Tonight and get you home in time to watch the last word of the evening. [applause] its very important that we end on time to talk about the new book playing with fire theyve had several interesting careers back in the late 1970s and the wrongful death and Police Brutality and the plaintiffs lawyer made into a movie and they told me its actually going to be reissued soon. So if you dont have a copy. Then they got into politics for a time working for senator Daniel Patrick moynihan and as the staff director of the Environmental Public Works Committee and later the finance committee. After that he found his way into tv. Along the way they did some acting on some shows. I mentioned that they won an emmy for his work on the west wing. That is the last thing that he won until this week when he made it into the hall of fame. [applause] luther king and the Democratic Convention in chicago and the nomination fights in both party all against the vietnam war and civil rights movement. Its a watershed event. We started to talk for those of you that are regulars you may have noticed earlier than usual because he does need to get back to the studio for his show so to keep things moving along when they reached the signing he will not be able to provide a personalization that he is looking forward to being here this evening and answering questions. Thanks for your understanding and please join me in welcoming lawrence odonnell. [applause] thank you very much. Standing room only, this is amazing. I cant believe it. Im going to be quick because youre standing back there youre going to get aboard more than these people will. So because we have to be heard way back in the standing room we have a live tv show and a little over three hours and tonight, just tonight, dont judge tonights show. Its going to berat be written n about eight minutes. Its going to be something off the top of my head. The unfortunate thing tonight i wont be compared instantly to the greatness as some of those specials it wont look quite as historically unprepared as it actually is. But i couldnt be luckier to have her there in front of me because obecause that would strh things out to be in the great anxiety of the control rooms involved in the minute i get to talk with rachel every night whewhen shes as good evening te are my favorite minutes a day and they always have been budgeted for one minute. You can see whats going on there. Thats just me and the latenight phone call desperately trying to keep her on the phone. And then she does an goes and io go to the show. I couldnt be luckier to have her. Shes setting new records and cable news this year so she is frequently the number one show in all of cable news and i get to be the number two in msnbc and i believe ive been asking can we change the name of the show and shoves you send it accurately for what it is which is riding the wave with richard odonnell. This was the first one that i was alert for. I remembered zero of the 1964 election and i remember flashes of 1960 because it was a great deal for the Irish Catholic boys in boston one of us was on the way to winning it and its hard to believe this now but in those days we lived in a certain old ghetto culture notioorderto go t couldnt happen. As you know our political history for the decades preceding that and others you couldnt elect a catholic and that was all transcendent and exploded in one night in november and 1960. The world we were looking at in 1968 when i could finally Pay Attention to what this was with the world coming apart in the United States, the vietnam war is raging at president johnson was elected in a landslide which was obviously more important in on the way to an easy overwhelming reelection again and was very likely to be facing someone very good at losing president ial elections. Richard nixon who had the distinct history at the beginning of 1968 of being the very first Vice President in history to lose a president ial campaign. As the years began, it was back in that age when someone said i am a democrat or republican you didnt know is that person a liberal or conservative. Liberal republicans are among the front runners for the nomination at the beginning of the year. George romney and Nelson Rockefeller and there were still plenty of conservative democrats in the senate was filled with conservative Democratic Senators from the south. It was the year when the revisions between the parties that we see now were first walked in the cement and we saw the more poignant scenes in the book with literally became the last liberal standing on the Republican Convention stage in 1968 and is the moment when the mayor of new york was forced at least half against his will to second the nomination to be Vice President of the United States after lindsey himself wanted to get that nomination even to second that nomination that was the last time, a National Republican of significance stood on the Republican Convention stage as a liberal, and john lindsay eventually left the Republican Party not long after 1968. So now we have a world in which when people hear you are a democrat or republican, they think they know everything about you. Its not just that they know you are liberal or conservative, they think they know everything. And 1968 has more drama than chaos and other madness as a president ial campaign than anything we have seen before. And in 2016 it was in fact a perfectly normal standard of president ial campaign with the example of one candidate. But if