President s . Guest quite a few. My taste is about the same as everybody else. Well, maybe not. I will grant you theres been about on him and eisenhower. Again, you do get some wonderful privileges. She was kind enough to invite me the chief of staff another dear friend to come out to gettysburg to get a personal tour of the eisenhower postpresident ial homestead. And it was wonderful. It was one memory after another. Here is where i met khrushchev and the house. We were talking and i actually got close to the plane and 59. My dad was a Master Sergeant in the air force base and i will bl never forget us going out there to look at the plane that had brought Nikita Khrushchev to the united states. He was the most Senior Master on the base. It was wonderful. What a treat. Their grandmother and grandfather and what it was like and see the things in the home but have a personal hunch this is where i used to sit when my grandmother was doing this, that and the other. Host i dont know if you picked up Peter Carlson and the Washington Post the book about the trip. It was a big deal. It was nine or 10yearsold iron and are very well following on television all of us but again theres montgomery and blocking the battlefield with a grandfather and then the fun stuff like heres the barn and the forces, try to catch me or follow me. But again shes a wonderful person but a treat. The importance of William Shakespeare to the culture and politics in your view. Pretty profound. Its more influence on the way we think and talk. In the history of the language its wonderful obviously its a great art but its great history, too. The character and history really matter is that history isnt just a matter of demographic forces. The individuals count and matter. Motivations are complex. I think i am no shakespearean scholar but anybody that tells you they havent been the most influential certainly so to speak around the world in some ways because he has studied so many languages. After congress you decided to go back to teaching. You have to teach a class and get your students one book to read. Its an obnoxious question. Its something on American History i would probably pick stephen ambroses book he used to say im told i think i read someplace he had a three volume mixing and i think two volumes on eisenhower commandeered dday and band of brothers. He wrote one that was not widely known. I actually found a copy of it when i was going to little big horn battlefield. So i bought the book actually at the park a little place you get your trinkets and books and stuff like that and its a fabulous, fabulous book about these two very different warriors with different traditions. If you live on the plains like i do. We work with frank lucas and i was the secretary of state in private hands to get into the National Park system which is now think of this. But he describes perfectly everything from the weather to this vast tableau that shaped the other great plains tribes that were involved but its a great book and here is the guy thats been pulled into the character of crazy horse and he was so good i could figure out a bunch of other books but i picked this one and it wouldnt even necessarily be a history book. But a wonderful first manna from that book on politics is probably better than any history written at the time. Theres wonderful history. But what a tremendous historical novel. Thanks for joining us. Booktv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they are reading this summer. Im reading three books right now. Kind of an eclectic reader ive been reading by erik larson which is a book about the sinking of the lusitania. I finished three felonies feloy at thtodayabout the policymakery are not specific could create legal problems for citizens that were unintended. Its a fascinating book for a policymaker like me to read. Finally im reading a book entitled to finance suc that thy book about the 11 recalcitrant prisoners of war including colonel sam johnson, one of my colleagues in the house about their experiences in vietnam. What drew you to those books . Im a bit of a history buff. So it was things that would be normal and also the authors of the books have a tendency to draw me. They wrote in the garden of beasts said hes been good. Then im a little bit of a libertarian streak in me so i wanted to just make sure when it comes to criminal Justice Reform into getting some Historical Perspective it was hopeful. Green Party President ial candidate jill stein holds a press conference. We will bring you the event is 10 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Tuesday a discussion about river basin management with officials who oversee the river in southeast asia. They take part in an event hosted by the Stimson Center in washington, d. C. That is live at 2 p. M. Eastern on cspan2. Next, erik larson on his book dead wake the Last Crossing of the lusitania. It tells the story of the 1915 sinking of a luxury liner as it sails from new york to liverpo liverpool. Mr. Larson was interviewed at the fitzgerald theater in st. Paul minnesota. [applause] you cant believe how excited people are to see you. I am not kidding. They came for you when no other author could have done this. Tell that to my daughters. [laughter] i want to talk about this idea of why we are so intrigued by the idea and here is my theory. You tell me whether this fits. Is it something about the adventure and the optimism of the voyage polite in with this tragedy that passengers dont know they are ceiling into is it like ththat like the collision e ideas . No. [laughter] i often wondered about that myself because its kind of drew me to the lusitania was the fact that i have this maritime thing as i think we all do in the titanic. I think what happens is having something bad happen to you with no help available. Its the isolation and also the idea of the glamour of the crossing and suddenly the interrupting of the catastrophe. But its also because of my scandinavian roots i should point out in minnesota and south dakota. You had been at scandinavian. [laughter] there are probably 300 erik larsons. [laughter] we are a seafaring people coming to sioux falls. You wrote something about the