What happened with the eruption is very stable area they were trying to protect that was devastating so they had to change their strategy because the area that they wanted. What they decided to do instead, scientists at that point had a sort of experiment they worked with the association and groups that were interested in setting aside this area for the studies and that did lead the creation e creation of the National Volcanic area today so that has been protected. When you visit the monument today you can still see that area has been satisfied. Its true that there are still major threats in that area. There is a company that wants to mine on the river actually and they are allowed to do so. There are people still fighting these battles. They use it as a tree farm essentially. [inaudible] this is a question about the process of how the land comes back from this kind of devastation. What they found out is that the cost is much more random than you would think. It depends on the time of year and what animals having to be around. Then they start to form a little area and it becomes an area of yours can go as well. One interesting feature of it is the area around Mount Saint Helens now is a bayou daters area if you just let the national processes occur that are entered into those areas as they started coming back. When you go to Mount Saint Helens, its incredibly devastating area and get its returning quickly. It wont for another couple years unless the full keynote erupts again. Its a wonderful place to visit and i would recommend everybody take a look at it. Would we be worried [inaudible] its maybe not a bad idea to check on things but the thing about it is they do issue warnings. Mount saint helens was active for two months before. [inaudible] two more questions. [inaudible] i would have assumed other than the National Park they are defined but they do exist for instance if you ever go to Mount Saint Helens you will come across. A severe instrumental helping set aside the National Volcanic monument. Its amazing there isnt more growth but they are so valuable that they have this amusement. One last question. Its astonishing [inaudible] is this unprecedented [inaudible] the fact of the matter is it is unusual in the United States this kind of eruption devastates the landscape in that area and is actually they see this all over the world you can go to other areas that look similar and further more Mount Saint Helens has done this in the past and its going to do it in the future. Its just a matter of time until they erupt. Thanks, everybody. [applause] [inaudible] if you could do us a favor and fill up your chairs. [applause] our signature programs are in depth a live look at work with questions from the viewers with phone, email and social media. It airs the first sunday at noon eastern. After words is a conversation between the author of a newly released on action book and the interviewer who is a journalist, public policymaker or legislator familiar and with a opposing viewpoint. Every saturday at 10 p. M. Eastern and we will take you across the country visiting booe constables, author events and parties where authors talk about the latest books. Tv is the only devoted to nonfiction books. Television for serious readers. Failed at the very families i dont know many people who want to humiliate themselves standing on the line waiting for their welfare check. A lot of those people are simply people who have not yet discovered a way out of their misery. Its concerned about their wellbeing and concerned if not more so we answer to the great social challenge it will never be the ending of cycle welfare. It will be the work. Today we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it is meant to be. Monday night on cspan now a look at the presidency of the editor Jacob Weisberg spoke at politics and prose bookstore in washington as part of the times books the american president s series. Politics and prose with my wife, just a few quick administrative notes and turn off your cell phones and anything that might make a noise during tight presentation. When we get to the qanda part of the session. Its especially important if you have a question you make your way to the microphone so that the question gets heard on the tape and in the rest of the room. At the end before you come up to have your book signed, the staff would appreciate if you would fold up the chairs that you are seated in and leaned them against something. Welcome jacob. He spoke here about eight years ago for his book the bush tragedy about the administration of george w. Bush. And he credits with helping to push the buck to the bestseller status. We will see what we can do for the new book about Ronald Reagan called appropriately Ronald Reagan. This book is part of the american president ial series of concise biographies written by some quite accomplished authors and published by times book. Until nine years ago if he edited the series and the point of the project was to produce volumes that were compact enough for the busy reader, lucid enough for the student, authoritative enough for the scholar. His work certainly fits that mold. Hes managed in a 154 pages of text not only to capture the extraordinary life but also to weigh in on several issues of particular significance among them the role that he played in ending the cold war and the seemingly impenetrablthusseeminf Ronald Reagans mind. Jake brought to the task a long career in journalism that includes newsweek and the new republic, pieces for the magazine, the Financial Times and vanity fair and editor and now chair man of the group. Now its true the political leanings towards the liberal and conservative, but that didnt keep him from approaching the subject with an open mind and writing it in an admirable fair portrait of a complex political figure. He calls him the secondmost important presidensecond mostimh century after fdr and shows that there was much more than the usual stereotypes promoted by both democrats. Please welcome jacob weissmann. [applause] thank