Marking 15 years of booktv on cspan2. Some programs to watch this weekend on booktv. Throughout the weekend we bring you a few interviews and tours from the tvs recent visit to andy reid, pa. At 4 45 eastern, a look at the smartest kids in the world with amanda ripley. At 11 00 p. M. Dumbing down accords how politics keep the smartest judges off the bench tomorrow at 5 00 eastern, we bring you a collection of programs about the Federal Reserve chairman and at 6 45 from the recent southern festival of books linda barnacle gives a history of the civil war battle. Visit booktv. Org for this weekends television schedule. Dr. James swanson is latest book is a history of the kennedy assassination for young adults is next on booktv. I am here to welcome you to this session of the southern festival of books and introduce you to our author for this evenings session. As you know our writer for this session is James Swanson who is the Edgar Award Winning author of the New York Times bestseller manhunt the 12 a case for lincolns killer, as well as chasing lincolns chemical and the bestselling adaptation of manhunt for young adults. He held a number of government thinktank posts in washington d. C. Including at the u. S. Department of justice. Is two recent books are a book called end of days the assassination of john f. Kennedy and the subject of his presentation this afternoon which is the president has been shot the assassination of john f. Kennedy. James swanson . [applause] thank you very much. To give you fair warning the book that has been published in . Want to leave, this is the Childrens Book which is available today at the festival. My adult book, end of days is coming out in a couple weeks. I dont see many kids here so i thought i would give you advance notice im talking about a Childrens Book today. Whenever i hear of this talk i dont like to see them read from their books or read from a script. If theyre going to do that i could just read the book anyway so why go to the event so i thought i would talk a little bit about how i did this book, al i do my books, why i did these. I am always interested to know the back story. Everything i have done as a writer originates in something i heard about what was exposed to as a child. Even the kennedy assassination. I got into writing because of Abraham Lincoln. I was born on lincolns birthday, the very twelfth in chicago, ill. Lincoln country and realize some of the Southern States like kentucky claim a lincoln affiliation but we are the land of lincoln and we are the lincoln state so we forget the others. From an early age i was exposed to lincoln things, objects, comic books, trinkets from the lincoln home. As a boy i would go visit the lincoln deathbed, Chicago Historical society. At the turn of the century created candy millionaire, purchase the entire contents of the lincoln death room in the Peterson House in washington d. C. Moved them to chicago, the room was recreated and remember as a boy going in the room and pushing buttons, and the voice of a man would come on and married the story of what happened to Abraham Lincoln and april 14th and fifteenth, eighteen sixtyfive and live with 6 or 7 years old going in and pushing that but to listen to the story of what happened to president lincoln. Then a few years later when i was 10 my grandmother gave me what you might think is an odd gift for the little boy, not a baseball bat or myth or ball, she gave me a framed and grading of the derringer pistol that John Wilkes Booth used to kill Abraham Lincoln and framed with an engraving was part of a clipping from the Chicago Tribune from the morning of april 15th, 1865, the morning the president died and i remember reading that story in the headlines and in those days there was no big broad horizontal headline across the newspaper page. The headlines were in the lefthand column and there was a series of them from top to bottom, i remember reading those headlines, president shot, John Wilkes Booth the actor the assassin shoots the president in his box, leads to the stage, cries out and runs out the back door and at that point someone had cut the sentence off in midsentence and i hung that on my bedroom wall. I still have it today in my house and i remember thinking i have to know the rest of the store. Where did and John Wilkes Booth go . Who chased him . Was he ever caught . That was my rosebud object like the sled from citizen kane. I must have read the story hundreds of times as of boy wanting to know what else happened the night of april 14, 1865. Years later when i was working on my book man hunt agreed find, i was able to acquire from my collection and original set of 100 issues from the Chicago Tribune from 1865 that covers not only the end of the war, the assassination, the manhunt, the trial of the conspirators. Years later after i was exposed to that as a boy, and actually had on my hands and entire original issue of the Chicago Tribune from april 15th, 1865, and it is one of my treasured possessions. I was exposed to other stories as a boy too. My grandmother worked for chicago newspapers. The detail end of that era, the suntimes, the suntimes, those reporters hung out at bars, dressed like cops, acted like an, pretended to be them. It was an era of wild storytelling and i remember when i was 6 my grandmother told me this, and she loved telling wild terrifying stories, she said did you know that during the 1893 world fair a madman doctor murdered 100 girls and as all their bodies in acid . I was 6 years old when she told that to me. Years later when my agent said what you want to do next . When i was a boy my grandmother told me as sort of a madman doctor who does all girls in acid. I want to do that and my agent said do you know who eric larsen is . I said yes. He said i happen to know he is in the middle of writing that very book. So i did manhunt instead of writing about dr. Holmes. Another time my grandfather who is a chicago policeman