fitzgerald. It wasnt all that glamorous. Its not Lake Superior and its something that anniversary for something that we observe or talk about every year. That i donbut i dont find t particularly romantic. I find it an amazing event. In the gravely and from what i understand they are terrible places to be. So that is the part of the edmund fitzgerald. You were studying the underwater photos and video of the lusitania. Why . Have i been wrong on every question. Let me elaborate on that a little bit. I did take a look at some of the photography that robert had done. But heres the thing. I didnt want that to color my impression of the research of what the voyage was like. I didnt want it to be on the floor of the ocean just what it is now. I wanted in my mind this great glamorous ship of the glamorous spaces and people walking aboard and so forth. So thats why i feel that way. Its in more than 300 feet of water. I dont want to jump too far ahead but do you know why it is whiny and the position that it is . On the port side im not sure in the end how it sank but i do know when it sank for much of the time it was only 18 minutes. But just before it went under it was so full of water there was no imbalance plunged underneath so whether it wound up i cant remember but how unusual is that . You dont think about the titanic. It was a rather leisurely sinking that there were not enough. Im not making light of the sinking. [laughter] it was a leisurely rate of sinking. There were not enough lifeboats. There were more than enough, there were 22 that you think of but then there wer are also a lf collapsible boats that were stored underneath it that is how they made up the difference. The problem with the lusitania is the net result was almost the same as the titanic because have were unusable because of this list if you can picture this. Once you try to let those go this one into the superstructu superstructure. They were lowered to the rails as the term 8 feet out from the home so if you could imagine getting into one of these, you are already 60 feet above the sea and now youve got to cross this span. I was using them as ladders and so forth. One of my favorite vignettes was able way that takes a running leap and jumps into the lifeboat. So anyway that was the problem with the lusitania and then the fact that it went so fast because of how it is struck. Since you mentioned the titanic, there is a connection with the captain of the lusitania and the titanic. Do i remember that right . Wasnt he being called to court there is a very interesting and the day before the departure captain turner was called to give testimony in a legal proceeding limitation of liability proceeding in new york trying to limit its exposure to the various lawsuits after the sinking and turner was called as an Expert Witness to testify why he was going so fast and turner didnt approve. Captain turner knew that there were risks to this crossing he was about to undertake and a lot of the passengers knew that, too. Im not quite sure that i agree with that. First, what we are talking about here is that i an interesting thing happened in new york. In the newspapers this morning in the shipping news pages which were widely read, the German Embassy had placed an advertisement or actually a notice we will say warning anybody who was traveling on a passenger liner or any kind of ship that when they entered the waters around the United Kingdom in the war zone germany declared back in february the notice was essentially reiterating and disabled on the ship into the waters you saile failed at yourn risk. The ad didnt name the lusitan lusitania, but it was widely interpreted and aimed because at the new york world with these notices appear for the lusitan lusitania. So it was that list. And there are a many people after the ship was late a few hours old which is a wonderful time to find out that captain turner, we knew that he knew about the warning. But i dont think that captain turner was at all fazed by it. He was a sailor of the old school and came up to the great sailing ships. He was the kind of guy when you get on an airplane or i hate to fly panicky so i look for the cues of what is going to happen. The. What would you do about it . [laughter] so, heres the kind of guy if you can picture him he would say yes this is the kind of guy i want. He wasnt fazed by the potential of the submarine attack. I think that he firmly believed his ship was faster and bigger than anything that any submarine could ever tackle. Thats something thats interesting. You describe how few people really understood how dangerous the german submarine was at that point. You note that the author of Sherlock Holmes actually got it. This is one of the fascinating elements. The thing is, see, i agree with you. [laughter] [applause] its going to be good from here on out. [laughter] the thing is whenever you write history the way i like to write it, one very important thing is to try to put yourself in the point of view of the era and one thing that was important to grasp for me was how new the submarine was at that time. There was bia was by the way non world war i and charges until after it was taken, so the submarine was actually brandnew and was not understood by anybody as to whether it would be a viable weapon and a couple guys got it. One before the war wrote this pressing short story about an imaginary european country called new orleans which was meant to be germany. Germany. An imaginary country that had a handful of submarines, and nonetheless managed to bring the British Empire to its knees. And that was his story which ran. He wrote it long before the war but it was published a month before the war. The other guy was jackie fisher. The admiral hierarchy in britain. There was the first lord of the admiralty and that was winston churchill, he was the top dog in the admiralty. Then there was his number two essentially the chief operating officer who was the first sea lord and he got it cut too mac. He understood that there were certain characteristics in the design of the submarine that virtually required used a certain way. Churchill completely dismissed. He didnt accept the idea tha ie submarine would ever be