you for the kind introduction. I love this not only because it helped my last book back on thee best sellers list but theyve done an amazing job with it. Its one of the best independent bookstores in the country. You are lucky to have it here and im lucky to be speaking here tonight. This book is a short book i consider that a virtue of the biographies are often considered as long as possible. I had to take the opposite approach. This is a distillation to figure out what is essential in the story but also to take on some of these myths. I think that its a myth that he was always a man of principle and didnt bend or negotiate. He was more of a pragmatist and improvisers and people if he were to hear the version of him represented in t and say the republican president ial made the reality very different. And i thought i would talk tonight a little bit about some of the things that i thought were interesting but i learned doing this book and parts of the thats maybe people didnt pay quite as much attention that are interesting and important. The first thing i want to talk about a little bit is his childhood. He wrote about his childhood the first place in any detail and autobiography in 1964 a book called where is the rest of me that he wrote when he was moving from his career in hollywood to the governor of california. He wanted to explain why he moved from the left to the right and he in the process told his life story and he talks about growing up in the small towns in downstate and western illinois and he paints this idea with picture. He calls it a tom sawyer idol. He didnt necessarily get the side of huck finn but he described being out in the woods in this beautiful prairie setting and the river freeze over in the winter and to put on ice skates and you can hold your coat up and the wind would carry you down. He describes a smalltown community and he loved everything about it. We didnt have a lot of money but we had a warm family life. My mother would make this delicious thing called oatmeal meat which is basically oatmeal and meat. [laughter] anyway, a happy childhood. Then you hear about his brother recounting the same event. He says dad was a terrible alcoholic. By the time Ronald Reagan was 10yearsold we lived in different houses. They went to chicago at one point where his dad got a job and got arrested for public drunkenness and they had to leave chicago. They were kind of being driven from pillar to post because of his fathers alcoholism. Oatmeal meat was a saying that i never want to taste again. Its something you eat if you cant afford everything else, oatmeal and eat and maybe put some salt, it keeps you barely alive. They would go to the church and state you have any liver, it wasnt something considered a great food to eat them. If you have any left for the cat they would take that home and make dinner out of it. So a different perspective on how they grew up, he told these anecdotes again and again and again. One of his favorite stories between sure you all heard is about the parents who take their sons to the psychiatrist because the on is such an optimist and the other is such a pessimist. The psychiatrist takes the optimistic, the pessimistic son into a room filled with toys and he says its going to break anyway. And hed take the optimistic son into a room filled and the kid gets out a shovel and start digging. One was an optimist and the other was a pessimist. The other is just congenital. Its the view of the world and that is true to some extent. By nature he was an optimist and he had to figure out how to preserve that optimism. His family left town and never ended up splitting up they got back together. But this was a tough poor childhood. They didnt have enough to keep body and soul together. But i think ronal Ronald Reagan, and this is a little bit of a psychological theory that explains some of his behavior, but to be on optimist, having this kind of life he learned to tune things out and do not see e things that were unpleasant to him that made it hard to maintain that he was having a happy childhood, not to hear certain things. He didnt have a lot of friends because he was being dragged from place to place. He made that thats a positive. He loved being alone. But this thing about not hearing things he didnt want to hear and not seeing things he didnt want to see but also physiological. When he was 13yearsold, he loved playing football. He wanted to play baseball but basically he couldnt see the ball. He tried on his mothers glasses and said its all clear now. So he was in his fall before his childhood and a maverick he hated wearing his glasses. People always said hes a hollywood actor, hes wearing his glasses. No, he just kind of preferred things a little blurry. And likewise with his hearing when he was on some of the first movies he made in hollywood, when he got there in the late 1930s were the movies he played his hero but fbi agent breaks up smuggling rings and counterfeiters and one of them somebody fired a gun next to his ear and left him deaf in one ear. I dont know if his hearing was that good before that. All his problems got worse over time to be at his eyesight got worse, but i also think that this was really functional behavior. Through his life when there were things he chose not to deal with because they were unhappy or unpleasant or involved conflict or in politics involved contradictions that he didnt want to deal with, he had this way of tuning it out and letting it be someone elses problem, letting it be someone elses issue. You would see this with family life, his daughter patti had a very difficult relationship with her mother. Ronald reagan just didnt want to deal with that. He wouldve tuned out and it wasnt that different from what happened in 1981 when David Stockman comes to him and says you can have the defense buildup and the tax cuts or you can get rid of the deficit but you cant do all three because the numbers dont add up. And he describes this frustration not getting Ronald Reagan to be able to understand. I dont think he