from the 1930s, the al capone gangster to the late 1960s, the entire vietnam war protests and Civil Rights Movement iraqis home and said almost in a stage whisper and i wondered if he wanted me to hear this, dont let jamie read the newspapers. They lived with us. What did i do the moment i was alone . Grab a copy of the Chicago Sun Times to read the newspaper. How many of you remember the name Richard Speck . Almost all of you. Madman murdered a number of student nurses in chicago. I read all about it because my grandfather said dont let him read the newspaper. Since that day i have read seven newspapers a day and four on weekends. I am addicted to newspapers and im sure it is because of my grandfather and grandmother exposing me to these when i was a little boy. My father went south to high school in chicago and the teachers used to point at a desk, he would tell me this, in that desk sat one of the eight nazi sabateurs who landed on american shores by you boat in 1942. Of course he was executed. I told my agent i want to write about the nazi spies who into america. My father told me about it. This was after 9 11 and my agent said i have great news. Theres no eric larsen writing the book about the nazi senators. There are three authors writing the same book about the nazi senators so you can do that. , a childhood was filled with the storytelling from my parents and grandparents. Theres nothing i have ever written that doesnt come out of something i was exposed to as a child because of my lincoln interest i became a fanatical collector of books, objects, memorabilia, artifacts related to Abraham Lincoln and the civil war and almost view myself as fulltime curator of curiosities who happens to an hour and then write a book about what those curiositys inspired me to think about. Over the years i have collected things like a lot of lincolns hair cut from his head in the Peterson House after lincoln died that morning of april 15th and that lot of air is framed with flowers that adorned lincolns coffin at the white house funeral on april 19th. Have a fragment of the dress stained with the president s blood. He dropped to her knees and cradled lincolns head. I spent a lifetime pursuing these objects and they were touched sense to me that get me interested in what i write about. The same is true of the assassination of john kennedy. November 22nd, 1963. Do you remember . I see that many of you are old enough to remember. If you are over 55 or 56 years old you remember exactly where you were and what you doing and how you felt when you heard that news. It was 50 years ago next month but in some anyways it seems like yesterday. I remember i was 4 years old. I dont remember anything about the assassination itself. I remember nothing about november 22nd or saturday november 23rd but i had two playmates across the street, two girls, i remember them to this day, they were 7 and 10 and they tolerated the 4yearold who wanted to play with them. Their father who was very conservative did not want them to watch television. They didnt have he wanted them to go to harvard, of them slammed it and went to my college, university of chicago. My mother said to me on the morning of sunday november 24th get dressed, get out of your pajamas, the girl coming over. Why . Their coming over to watch television. Why are the girls being allowed to watch television . My mother said the president has died. We are going to watch the carriage take his coffin from the white house to the u. S. Capitol where there will be up Memorial Service in honor of the president. I remember that conversation with my mother as though it happened last week, it made such a vivid impression on me and i realize that is why i have written these two books, the president has been shot and an end of days for kids and adults. After i did manhunt i thought about doing books for young people because my boys would tell me they dont find a lot of good history books that they love and we talk so much about these stories, why dont you write books for kids . Their 7, and 9 and give me a couple good tips how to get into this. My 9yearold said readers want blood. And the 7yearold said and knives. There was a lot of that in my lincoln books. I can assure you i love speaking to kids. One of the first time i did was at a school attended by my niece in illinois. Was a writing class and my students prepared writing samples to show me and i would comment on them and discuss how to write, what to do and after that, the children all wrote letters thanking me for coming to the school. I remember a letter from one girl identified as one of the smartest kid in the class and perimeter said thank you so much, i dare say you seemed to enjoy yourself quite a bit. This was from a child. Than she said i felt tidying insight into your personalities by staring into your right eye as you spoke. I asked my knees about this. What is with this girl . Sheet is just weird, dont worry about her. She is not a witch or anything. Since then, when i speak to an audience i am tempted to put a patch over my right eye like those old hathaway shirt ads, the child who looked into my right eye to figure out who i am. A few years later, after that november day, i was going through my mothers closet, she called it her morgue, she was a painter and a lot of resource materials, twice my height, sliding or closets with a number of shells crammed with photographs, newspaper clippings, magazines, souvenirs, she would use these things in her pink things. I remember one day in that closet i discovered her memorabilia from the assassination of president kennedy. The life magazine, the saturday evening post, the old brown newspapers for, and albert when you have to turn the pages so carefully and i didnt fully understand what it was all about. I didnt know who president kennedy was fifth. I didnt know what happened. I knew from my mother tears when she looked at these that something terrible had happened. I