern europe was behind the iron curtain and western europe, which way did they want to go . The Marshall Plan was a map to defuse american hate. It was not really motivated it was mostly motivated by anticommunism. Americans got it, it was to help people we did not want to see starve. It was altruism. Brian you go from George Washington to the current president. You have items on almost every president along the way. From your standpoint, what is the most interesting president in history to write about . Carl that is lincoln. But i could do every one on lincoln. I had to watch myself. When i got these morning notes i had written for real clear politics and looked at them there were probably 30 or 40 on lincoln. I learned something about myself doing this about president s. About how i feel about president s. There is more truman then roosevelt and that is interesting because Franklin Roosevelt is considered the greatest president in the 20th century. Some conservatives will tell you regan is there with him. Ok. Im being generous. One of the two greatest president s of the 20th century. Most scholars think he is the third greatest after toward washington and lincoln. But i find myself coming back to truman. When truman left office, he had 25 he had Richard Nixons Approval Ratings after watergate. Jimmy carter and george w. Bush had these low Approval Ratings. Truman, by the end of his presidency, democrats will not be seen with him. They will not campaign with him. They want to offer the nomination dwight eisenhower. It turns out he is not even a democrat. Senator fulbright shows up and says, we should go to a parliamentarian system. They cannot stand this guy. He has weathered well in history. In previous stories i called him the patron saint of beleaguered president. But he is more than that. He is this principled guy who is a truthteller. He weathers well. After world war ii, these africanamerican soldiers come back and theyre suffering the same conditions or worse. Lynchings, violence, after fighting for their own home. Truman, with the stroke of a pen signs and order integrating the American Armed forces. Something Eleanor Roosevelt could not even get fdr to talk about. I will answer questions. I must like truman more than roosevelt. I would not say it out loud, but there i have said it. Brian what is realclearpolitics. Com . Carl it was started 17 years ago by two guys who went to princeton at the same time. They weirdly didnt know each other. After college, they were political junkies, they were doing different jobs. One was a day trader, one was in politics. But politics was their passion. They saw a need where you can get a onestop shop of politics whether you are a conservative or liberal or libertarian. It turns out not only was our Business Model about to be blown up because of the internet. These two guys who knew nothing about the news business, that was a time when it was the right amount to know. We who had grown up around it had negative knowledge. Things we thought were true or not true. And they started this company. It is a free website. Anyone can go to it. It started it as an aggregation. We have 17 stories on our front page every day. It is left, right, center. It is unpredictable. Whatever your views are about politics, youll find them there. Then they started aggregating polls. Other people do it, too, but they were the first. When you aggregate polling, you do not run around with your hair on fire and think the race is going one way when it is not. You can sort of have a calm review of what is going on in politics. Now we have a staff. We have reporters. I oversee the original content. We have reporters covering the white house and congress. I am pretty proud of it. Our goal is to adhere to the old model, which is the model i grew up in, which is we are not taking sides. Were just trying to present the information and trust the voters to get it right. Brian where is it based . Carl it was based in chicago but we have graduated incr