Please move down so our friends can get through the audience. Comments . Questions . Anything to explain to you . Or we can do straight to Milling Around or trying to cool off. And amazing books. It sounded like you were reciting some think and the elements it takes to create any idea what i am talking about . Yes. I mention that in men explain things talking about their right to have a police. The sense that your voice matters, possibility of being heard. Sounds to me like you were reciting it, then you started reading. We know it is in here but we dont know where. Was it so it would take a while you were definitely not reading. Its sounded like you were. Only memory and booktv will know exactly what was said. I would like to hear it again. It doesnt slip away when it is written down. And for the New York Times the dialogue about that. I havent heard anything about it. I was under the impression she left voluntarily but was she fired . It would be interesting online the comments and the dialogue back and forth. You was brusque, that management style, much less. I thought you might have read about it. No i dont. Just happened in the last few days and im trying to write something for our present one i am not standing attempting to enunciate clearly, frantically writing. Im really nervous about asking a question but something important to say to you because you were in a position of power. I love how the harbor institution is mentioned but i am also troubled by their consistently poor on the visa account every year. They did in issue that was mostly women and i talked they are working on it, getting steadily better but it is funny. The conversation ahead with what would make some happy, does it have to is it enough to get better work is it a shifting benchmark. They are working on it and i am working on it and keep promoting my female friends who are great writers, for them to publish but theyre very conscious of it and it has done great work in calling attention to it and i am only one woman but i tried to show up at harpers regularly and urge them to do stuff. Thank you for bringing it up but they are working on it, really. Other questions or comments or inside scoops . Is it too one to have questions . Of a. We can go to the happy, aimless milling about in the fabulous bookstore portion of the evening. If anybody wants me to sign anything that i wrote or colloid like these that wases on will be here and happy to do it. Thank you for coming. [applause] thanks for coming. There are books in front end that back and at the desk. Thank you again. Booktv is on facebook. Like us to interact with booktv guests and viewers, watch videos and get uptodate information on events. Facebook. Com booktv. Lynne cheney examines the president ial tenure of James Madison. Discusses her book with her husband and 4 Vice President dick cheney in california. This is all little under an hour. [applause] [applause] [applause] that was nice. Dick says it is enough to make you want to run for office. Almost, almost. We are delighted, delighted to visit the Nixon Library and museum on a number of occasions and the Nixon Administration during the first term so i am always pleased to come back and visit this part of the world to be reminded of an important time in our history and i was happy to be part of his administration. We are here tonight, i should explain at the outset why we are here together. The fact is i was born in lincoln, nebraska and lynne was born in wyoming. One of was 13 years old about going to the eighth grade my dad moved the family to wyoming, had a choice between montana oil wyoming and picked wyoming and it was a good thing because we grew up together when i first started and she was 16 years old to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary come august. [applause] if his dad had picked montana instead of wyoming i would never have married lynn. She would have married somebody else and as she said the other night, then he would have been Vice President of the United States. [applause] i dont recall that that was one of the jokes. On a free lancer now the hymen changed. We are here tonight to talk specifically about a magnificent book that win has written about James Madison. It has gotten some great reviews and we are on the book circuit so to speak and i have been to the knicks an event here before, sponsored by the Nixon Library when i had other books to write, to publish. And now we wanted to have an opportunity obviously for lynn to present her as. I say it is a superb book about our nations fourth president and the plan is that i will ask her questions and she will respond and at the end of that period of time we will open it up to take questions from the audience as well. Let me begin by asking why madison . What made you decide James Madison needed a biography . I want to say i am grateful to dick for joining me on this book tour and i refer to him as my arm candy. I was interested in madison for a long time. I served on the bicentennial commission for the constitution in 1987 and it was then i first began to understand how magnificent madisons accomplishments were and how little recognized he was in terms of what he had accomplished in his political life. It wasnt until five years ago that i became serious about writing a book and it has been up labor of love and i only hope that you will enjoy the book as much as i enjoy writing it. He was the architect of the constitution, the architect of the bill of rights, he was crucial to the establishment of the first government under the constitution, he was president during the first war under the constitution and he performed if not magnificently in all those jobs, at least very well. At the end of his presidency john adams who was kind of base our figure and not given to making complements easily john adams wrote that James Madisons administration had covered itself in more glory than any of