used against civilian shipping. It was too outrageous to contemplates. One of the things you notice what the submarines had when they were at sea. You say that once they captain was free to conduct his control in whatever manner suited him without supervision from above. What did that really translate to, what does that mean . With the translated to frankly was extremely high risk for germany the mistakes would be made. The elephant in the room, america, would climb into the war with guns blazing. What it meant is when youre the captain of the submarine, typically they were young men, late 20s, early 30s. A crew of about 36. Once youve got out of range of german transmitters, you were literally on your own. You could thin could make any du wanted. If you saw a target, you didnt have to call back to headquarters. You just went for it. So the autonomy was both thrilling from these guys but also a huge, huge responsibility. And i wonder how important it is to understand how the captain ocoming holidays to understand that he interpreted that. He took it and ran with it. He was one of the big submarine aces even early in the war. He was a very talented, a very talented hunter of ships using a submarine. However, when i went into this i was thinking i kind of knew that there was going to be this collision course between the submarine and the lusitania because the captain of the ship from the captain of the submarine had kept meticulous warlord detailing everything so i knew all of that and it made an obvious narrative thing to have the lusitania converging. I came across all this interesting information. I wanted him to be a classic villain. I would love a monocle. [laughter] like a scar. I got this guy become a, charis, loved by his crew come and one of his friend friends from a few commanders to defend he couldnt hurt a fly. This was after the war. So, just i opened the book to this room for the cadence. Is this the positioning, this is the report on the positioning. One of the remarkable things about the story when i started getting into reading about it, like i say, i came to the lusitania kind of reluctantly. I had nothing else on my plate. I had this maritime take and i started reading about it and getting more in my first exploratory archival trip and thatruck andthat is what cement. So churchill and a handful of others got together and formed room 40 which was to take advantage of these captured codebooks. They would use them to read wireless messages interception from the german navy. They became very adept at this. One of the most interesting things about the saga is that the submarine sent and received wireless messages. From the very beginning this room 40 new exactly what the submarines orders were. They knew exactly where it was supposed to end up on patrol, and what youre looking at during the first 24 hours that sees the wireless operator sent 14 position reports which the british in room 40 duly intercepted and decoded. They knew exactly where the submarine was for the first 24 hours. Thats the chapter youre looking at. In the book it is two a. M. , the exact lake casing, four a. M. , six a. M. , and then you say the report sees. Where was sees. Where was this information for you to find it . It is in the intercept, in the National Archives of the United Kingdom they have information and they have all the decoded intercepts, theyre all there in their files. Its really tremendous stuff. The thing also about the german submarine is that they were said to be they liked using their wireless and like chatting over the wireless. Apparently, i have to think that part of it might be because they knew that ultimately theyre going to be dealing with this amazing loneliness so it was comforting. But they had no clue that somebody was listening, they had no idea. Not only did they have no idea then, they had no idea through most of the war. The germans were so arrogant to believe that the codes were not going to be broken. How hard was that code to break . Well once you have the codebook. But there are two elements to this is the codebook which is key in that consisted of three letter groups including a three letter group of nantucket which is suggested certain aspirations but when the germans put them in code they use the codebook primarily as the first step and then there further scramble it. So there was a lot of code breaking i did have to go on even though, not cobreaking but breaking but deciphering, there is a difference, so it was relatively easy to break that cipher because of how regimented the german navy was in communications with its ships. I dont want to bore anybody with details of this, but essentially if you signal the same lightship every night at 6 00 p. M. , youre going to eventually catch on that this is the lightship and it 6 00 p. M. And message and you know what it is saying. So through that process there able to become very adept not only at deciphering but back to i had somebody in the audience asked me how you discover the lever of detail of what the lusitania was wearing, flower that somebody wore their pocket or Something Like that, where is where is all that information to be found . I hate to say but all that detail is in the very detail cataloguing personal effects found on the dead afterwards. Who did all of that cataloguing . Guest it was mostly the british navy, people in queenstown, maryland, some other people. Actually put out a confidential book after the sinking which contained every name, everybody, every listed person it affected and the reason he did it and it was because i hope that through all of these unidentified bodies something might trigger someones recollection and say maybe that is and mod. That kind of thing. That is where the all those things came from. Host you are listening to eric larson at the fitzgerald theater, his new book is called dead wake you can follow the thread at the thread and pr on. So lets place these two adversaries, the lusitania on the collision course. The the lusitania has been at sea for six days. The lusitania set out on may may 1. The torpedoing occurred on may 7. And the submarine set out on april 30. So what is happened on the voyage of the lusitania leading up