didnt understand it but he didnt have a solution to it and the path of least resistance was to allow it to grow and to not fully engage in the problems. He learned for his political career that tuning it out was functional behavior and an effective political technique for him. When people would see the way he would distance himself and not engage in t and tune out they wd think hes clueless, hes out of it. But at some point, the alzheimers kicks in. Theres been an interesting debate since he first acknowledged he had it several years after leaving the white house when he wrote this kind of moving letter about when it started to happen. There is a fight going on right now about bill oreilly and george will about it. Theyve labeled Ronald Reagan by saying that it was affecting him earlier in his presidency. In fact i looked at the books he was interested in and he doesnt say what he accuses of him saying which sort of kick starts his alzheimers. It has a big effect on how much everybody said it did but he was dressed slower hearing and the recognition but i think that suggests that alzheimers really started to affect him in 1986 around the time of the contract went he was unable to remember what happened. I think by that point it was actual. It was a question of what did he know and when did he know it became a sort of conundrum because he didnt know what he knew at that point. And with alzheimer its still a relatively early stage. He had good days and bad days and days when you could see him and think he is really out of it and he would be the same person he was before and it wasnt affecting him at all. I find almost a poetry in the ip sort of drifted away into this fogginess that he created himself. Another aspect of the career that his understudy does the period in the 1950s when he moved from the left or right. To helhow grew up in, reagan revered fdr even after he moved to the right and he was a liberal democrat. Liberal anticommunist. He campaigned for truman and voted for truman in 1952. In 1954, he would still come he asked what his views were and he was a liberal democrat. Eight years later come he is so conservative that General Electric said we cant have this guy around. Hes embarrassing us. And he has adopted this view that liberalism was a shortstop and there was a continuum between democratic and communism and we were sliding down that slippery slope. Part of it came out of the road to serfdom but what happened in those eight years that is a huge gap from the goldwater conservative and its almost a blank period in his life because everything before that is a hollywood career which is incredible and welldocumented in the way that a hollywood stars life is documented. Hes covered as a celebrity and the pictures are everywhere. Everything he wrote was in celebrity magazines. Once he went into politics everything is documented. But he did during the years as he went to work for genital electric. He was the host of the theater which was a Weekly Television show where they would have one week of drama and comedy and one of the Television Shows that got famous film actors to appear on television and he hosted it and introduced it and some days he acted in it. He also was a kind of traveling spokesman for General Electric. As a huge company to get factories all over the country making different kind of appliances, giant turbines. A Ronald Reagan would go around to all of the factories and facilities and speak to all the workers and he was there partly as a celebrity but also he was kind of representing ge management and view of the world and when you start to look at what the view of the world was at that point, its an amazing match for what he ended up thinking by the latter part of the period so very opposed to the government regulation and why is the government interfering in our business, very opposed to the taxation and higher taxes. What is the government doing to support the Business Climate and he starts using this term talking about the climate ahead of the Public Affairs that claimed the phrase Business Climate which now everybody uses all the time. His view of the world was this corporate view that was specifically ge and they wanted to propounded to the workers. I dont think that he took this on cynically or he thought that he was being a propagandist for ge. I think part of the reading he was getting was coming for General Electric he was reading the literature from the movement at that time he was a charter subscriber to william f. Buckley and national review. He read Whittaker Chambers witness which was an incredibly influential book on the right. And i think that these books having all this connection influenced him and he sort of has the view that government can do no good and business can do no ill. It was a blind spot you could say he was sort of incapable for believing the government can be effective outside of National Defense and a few other functions. He never thinks the business does anything wrong. That isnt part of his vocabulary to think the business could be abusive or coercive or monopolistic. Monopolistic. He is always defending the prerogatives of this big business. It is really hard to tap that out. I went to the library and the file on this as like 30 pages in it. There is not a single surviving copy of the speech were recording that anybody has found that many of these hundreds if not thousands of jews he gave on the factory floors and ge facilities. There are some correspondence and bits and pieces but its almost like detective work to put together this gap in the career that is central to everything but his view forms the core of the modern conservative movement and its this question of where it all came from and ends up being pretty important. Maybe as the last bit and then we can open up for questions. Talk about the role in the end and the collapse of communism which is contest and interesting ground when i went to the Reagan Library the best thing i did was after id been there a few days they said they dont have that many visitors they ar