Removed from a slave, it brought tears to my eyes. Theres a lot of human stories that so many people can relate to in this book. Its about you and me. Its not just about black. Its about white, all of us coming together. If people go to booktv and type in april ryan they will see this big panel that was held, and author panel. What was that . The author panel was a Panel Discussion on race. We have professor paul butler who talks about criminal justice. We enjoy read, and author as well, who wrote the book fractured. We have michael eric dyson, and author himself, various books. I was the moderator and we had a serious discussion, serious civil discussion on issues of race. From authors who have written about it and research. Who are experts in the field. We had a Panel Discussion on the. We have people from all walks of life who actually were in the audience and asked about it, ask questions. It was a grea a great discussion becomes like the beginning of discussion that needs to happen in this nation. Booktv, thank you. I loved booktv and politics and prose. We are going to do this again i believe in february. So i hope booktv will be there, but it is a discussion that is needed. April ryan from the white house and the presidency in black and white. Former secretary of defense William Cohen has written a novel where he explores the possibility of an asteroid hitting earth. Next a booktv he talked about his book, his congressional career and his tenure as defense secretary. You could see the friendly rapport today that we have no now. Good evening. I bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose along with my wifwife lissa muscatine. On behalf of the entire staff, you so much for coming out. A few quick administrative notes. Now would be a good time to turn off your cell phones or anything that might be. We make it to the q a part of the session, we would ask that if you have a question to ask, and you all that i have questions, please make your way to that microphone because we are building out for our Youtube Channel and cspan booktv he is also here and would like to pick up your question on microphone. At the end before you come up to get your books signed, our staff would appreciate it if you would fold up the chairs youre sitting in and leaned them against the shelves or the pillars somewhere. For as long as ive been part of the washington scene, which dates back to the mid1970s when i started reporting for the Washington Post, William Cohen have stood out in the city and on the national stage. Back in the 1970s as a young congressman involved in the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon he became among the first republicans to break party ranks and vote in favor of removal. Them in the 1980s as a member of the Senate Committee investigating the iran contra scandal he was one of only three republicans joined democrats signing a majority report Holding Ronald reagan responsible for wrongful actions. In the 1990s while making plans to retire from elected office and go into business, he was pulled back into Public Service by bill clinton who asked him to be secretary of defense. The first time i think in modern history that a president chose a member of the opposing party to serve in the cabinet. And thats when our paths crossed and overlapped for a bit. I was a pentagon reporter for the Washington Post and covered his tenure running the Defense Department. While there certainly were more than a few times that i wished he and his staff had been somewhat more forthcoming, we journalists are never satisfied, i thought and still think today that he was a very, very fine secretary. On top of the issues, fairminded, even far minded about some things. He showed it was actually possible for a republican to get along well in a democratic administration. And he faced his share of tough challenges. Among them, military actions in iraq and the balkans, the expansion of vedas, a series of Sexual Harassment and assault cases here at home. And efforts to refocus u. S. Forces on postcold war issues i met a shrinking defense budget. After leaving the pentagon 14 years ago, he finally left Government Service and set up the cohen group, a Consulting Firm which has put together quite a team of exmilitary, former diplomatic and other retired government officials, he also has continued to write. In fact, looking back over his numerous works over the past nearly four decades, its possible to get the impression that his main interest has really been in writing and all the rest have simply been to buy time between the books. Just consider the sheer variety. Case produced a couple volumes of poetry, a journal about his first year in the senate, emanuel on cutting through government red tape, an account with george mitchell. George mitchell of the irancontra scandal. And Nonfiction Book on fraud and the elderly. Mmr of race, religion and romance written with his wife janet, and several thrillers. Did i leave any out . No. So my favorites happen to be the novels because they show for one thing that even folks who end up Holding Senior positions in this town have vivid imaginations about all that could go wrong. Come to think of it, being on the inside and into senior positions probably just feeds those imaginations. In his new book, collision, the quickwitted sean falcone shows up again. He was the president special security advisor in bills last novel, link of an eye. Has since become a d. C. Lawyer. And this time stops one gunman early on in the book, pursues another and discovers a joint russian american project involving an asteroid that for more than Just National security. A reviewer called the book quote a good john spongelike quote a former u. S. Senator and defense secretary who clearly understands what hes writing about. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming William Cohen. [applause] i was about to yield the balance of my time to branch. I wish i had written that. You capture just about everything ive done, but i thought it might begin since we have such a nice crowd here today on an incredible weekend, the fourth of july weekend, to say a little bit about how i came to write and why teachers are so important and why id love to coming to bookstores. For me its a cathedral. Its a cathedral knowledge would walk into any bookstore. But i was a young man at one point in my life and i had a goal of playing percussion basketball. And you can see there are certain limitations that have in achieving that goal, but that was it at the time. I saw myself, i was cocaptain of the Basketball Team in a small school, and so i thought i was a pretty big man on a small campus. Thats how i saw myself, as a basketball player. Into one teacher, professor leroy grayson, he said everybody in this room will write a sonnet. And i said, sonnet . Ive never read a poem, let alone write a poem. I said, you understand, professor, im on the team, cocaptain of the team, and were traveling throughout new england the next couple of weeks and it just would have the time to do that. He said you will write a sonnet or you will fail this course. So that i started to shake all of it at that point and i said well men dont write sonnets. I tried every angle i could. He said no, youre going to write it. Eventually i did. I wont bore you with the theme of the i quoted to this day but it was my first sonnet. What it did is it forced me to see myself in a different way. It forced me to open up the lens and look into another world. From that moment on i never stop. It tells you about the influence that a teacher can have and how they can shape your life and make a decision that you otherwise would not have made on your own. Some out of lead you down a path of which you only understand looking backwards. It was funny i used to make fun of this story because i would get in front of, my 50th reunion at bowdoin come in front of a very large crowd, tell the story of what hed given to me as a great which was a seat. I though thought i deserved andt and everybody in the audience thought so, too. And professor grayson was so, he was embarrassed to the extent he wrote me a nice note and said my god, i gave you a c for that . That was worth a a. To which attention but that began my career in writing at the wrote more. Then went on to law school and i became an editor of the on the law review and so i continued writing legal briefs and trying to bring my knowledge of literature into the briefs because writing legal briefs can be fairly dull when youre citing cases, citing dissent in various aspects of things. I tried to make it much more literary. And went off on the way back to maine to practice law i used to write briefs not only for my own firm but also for other attorneys were filing cases on appeals because i loved to write something colorful. It always got the attention of the Supreme Court justices in maine. Thats almost the whole career i was writing poetry and had an agent up in new york, and the agent said one day you should write a novel. And i said, ive always wanted to do that. He said let me know when youre ready. One night in the senate the was night filibuster going on. It was in the second day of the third day of filibuster. It was 3 00 in the morning and i was on the senate floor and there was only one other person on the floor. It was senator jerry hart who i knew only casually. I walked over to him and i said, what are we doing . Everybody is sleeping outside the senate chambers. They had cots set a. So we had to be oncall to enter votes and everybody was sleeping. Senator john warner used to joke that he was married to Elizabeth Taylor and sleeping next to strom thurmond. That was an irony of sorts. So i said to gary hart, i am weary. Im bone tired. Lets go downstairs in the senate under and get some coffee. We did. There was no one there. We ordered a big pot of coffee, and i said, gary, what would you rather be doing if you were not here right now . He said id rather be in iowa and writing a novel. And i said, well hell, im half irish, ive always wanted to go to ireland, ive always wanted to write a novel, so why do we doing to get the . We start laughing like a couple of teenagers at the point. He had an envelope and he said, what to write about . It has to be something we know. So we started making notes. I just come back from a conference in bonn, germany, on terrorism. I was also heading up a subcommittee dealing with the influx of drug money coming in and funding terrorist groups. He had been on the church Committee Investigating the assassination of president kennedy, and we started taking all of these elements on what we are doing and we wrote a story in about a 45 minute time for the he said look, ive got ago. See you later and left the thing with me. So when the hour was right, about eight or so that morning i call the agent and i always wanted me to write a novel. I think i have a novel in mind and i have a friend i would like to write with. He said who is the . I said i can tell you. Youll have to come down to meet with us today. He came down that they. With a restaurant, i think it was called twoandahalf something of on pennsylvania avenue. Pardon . 