you look at every other moving parts of this campaign, it was all operating according to the way it always has. And on the democratic side, what we are seeing is a rerun of 1968, which was the liberal insurgency from the left which starts out at about 3 in the polls and challenges the overwhelmingly safe establishment favorite of the Democratic Party in this case Hillary Clinton. Then it becomes a challenge and wins a bunch of states. Thats exactly what we saw happen in 1968 when Gene Mccarthy made it this historic decision without which this would be a very different book. Gene mccarthy made a decision thathe decisionthat changed his. He decided to challenge an incumbent president. We have never seen that before. Bobby kennedy thought about it before mccarthy which is something i didnt know. He actually thought about it and decided not to do it. Then jean did it and won New Hampshire and then bobby decided to get an. I didnt know. It was decades after 1968 when i first learned Gene Mccarthy actually came in second in New Hampshire. But for a High School Kid consuming the news it felt like he did so shockingly well in coming in a close second and that changed everything. Its nixon and the likelihood is johnson would have won that race but as we know the outcome wouldnt have made a difference on which one of them won that race. This isnt just one for the history book. For many sections of the book i dont always identify the accounts. I was sitting on the floor at home and my parents and my older brothers were sitting in the chairs around me as we were watching the convention and watching the rioting in the streets. I was watching that so these accounts are things i saw in my own eyes looking at the Research Material and remembering what i saw and the thing i can never forget from that convention was the moment when the mayor of chicago was running that convention is standing and yelling antisemitic profane slurs at the senator because he stood up to nominate George Mcgovern and said if George Mcgovern were president today, we wouldnt see this gestapo behavior in the streets of chicago and that set off Richard Daley. I can read his lips. I know what those words were he was saying it for anyone that cannot read his lips within an hour the Network Stack julie had with readers on telling you what Richard Daley had said. The Richard Daley moment of the Chicago Convention would have been the most dramatic moment of any convention in our lifetimes. Just that one moment. It is but a moment in a week that was just a stunningly out of control week for americas political system which believes that everything must be controlled. I want to read you a passage or two from this book and yesterday i was in Harvard Square during one of these appearances and i have with me this wonderful guide to basically guides people through the book to her stuff and this is what she does in boston and i asked for advice on how to handle these things and what about meetings from the book and she said with nonfiction you dont really want to do that. I said okay i dont have enough material if i cant read from the book so i violated the rule and reached for the buck. I wanted you to get the feel for people that havent had the chance to get a start with the book. There are some really personal observations and personal experiences that go into living through the 19th Isabel Allenda and life in 1968 and i want to give you a bit of that and give you time for questions as fast as possible. I would like to learn some stuff i might be able to steal and then use on tv. So, 1967 is the year he spends thinking of running for president and deciding against it and everywhere he goes, whenever he gives a speech anywhere all he hears is run, bobby, ron. Undermining the speeches was a force we have never seen before in american politics into something we have never seen since, something shakespearean. When he stepped up to a microphone, no matter how sunny that day or wide smile, it was always framed in the tragedy. The personal and National Tragedy of the assassination of president of the United States on november 221963 his audiences knew his team because they all felt their own version of that pain on that program this day in 1963 that shook the country to its core. In his hometown of boston, it felt as though the world stopped. I was in Elementary School in boston when they got the news that the president had been told. The first catholic president something they never expected to see and now they outlived the 46yearold Irish Catholic boy that made them so proud. The sisters of st. Joseph with the strongest women i knew that this was too much for them to bear. They simply couldnt carry on. They closed school early and sent us home. We had never seen him cry before. We were both crying when they got us in line to march up the sidewalk. Everyone we saw was crying. Every driver stopped at every traffic light, many carrying two bags were crying and briefcases, boston cops were crying, subway cars were filled with people who left work early to go home and cry with their families and watch the kennedy familys ordeal unfold on tv. We watched bobby holding his brothers what does hint at night when she went back still wearing her bloodstained clothing and watched her holding their hand at Arlington National cemetery and nothing could have been in this world to make us forget those images which were only 4yearsold in 1967 and the audience started chanting random bobby run. He had a