Like it. [laughter] something you should be shocked. Thank you for writing this wonderful book and thank you all foru coming. Thank you for hosting us. [applause] you are watching a book tv with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Book tv common television for serious readers. Awardwinning journal for the atlantic as a veteran journalist. An i say veteran because he has been reported since he was a student at byu. He is still pretty young. No one perhaps is better suited to write about that sure faith, political sense of ability and a deep sense of right and wrong. We a will hear more about that n a minute. Hes joined in conversation i dont think he is an introduction hes been a friend to all of us for many years we go to him for advice and good humor especially on nonfictionno topics. Before we get started a portion of all of our ticket sales are non for profit books working to get books into the hands of both without regular access. Professionally young people. Since the beginning of last year with distributive or 20000 books across the state and also the Pediatric Clinic in arizona. [applause] [applause] hi. [laughter] well, want to start with a tweet. From donald trump. There have been plenty of reviews of the book. Donald trump doesnt realize its you thats done the writing heres a tweet mitch at romney a total loser that only a mother could love just wrote a book which is much like him boring, horrible, fairly perfect. That is not to move a few books, right . We are thrilled we did things that tweet to mitt romney such a whack job one of the things i wanted to ask about does has something to do with donald trump on the part he is playing in the moment we are in right now. Incredible timing of this book of the same level ofn attention the audit moments. The strange timing for all of this. We wildly interesting. L and we had to sell it to publishers but through at the end of the subject within the space of 10 years he had gone from president ial nominee washes party radically transform all around him. Didnt change that much and that. And rather than quickly capitulates to this new brand of right wing populism like his fellow republicans stood he sortof decided he wasnt going o it. And not being willing to do it made him very isolated those perspective and soulsearching with what had happened. That was hee jumping off point insert one character in particular about that romney even covering mitt romney for some time now. Before he was a pariah in the party when he was a candidate to the characteristics you thought you wanted to explore. I have covered him for more than 10 years before he approached him about writing this book. And as a president ial candidate he was not that interesting. [laughter] high covered his campaign. I covered hundreds of events. He gave the same stump speech word for word four times a day every day for a year. I got to the point i was having dreams about it. I could recite everyry word. He was very cautious, very confident, very disciplined that is what his public persona was. And i remember early in that campaign in 2012 talking to another reporter about how its really difficult to cover mitt romney in an interesting way. The reporter said i dont think that is my theory he does not have a lot going on beneath the surface. I didnt know i said maybe thats true. Internally than he let on. But i think what was so interesting about getting to do this book was that he really became pretty vulnerable with me and opened up. Over the course of two years i interviewed him 45 times. He gave me his journal, his email correspondence with Top RepublicanText Messages i interviewed his family. I interviewed people who had known him throughout his life. It became very clear very quickly to me theres a lot mitt romneyhe has a lot going on. He wrestles with his conscience. He wrestles with the compromises that he has made over the course of his political career. His journals are field with him being really hard on himself. Beating himself up o for mistaks hes made or gaffes hes committed. Y and it pretty early on in the process i realized this was a guy at much more selfaware than most people realize. I think that selfawareness was the characteristic i found most interesting. When you presented romney with your pitch and then the condition, you write in the book he responded to those as if it were a dare. What was that about . Did he see it as a kind of s challenge that i will take th . I did kind of needle him a little bit when i first approachedi him. I was hoping to get a little bit of a rise out of him i did not think i would get nearly what i did i basicallyea said i think u have a very interesting story to tell. Youve seen a lot in politics especially the last few years as a republican senator you talk at lunches and i want to write a biography and make only want to do it if you are ready to be candid. An implicit said that as i wasnt sure he would be. I talked to friends of his wives thinking about doing this hes not going to give you what you need. This is not going to work out. So i presented that to him. I dont know but its almost like he took offense at the idea he would not be fully candid or forthcoming. And i knew i had him. The first few weeks of interviewing him of sitting in church i got a text message i sent something that might be interesting to look at before our next. I looked at it in its hundreds of his personal journal. That i had not asked for. I later found out through his wife and he had not really read them before giving them to me. What is that about by the way not rereading them . Because twits, not job all the quoteur unquote burns people hae been paying attention to in the book appeared in this personal. A lot of them anyway progress a lot of most withering comments he made about his fellow republicans were from those journals break some more than a decade ago. Part of the deal we made he couldnt take things out he couldnt tamper with it. We letli them read it before it was published if you wanted to have a conversation about is willing to do that good faith. For him to give me his journals without reviewing them demonstrate a lot oflo trust whh i certainlypr appreciated the reckless feeling of liberation. When i approached him something had shaken loose and him being in