209 and a half exactly what it was. The agency this bill adler, became a great friend. So bill adler came into i said this is senator hart. We have an idea. Whats the idea . I laid out with id was. He said thats terrific. Thats a great story. I said to his uncle to take it back and ago to try and see if i can get you a publisher. I said theres one hook. You can tell a publisher who we are. Because i dont want to sell a book based on my title. I want to sell a book based upon the quality of the writing so you get to the. He said thats absurd. I cant sell this book without having the authors names in front of the publisher. I said thats the do. He said okay, dont count on a. The next day at 8 25 a. M. I got a phone call, i just sold a novel. We signed a contract as mr. X. And mr. Y. They didnt know who we were until the book was submitted and approved and ready for publishing. So that was my first art in the novel writing. It started with the carey hart. Theres another man that came in the picture, tom allen. No, one is a great different upon. Tom was the editor of the book, and he used a word i first heard in connection with our work. He said this book is really person multitude. And i said well, yeah. We writing about anything thomas just been a great counsel to me over the years. I call them my yoda. Theres nothing he doesnt know and nothing i dont try to share with them. Is that you. He thought fo were up to me as a benefactor he goes out there to Ragged Island every summer. Theres no electricity so we disappears. Long story. Let me come back to watch i write what i write. When is at the pentagon reporters like brad used as a will keep you awake at night . And i would say a nuclear bomb destroying an american city. That keeps me awake at in terms of what was that unleash globally. Of us could not write about when a that the pentagon. When i got out i started thinking about those things that pose a threat to our security, but to our survival. So i decided to write a novel called blink of an eye. And in the blink of an eye there is a bomb that destroys this city of savannah, georgia. You ask me why savannah . Yapped repo book. Theres a reason for that. But in essence what then happens. As soon as that bomb kills tens of thousands of people and those who die from radiation poisoning, what does a person in a tiny few . Hes had to find out who did this, how good theyve done it, why did they do it, and what do we do about in response . All in a period of four, five days max. Thats the challenge we face as we would to see whats going on in the world. We are seeing still the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear weapons. Thats what this whole deal is with iran. This effort to negotiate and agree with iran, is that something that is countering proliferation, or will it increase . We can talk about that in a little bit but just the notion if you think about the horrific damage caused by a nuclear bomb, doesnt have to be a big one, they are all big in terms of the damage they do, but what do you do in response . How do you know who set it off . How can you be sure the people who made the bomb are the ones who set the bomb off . And then what do you do in response . What if you make a mistake and you attack the wrong country . All of those issues are still very much involved everyday, and when brad was talking about building a Missile Defense system, hit to kill is what brads book was about, trying to build something that stops think some coming in because of the horrific consequences to any kind of an attack using Kinetic Energy as such. Now i came to this particular subject matter in terms of asteroids. It sounds okay, this is science fiction. It is science. Theres science in the book and is also fiction in the book. But its not science fiction. Its real. Its real in the sense that the United States, including the Obama Administration, started before but the Obama Administration now has a plan to extract samples from an asteroid and return it to earth for analysis. Other governments have this in mind as well because, in these asteroid from that are rich with marine minerals, palladium, titanium, other valuable minerals. The private sector that says he wouldve an asteroid into a subliterate orbit so that we can put astronauts on the asteroid or robots on the asteroid and mine it for commercial purposes . So you say isnt that kind of like a gold rush i can . You have the outer space treaty regulates, prohibits introduction of weapons in space. Thats the outer space treaty that goes back to the late 60s. But it says nothing about regulating for private activity. So now we know if you read the press in the last couple of years more and more private companies are thinking about if we can get to space, we can movies, bring them closer and then be able to mine them. So i decide to stay what happens if you happen to be moving an asteroid into a subliterate orbit but it gets caught in what we call gravitational keyhole added so that puts it on a collision course with earth this is not something that is farfetched. Most if not all of the astrophysicists are convinced its not a question of if we will ever get it with an asteroid. It is a question of when. So have efforts underway for some time now here in the United States to try to build a defense in which brought me back, brad, too early discussion this evening. What do you do if you have an asteroid on a collision course with earth . Well, you have chuck bolton who is the administrator of nasa. Ive talked to him. Hes a friend. People get onto a couple of top nasa people who deal with near earth asteroids and bodies. What to do . If its far enough out in advance that if we conceded in advance and we can move it. We have the technology. We can figure out a way to move it, just nudge it off its collision after if you give me three weeks, he said, its time to pray. So if you have three weeks, theres not much we can do in terms of hitting it or moving it. Its coming at you pretty fast at that point and i would say look what happened just two years ago over in russia. You had a 56foot asteroid, very small, coming at for about 35,000 miles an hour. And it exploded over a portion of russia and injured 1400 people. We didnt see it coming, had no idea was coming. And even know what it was that quote it. San diegos in a asteroid. We did know that was coming. It was about 90 feet in diameter and again coming at us at about 35or a thousand miles an hour. We have been tracking that, and became relatively close in terms of space distance. It was 47,000 miles i think, but thats not a Long Distance when youre thinking of the possibility of what happens. So ms has been doing has been mandated by congress to start talking, identifying and tracking those opposed the greatest threat to earth in terms of their size. And nasa is doing there. They are, as i recall, about 1400 or so that these are the lights out types of