learned more as i looked through these documents in these Old Newspaper stories. I am sure it is because of what happened when i was 4 and what i found in my mothers closet so many years ago, the reason i have written these books. A little bit about them. There is so much one could say about november 22nd, 1963. It is especially challenge to talk about it and write about it for young people. Children and adults who dont remember anything about it. Those of us who do it seems like yesterday but it was a challenge to write about something for people who had never experienced it, didnt know who john kennedy was. Children are not talk about john kennedy in Elementary School or high school today. Few kids are taught about the cold war or the vietnam war. History stops and a lot of schools with the civil war and they move forward to the Civil Rights Movement and modern history. I was dealing with kids who dont know much about the subject. I had to figure out what to tell them so i try to tell i experienced it through imagery, maps, drawings and through vivid chronological descriptions of what happened to make it come alive for kids who knew nothing about it. The cuffing was the story is a gigantic. What do you do . I began the way i try to do my other books as though i am writing a novel, but pretend you dont know the outcome. Like writing about the titanic. Everyone knows the ship sank and everybody died. I try to persuade the reader that it didnt have to happen that way. I think i tried to do that in all my writing. It is of being a historian writing about things everyone knows. You all know john kennedy was assassinated on nov. 26 and. What i surprise you with. You know John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln. How could my other books surprise you with that information . I discovered readers seem to like telling the tale. Tell the story as it happened, as though people dont know the ending, week by week, hour by hour, day by day, minute by minute or in the case of bill street in front of the Texas Book Depository second by second and dont tell readers anything a person living at the time wouldnt have known before it happened and the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth. I dont want you to know what is going to happen on day 10. The story of the kennedy assassination when i tell you about Lee Harvey Oswald seven months before president kennedy assassinating an army general with a rifle i dont want you to know hes going to kill president kennedy. Another way is through reports of what happened through the eyes that saw it. There is incredible newspaper and television and radio coverage that came out of the kennedy assassination. It is almost as though shakespeare was providing the lines to these journalists. If you look at the arrival of the kennedys in dallas, who doesnt remember that bright pink suit . You should listen to the reporters saying this is kitty now stepping off air force one, her bright pink suit glows in the sun, the deep dark red roses contrast beautifully with the pink suit. Almost as though they know but they dont know. The reporters talk about secret service protection. We spent many days talking to the secret service men, and this is a splitsecond operation. Nothing is left to chance. That is what they saw on the airport. And reporters said they extend down to the state. The secret service was going to randomly select the states so no one could poison president kennedy unless that person poison dollar 2,000 people who attended at the lunch so they didnt mention the president would drive past 20,000 open windows. To the trademark. They didnt mention of the buildings had been searched. They didnt mention fbi agents had forgotten to mention that a strange man named Lee Harvey Oswald was being interviewed regularly because of his past with the soviet union. Nobody confronted the president and said we absolutely refuse to get off the back of your car and not stand behind you when it is driving. President kennedy was not well protected just like Abraham Lincoln. It wasnt raining, kennedy wanted the top of the car, he often traveled in the car, one was a convertible. Agents try to stand on the back behind him and two agents standing on the back of the car, oswald wouldnt have much of an angle, rifle fire at the president. He didnt want that. You wanted to show himself to the people. I found photographs that would shock you to see how close people were allowed to get to the car of the motorcade. Anyone could have jumped on it. People got so close someone could have plunged forward and stabbed him or jackie in the back seat. That is how close people got to the president that day. None of it had to happen that way. If it was raining and the talk was on the car, if the agents the on the back of a car, if a friend of oswalds wife hadnt by chance found a job at the Texas School Book depository six weeks before the president came to dallas, if oswald had succeeded in murdering general walker in texas seven month earlier maybe that would have satisfied the first for blood. If his wife had hidden the rifle from him so he couldnt find it that morning he took it to the office. So many things could have happened a different way. President kennedy himself believed ultimately nothing could protect him in the end from an assassin and he said something very peer e. Just a few hours before he was shot, he was still in fort worth, he had gotten a been morning, went outside and spoke to a crowd in the rain. By the way that crowd was right up against him. There were open windows all around in front of the hotel texas in fort worth. Went inside and spoke to reporters. He sees the dallas morning as a fullpage ad, is it looks like a friendly greeting, welcome, mr. President. Was a vicious add that after a series of part important questions, why are you a communist, la why are you with americas enemies, why is your brother helping communist skill are soldiers in vietnam.