that experience being the senate be evacuated on think for him and fellow republican traders. Nk he had entered this new phase of his life and career in Public Service he didnt care anymore about getting reelected his own political future won his own legacy and he wanted a story that could be put into a book. He said i want this to be something my Great Grandkids can read. I want them to remember this. It was kind of a warning. Fragin democracy and he has this map on the wall of his Senate Office that its called the histo map, and it charts the rise and fall of very the most powerful civilizations throughout Human History. And he had hung it on his wall when he first got to the senate and kind of thought of it as like a curiosity that he kind of thought of it as curiosity that you sometimes show people. After january 66th he sort of became obsessed with it, and he would find himself looking at it hate at night in his office and showing it to o people. And the thing he said to me when he first showed it to me was if you look at the old chart of Human History, there are very few periods where democracies are thriving, right . Almost without exception throughout Human History the most powerful civilizations in the world have been autocracies of some kind, you know . Kings or emperors, rulers, kaisers, whatever. And he came to believe that we are in a much more perilous moment than a lot of us realize. And i r think he saw this book as sort of a warning. Is any of that view of history informed by his faith, his sense of, i dont know, book of more month characters mormon characters, biblical prophets, the ideas, theres a latterday saint notion that joseph smith would talk about the constitution happening by a thread. Was heha informed by any of that in. So i think theres no question that his view of the kind of sacredness of american democracy and the american project is informed by his faith. I mean, i think most people who grow up mormon are kind of taught that, you know, the founding documents of the United States are divinely inspired and americas a promised land, you know, all that stuff is. And so i think that he had a kind of very sincere and sort of sentimental patriotism that these days almost kind of seems quaint. But, you know, he was deeply offended on kind of a visceral level byng seeing members of his party try to overturn a president ial election. Like, there was something about, you know, he was mad about the lies, he was mad about, you know, the cynicism of his colleagues. But i think just on an elemental level, he just couldnt stand seeing sohe much disrespect. One of the first things he told me was a very large portion of my party doesnt really believe in the constitution. And i remember kind of being taken aback by that. This is, like, our second or third interview. And i i asked him to kind of expound on that, and thats when he showed me the path and he said, you know, members of my feater believe inev the parts of the Constitution Party believe in the parts of the the constitution they like, they likeou the Second Amendment and delay believe in that, but they believe in that, but it seems to me theyre willing at least now in this new era to pick and choose which parts of the constitution theyre willing to follow. And for him, thats just very alarming. I want to ask about sort of the nature of the conversations you were having. As a you say, 45 interviews [laughter] riyou describe in the book hes more puckish than his public persona. Some nights he vented, some nights he dished. Youve also a talked about i dont know if this is you dont use this term necessarily in thehe book, but you said you think hes kind of judgmental. So what, i guess what im saying is in the ebb and flow, did you argue . Did he ever yell at you . Did he ever say, dude, what are your motives . Like, what was the give and take like . Yeah. I mean, first of all, i will say that, like, to my pleasant surprise, mitt romney is a pretty good hang, which i dont think people would necessarily know,ec right . [laughter] you know, because i knew right at the beginning, like, oh, this was going to be great material. I wasnt sure what it would be like to happening out with mitt romney for two years, right . Yeah. But luckily for me, hes actually, like, very funny. He has a finelytuned sense of the absurde. In political life. He can tell really entertaining story thes about his colleagues, and, youan know, the indignities ofof running for office. So all of that was fun. Most of our meetings were very friendly. He, you know, often a i got the sense that he just liked the company because he didnt have that many friends in washington. I would like, get to the end of my questions and close my notebook, laptop, and he would be, like, so what are you watching thesese days . [laughter] haveav youu seen ted lasso . Im like, all right, were still going. Lets do this. But there were definitely also contentious conversations, for sure, because the relationship between biographer and subject is pretty interesting and kind of wood. Like of weird. Like, on the one hand you want to do everything you can as a writer to understand where theyre coming from, understand their per speck if u i perspective, and andi really did strive to do that. But then once youre writing the book, you have to kind of insert yourself sometimes as a narrate or to point out where you think he is, you know, fractionalizing or where hes, you know, a little being rationalizing or where hes, you know, a little bit being up consistent. The deal that we had was for him to read the book before it was published. And i remember i sent hem the manuscript, it was earlier this spring, and then i kind of waited for his reaction. And i thought he might if take some time to process p and, you know, next time i saw hem, i we would talk about it. And instead he was live texting me his reaction. Wow. As he read it. [laughter] would which made for a very up nerving weekend. On page 132 be lislely. Literally. It would be a hundred pages in, this is really interesting. This part but i give him a lot of credit because i think i tried to put myself in his shoes. I think reading a biography written by somebody else about your life where youve given so much access to your innear most i would sometimes joke with my