movie star smile but audiences believe that they were seeing a grieving man smiling through his pain. He was the only politician who smile could make peoples eyes teared up and with tears in their eyes when they looked up at Robert Francis kennedy, they were always seeing John Fitzgerald kennedy and for them, justice demanded that they take the seat behind the desk in the oval office. History demanded it. They never had suc have such an advantage or such a burden. Theres a part of the book that we go in to great detail about the decision david was going through, like hell to decid to e of this and its fascinating was in favor and who was against it. His wife was in favor of it and Jackie Kennedy was in favor of it although jackie when he finally did decide to do it did privately tell someone that she believed that this would end the same way it ended for jack. At the assassination cloud was in bobbys head all the time as he was trying to make this decision and also it was just the tactics of it that had never been done before. This is crazy i cant win and no one wants sharper about it. That may have enabled him to run for president. Bobby knew too much and was a realist first and politician second year as audiences urging him to run for president he knew he was hearing dreamers but it wasnt so much a restoration of the presidency. They want to put their shattered dream back together. He knew what he wanted was impossible and maybe even political suicide running against the incumbent president for the nomination was madness. For the nomination that he owned it was something more than that ms. The most ruthless democrat and republican feared that dream of the kennedy presidency has to gd all the other republican president ial hopefuls. Bobby was almost certain that the challenging johnson was hopeless, but it might be the only way to put pressure on the president to de escalate the vietnam war. The antiwar democrats privately urging him to do it to get him to think about it. It was a rerun of the way that he approached running for the senate three years earlier. At first, he resisted and then he wavered and then resisted again all th of the wild johnsod nixon and the others being needs the help history in his hand. In the nuclear age, all were by implication at least about life and death because the commanderinchief of the power to start world war iii in minutes by launching Nuclear Missiles at the 1968 election was going to be about the life and death of people the new. In the spring of 1968, my cousin graduated from west point before he shipped out to vietnam to. We worried he would be an easy target in vietnam. In the korean war record it fill up their homes with 26 awards and combat veterans including a recordsetting eight silver stars. My oldest brother showed the draft notice which had just arrived in the mail and he was worried. He didnt want to go to vietnam. No one that we knew wanted to go except for johnny. He wanted a career in the military like his father and combat was part of that. The best way to avoid vietnam might be to voluntarily enlist before being drafted because then you might have a better chance of assignments. Getting drafted was the first group to vietnam. Johnny earned a silver star in four months. On september 8, 1968 today that he was killed in action dot the funeral was the first that i had attended. Tragedy has many faces but none quite like a general audience including his sons coffin. It is another day in the life of america in 1966 but the president ial election could end all that if he ran on ending the war in vietnam and ran as the antiwar democrats were assuring him he could. I never heard my brothers and their collegeage friends. Life was a shortterm gain for many as 1968 it was as if they were prisoners who could only begin to think about life on the outside when they were outside. It walked their hopes and dreams. The president ial election could end all that. It was a matter of life and death for all the people we knew and that meant it didnt have to be about ego is could be simply a matter of calculation and it wasnt just about what was good for bobbys future in politics, it was about life and death. What he thought about was his own. He worried about announcing their candidacy was driven more by matt us than logic and maybe getting the second on his way to the presidency would capture the assassins twisted imagination. He was the only potential candidate who had to worry about a copycat assassins doing for another kennedy. So his thinking about running was muddled and slow. He was leaning against running most of the time as he thought about it keeping the manager of the winning president ial campaign to see every detail of what could go wrong with his own. But he couldnt yet see what it was going to be about, life and death. So he held history in his hands for so long as someone that couldnsomeone thatcouldnt seeo be about decided he couldnt wait any longer and he grabbed it out of his hands. Someone that no one expected to see in a moment until he did. And that was the pebble that started coming down the mountain that created this avalanche in american politics. Theres much more to say about this. Much more of you know more than i do and have lived through it and i would love to hear from you on your questions and what you might want to eliminate on this or anything else. If you could make your way to the microphone. The transformation into what he had become. Was and he kind of these