his predecessors which is a great compliment because his predecessors were washington, jefferson and adams himself so i do think he has been a newsappreciate it and it has been really so much fun. I know five years of labor doesnt sound like fun but discovering things, being able to put it in a form that i hope will reach a wide audience and as the book is called, reconsidering James Madisons life. Which was the most important contribution. I dont think these contributions were enormous obviously but if you had to pick just one, what would it be . It would have to be the constitution. I think he was a genius and the reason is he was the kind of genius he had is he was able to break through conventional thinking. When everyone else was thinking one way, madison doesnt necessarily accept it. He would think of other possibilities and he did that in the case of the constitution, in the case of establishing a Great Republic which is what we are. The conventional wisdom was you couldnt have a Great Republic where people voted for representatives for themselves, representative government, that it would be too loose over long extent of land and it could fall apart unless you had monarchical power, a king, a monarch at the center. Madison thought that was not true. He thought that in fact the danger in our republic is that one faction will dominate and of tres everyone else and madisons genius was to see that if you had many factions as there would be in a large republican than no single one was likely to be able to become aggressive. That was the rationale for the constitution that was produced in philadelphia. It was his genius to see through what everyone else believe time and again and it transformed the world by doing it. You talk about his relationship with the other founders George Washington for example. We think sometimes of the founders as sitting around having a polite conversation and dollars from having degraded in mind at all times. Is much more interesting to realize the man as they were which was people who theorem believed in that point of view and were willing to fight to see it succeed. In the beginning madison was washingtons chief lieutenant. When the first government under the constitution began, this will be familiar to any of you in politics, washington had an aide to read his inaugural address and the aid produced a 72 page disaster. So washington wrote to madison and and asked please come to mount vernon and held some madison did and he wrote washingtons inaugural address and did a very good job of it. After washington delivered the address madison who was leader of the congress wrote the congresss response to madison. He wrote the congresss response to the inaugural address and washington thought madison was so good at this kind of thing he asked him madison, to write washingtons reply back to the congress. It is hard to imagine his voice echoing off every wall. Im not sure there has been another time in history when one man has been so influential at the beginning of an administration when madison was in the beginning with washington. Talk about the Constitutional Convention. Obviously there were battles over various provisions in the constitution. We ended up with article i, ii and iii and it took a long time, many hours and days of work to put it all together but can you cite specific compromise, the most important provisions they were arguing about and ultimately were able to resolve . It is will we learn about in history, big states and small states, the big states wanted states beat represented according to their population. Small states wanted then to be represented as states and we all know the compromise. They got representative states in the senate and proportionally in the house. Madison was appalled at that. He thought there should be proportional representation across the board. He had gone into the Constitutional Convention thinking it was a great threat to the republic, he called them the evil states because they had been so irresponsible under the articles of confederation, repressing religious freedom, churning out money. Road island was a special the guilty. It was called brogue island, churning out money and this is what rhode island did, passing laws that made it necessary for merchants to accept that depreciated money for debts that had been incurred, maybe were getting paid off a penny on the dollar. The states were taxing one another, they were conducting their own foreign policy. Some madisons states needed to be controlled so when it turned out the compromise was to have the state representatives not proportionally in the senate, he was very disconsolate, kept a couple days to get around to accepting that. Conceivably made him think they needed a Vice President. That is an eternal question, isnt it . It had to do with the electrical college. Every electorate had two votes. They finally got the Electoral College when they couldnt agree on anything else. The alternate at that point was to let the congress choose the president. Imagine how different the president would have been if the congress was choosing. You wouldnt have data ronald reagan. Nixon i dont think you would have nixon either. You would have had plenty of speakers of the house go on to become president. The Electoral College, everybody gets two votes and again, the big states and small states, small states are worried that the big states will always elect the president , so to assuage their concerns the deal was made that you could only cast one vote, one of those we to vote for someone in your own state. The other had to be cast for somebody from another state which would give the small states to better chance, but then they started worrying, and you have played this kind of game, if you want that one vote for your own guy had to be really important you throw away the second vote, you expanded on jim who doesnt have a chance, to prevent that you