wife, actually, held joke that it felt like i know mitt romney better than i know her at this point because, or you know, shes, like, im never giving you my journal. You dont know what i was thinking. But when you have, youve given that level of access to your private thoughts andat feelingso a writer and then you have to read their assessment of your life are, thats got to be reallyd. Hard. I dont know if i could do it. I dontt think if somebody came to me and said i want all your emails and journals and im going to turn it into a book, i think that would be a little deefficient p. I think it speaks to his selfawareness, candor and also to his kind of confidence in himself that he was willing to do that. But i think it was the hard, you know . I write in the book at the end that there were some things he disagreed with. He disagreed with my characterization, he doesnt think thatt i quite captured it. But overall, i think, i mean, youd have to ask him, but i think that he feels good about where it ended up. I think for the most part he feels like i hope that he feels that ive done his story justice. You mention in the book that one thing he said to you was he figured that you would get the mormon thing as a fellow latter day saint. What difference did that make, you being a latterday saint, him being a latterday saint . Did it come up very much . Did he think that you would understand him, be more sympathetic to him . Like, did you get a sense of that . I wondered when he said that in our first interview. And i kind of didnt explore i. I was, like, well see. [laughter] early on, one thing became very clear which is that it helped that we could use a mormon shorthand with each other, right . If while he wasot telling me the stories of his service as a bishop in the belmont warted or his mission or whatever ward, he didnt have to pause to explain, you know, what all this was. He knew that i understood it. Nl [inaudible] in my con detective. Right. So that steppedded helped. But i also found over time that, you know, one way that i wasle able to understand him was not just that we were both more if morning but that we had both grown up mormon in places where there werent many mormons. And he grew up in michigan, i grew up in massachusetts. He said to me once, you know are, the thing about growing up more if monooutside of utah is that you get used to being different in ways that are important to you. And, you know, especially these last seven or eight years of his career, thats kind of been a defining theme of his work, right . Hes become increasingly isolated, increasingly disliked among his, you know, republican colleagues. But its for reasons that he feels are important, and so hes sort of made peace with it. Hes drawn on his experience of being in a hundred, you know, parties in high school where hes the only one not drinking or whatever, that kind of, i think, helped inform him. And i think i understood that the about him because we have that same experience. Doo you think that it sees like in his early experience as hes trying to decide what sort of id following he ideology he wants for himself politically, like, he seems somewhat ambivalent about being a republican early on. Certainly his father, as you say in the book with, planted himself square he in the liberal wing of the Republican Party do you think thats where he wanted to be . If and talk about the fact that he didnt really ever fancy himself a reagan republican, he fancied himself a George Romney republican. Yeah. So i think the part of the reason he didnt identify stockily as a republican strongly as a republican earlier in his e adult life is because his father was sort of, you know, chased out of the party. Not totally, but George Romney was a liberal republican in sort of the last days of the liberal republican wing existing, right . He was a big advocate for civil rights in the 1990s. He marched 1960. He marched with civil rights activists in michigan. When he ran for president , he refused to condemn the race rioters in detroit even though, you know, a lot of his white constituents wanted him to and instead gave a televised address saying we neededst to look at te root causes and the inequality that black americans are sufferingso from. So mitt grew up watching his dad represent this strand of republicanism and then gradually become more and more isolated in his party as Barry Goldwater won the nomination and conservatives took over the party and his own president ial campaign was sort of derailed by a gap that was also, you know, him being attacked by the right for his position on vietnam. And so i think that mitt probably 80s and 990s, he didnt really identify9 with the reagan wing of the party which was, youyo know, a succession secession from Barry Goldwater. But once he got into republican politics, thats kind of the only wing of the party you could be in, right in so while he was governor of massachusetts, he governede as kind of a moderat, probusiness republican. Once he got out of massachusetts andou was running for president nationally, he sort of felt he had no choice but to reinvent his persona as this kind of reaganite conservative. And its the not that he consciously decided im going to adopt a bunch of positions i dont really believe in and, you know, pretend im a totally different person, it just kind of happens, you know . He said there were a couple issues that he very consciously flipped on, abortion was one of them, but for the most part he told me that he would get on these stagesea to speak to conservative voters, and he thought when he first started running for president that he could make his campaign about the things he cared about a, right in im going to talk about fiscal discipline and jobs and, you know, education policy. And what he found was that the people in the crowds didnt want to hear about that stuff. They didnt want to hear a 59 point plan to reduce can the deficit. They wanted to hear about guns and abortion, killing terrorists, and he found himself reacting to what the crowd liked and kind of a new persona, kind of organically formed on that stage. And what i never was able to figure out and i asked him about this was did he ever pause to considerne whether this new persona was more or less true to himself. I think that you he l