ruthless guy in the 1950s and become this liberal icon by the time hes running for president , and the answer is the 1960s. The part about the section of the career is very brief and he despised him every moment so it was a. That they were looking to get into washington and jack was already there and he got out of it in less than six months. What i trace a he wasnt the same person that he was in 1961 and no one in the country is. There were segregationists who were not segregationists in 1968. Bobby kennedy is someone who changed an average amount for someone with their eyes open and period of time. There were people who went through much more dramatic changes and that is something i get into in depth about how the 60s changed everyone. Gene mccarthy and everyone in the senate except for one senator voted for the gulf of tonkin resolution. That was the resolution used to wage the fullfledged war. Gene mccarthy wanted it back a few years later. Gene mccarthy ended up running for president because hed been the hero of the integration of the university of alabama when he was the Deputy Attorney general he was standing in the doorway steamrolling him to integrate the university and then Gene Mccarthy is a member and they say he believe the declaration is outmoded and the president has all the authority he needs to wage the war in vietnam at any moment that he wants to and there is something the congress can say about it and that was the moment, that is the statement that made Gene Mccarthy walk out of the room too angry to speak about it and ask a question and he said to his chief of staff when he got out in the hallway if i have to run for president , i will, to stop what Lyndon Johnson is doing. The resume is much more vivid so whatever moderate he was in the 50s to the liberal democrat and theres all sorts of questions about what kind of opportunism. It was the kind of experience and enlightenment of people were going through in the 1960s. Before the assassination of the summer of 1963 bobby goes to north dakota. To go to north dakota or anything, he went there to address the convention of Indian Tribes that were meeting in north dakota and he delivers a speech to them in north dakota that was a breathtaking piece because if you read it and stood up at the reservation where i was last summer if you read a speech every word would be relevant to what they were doing there that day and he quoted him about his hope for the way that everyone here would be able to live together as one tribe so there is one that clarifies and im sorry that answer was so long. I am intrigued by the decision not to run. Even though he was only 60yearsold, im wondering in your Research Whether you were able to nail down what the plan ultimately was because it has been said he never would have looked through a second term and i dont think that he filed in New Hampshire. He had some surrogate run in his place. No one is going to challenge him so the primary action would be on the republican side. We either use to say that lbj had a resignation all the time. He was kind of a quitter. There were times it was lady bird who was the strength that kept him in. He lived in fear of Bobby Kennedy. It is very rare to hate one another but they each said enough wind an then lived in complete fear. Then bobby jumps in and simply couldnt see how he could successfully campaign against bobby. He was the only one that said if you get into, johnson will get out. He was the most peer peers haven the champion of all time until he sat on the school at the end of the ground and refused to go back to after winning the championship changes to mohammed ali. So hes not even listening, he is just going to quit. [inaudible] the question was can you draw a comparison between the decision not to run for the senate for their reelection this year. Having worked in the senate, there is one decision that i always understand and that is the decision not to run. Its the decision to run that youve got to explain to me. If you are a junior senator once you have a chairmanship, you have a reason to go to work but before you have that, i could spend my time explaining the job. Once you throw in all of this crazy static frustration that survives the lives of the senator, it is not worth what you think it is. Those that were running are the ones that have to explain something to me. I dont get that. I was just thinking i was in graduate school at the university of chicago and 1968 and i was just thinking for me and many of us it is like having a sore tooth. You know that it hurts a lot but you cant stay away from it and i wondered if he would comment some on the violence. I dont know that they got going in the 68 but i was very sympathetic with the demonstrators and it took them long enough to know that it wouldnt be a bloodbath so i wonder what do you see as the effect of violence and protest thabut also turned a lot of peoe off. The commission was convened to study the riots of the convention in chicago and it was a Bipartisan Commission of the people in those days there were always on the commission and if they reach a very clear conclusion they called it a police riot. They said yes the protesters are up there. They were beating people that were sitting in restaurants they were beating people who were very illegally assembled on sidewalks and delegates who were trying to walk back to their hotels. They were completely out of control. Its beyond argument. The violence is something that many of the