are finally getting the answer, they invented the vice presidency. The at the was the person that got the secondhighest number of votes would then become Vice President and that seemed like a pretty good idea but then they started worrying what was he going to do . And it is so interesting to see how this thing builds up. They decided he needed a job and they would make him president of the senate. By the end the Constitutional Convention there with two delegates who were so worried about the Vice President , of the executive branch, being president of the senate, the legislative branch of about dilating separation of powers, two delegates, and randolph of virginia, two delegates and george mason of virginia, specifically cited the vice presidency as reasons they wouldnt sign the constitution. They call it that dangerous office so there you go. During the course of his career, in terms of implementing the constitution would be the best way to describe it. Alexander hamilton became an important player in all of that. Can you talk about what it was that lead to their major disagreement and confrontation . Maybe it is important to understand that he and hamilton were not buddies exactly, but they were friendly colleagues. They wrote the federalist papers together with a little help from john j. The story of the federalist papers is, if you dont mind. Goahead. The story of the federalist papers is so interesting because it was done at such speed and such haste. I was explaining to a college audience, colleges and universities in this area will appreciate that what madison did during one period of time, during 40 days was the equivalent of writing a ten page paper every other day. You could do that. That doesnt seem impossible, but the papers became immortal soul writing, writing philosophy, politics, writing an effort to convince people to support the constitution at breakneck speed, the printer was putting the beginning parts of this and to print before they were finished. So that madison and hamilton respected one another until hamilton became secretary of the treasury and George Washington, began to make his financial plans clear. Madison was troubled from the beginning. Body eventually, particularly when the issue of establishing a National Bank came up. He was deeply concerned. He didnt think that a bank was a bad idea, but at the Constitutional Convention he said it was such a good idea that the Constitutional Convention he had proposed giving the congress the power to grant charters which is what you needed if you want to establish a bank. However the Constitutional Convention had turned that opportunity down. Congress didnt have that power and that was madisons problem. Hamilton was simply running roughshod over the strict number of Powers Congress had been given. There was no power to grant chartering and therefore madison thought you should not establish a bank. He lost the fight, but he went on to win the war against you could say. Reestablished the first opposition Political Party. Parties didnt have any better reputation than than they do now. This is counter intuitive. Was against the conventional wisdom that said parties were divisive, they were noisy. We didnt want them in the republic. Madison said yes we do. A government without opposition is little more than a monarchies though they organized the party in order to change the way, the feet away hamilton was trying to carry the government, to make it so strong that madison thought was something the constitution hadnt contemplated and by founding this Political Party meeting in the founding of that he manage to get jefferson elected president in 1800 and jefferson, like madison, was a small government guy. One of the most important functions when seen in recent years throughout our history is the role of commanderinchief, who is in charge of the military. Madison as you mentioned in the opening was the first president to have to conduct a war under the constitution. And the way the power was vested in the presidency strikes me as a great story but it is not how they started out. The proposal at the Constitutional Convention was just about to go through, was that the congress, among its delegated powers was the power to make war. Madison, his mind was so quick. His intellect instantly grasped what would be the results of various proposals. On the floor of the Constitutional Convention he changed the word make to declare. Congress would have the power to declare war. He did this in part because he had seen what a mess congress made of things when they were in charge of war. He had been a member of the Confederation Congress where there was no executive and the congress would be decided, they would write to washington and then realized there was more trouble in the north and say the washington sent him north and it simply wasnt a way to run a war so madison led to his feet and said congress has the power to declare a war but what that did was make the president commanderinchief once the war had been declared. How did he do as commander in chief . The british marched on washington, burned down the capitol, burned down the white house . Was he a good commanderinchief . He was patient. Like lincoln he had trouble with generals. And the war of 1812 the generals were people who had served in the revolution and they getting a little bit long in the tooth and they werent as brave as they might have been in their reentry years. One general who was supposed to invade canada near detroit over the border became so alarmed at the rumors that turned out to be true that the british had formed a Strong Alliance with the indians and were great warriors that the americans might have to face this, he turned around and not only didnt invade canada but gave the british detroit. So generals as they were with lincoln were a problem. Not so with admirals. The navy started under john adams with six frigates, they had