protesters wanted to see because they wanted the violence to teach a lesson to america about the way that the country was. They perceived it as a police state and believed this kind of imagery would help deliver that message. Most of the people there who were the victims of that didnt think that. Most of them were clean and those who did not want violence mccarthy himself was providing felt guilty and felt that he toured them up to New Hampshire and now they are gettin gettingn portably on the streets of chicago. He opened up the Mccarthy Hotel rooms and told hi assaulted that to basically use and brought them in and walked around himself visiting the metal thatll. The networks were cut from the nomination process to the violence in the streets said he never got that moment on tv. The people that included country all recognized coming through the system they were smelling the tear gas and sweet. The next day he never went to the Convention Hall at the next day he went to grant park for all of the wounded demonstrators and he addressed them as but he called for government of the people in exile. I think we have to go to another question. [inaudible] it looked opportunistic when Bobby Kennedy jumped in and at the same time i have this romanticism about the kennedys and so i was torn about who to cheer for knowing that theres more to it than that. Alec was going around trying to get any democrats to be the candidate to dump johnson. They go to Bobby Kennedy, he would think about it and say no and then theyve got to Gene Mccarthy and he would say no right away so you should ask George Mcgovern. He would say you should ask Gene Mccarthy and this went on for months so he was much more active in what the campaign became than what a band but i d it wasnt a decision that was made immediately upon seeing the return in New Hampshire. I wanted to give your opinion on the current event with judge roy moore. I wonder do you think that he will win if he stays in the race and what is your reaction to what was said in reaction to the situation that the media and post says of the opposition party. If he said that it must be right. [laughter] we will have to take his word for it. Its one of those things that this fastmoving but its a flash poll in alabama tonight after 24 hours of this that shows the two candidates tied so thats a pretty big draw for roy moore. I dont have any predictions for things that are so live news events. I dont know whats going to happen next. I certainly never before have the outcome in alabama. I never thought about it. Heres how much i know about it when i was serving in the senate both of the senators from alabama with democrats, so what do i know. They asked because they cant take it off the ballot you can with murkowski held onto her seat and alaska wil was a rightd so they work and as i discovered in the book, lbj won New Hampshire because as you said they didnt bother. I not think t bigotry to abbe this here. I want to try to get comments from you on the economic g. Between the political divide in 1968 and the political divide today. As a previous speaker i was a graduate student in the 1968 election. A with a lower number and so military policy and Foreign Policy were important to me for personal reasons as well as philosophical reasons and today things are different because we dont have a lottery or draft and yet we do have a divide between a part of the population that is in some sense of vulnerability economic reasons and sort of the rest of the military Service Versus those that are not so vulnerable to that risk. Am i trying to make too much of the importance of the military and Foreign Policy because of americas involvement not only in the part of the electorate but their parents and so forth . Can you comment on what things were like then compared to what they were like now . It is a great question. Every kid in high school is a foreignpolicy expert and those were the days when a High School Student like me could think that he was smarter than the president hepresident of the unis the president of the United States and smarter than the secretary of state and be right. It was an amazing time and its because of the way that it was fought, the order of magnitude we havent seen anything like it before. 1968 along, 16,005 at 89 military funerals this country. My cousin was just one of them, 16,589 in just one year. Iraq the entire 16 years, 4,497. Afghanistan, the entire 16 or 17 years, 2,386 so the total combined for the United States in afghanistan and iraq is less than half. You can only get the numbers in the draft as you were just talking about. Every 18yearold got that card and became a foreignpolicy expert and had an opinion about all this and most of us ha haven opinion about it before that time because everyone was threatened. Your boyfriend was threatened and that meant he was returned. Your brothe brother is pretend t meant you were, your nephew was threatened, your grandson, that meant you were. When men were not immune, mothers, sisters were not immune from this. So every family was threatened by this and it determined the wathatthe way we thought about t just the politics and policy that our lives. I was not intending to do this but i want to read a passage that is relevant. Im going to read the last couple of pages of the book the epilogue but not giving away any of the plot. Its all going to be a surprise and one of the things i get to is the question of what if bobby didnt run or gene didnt run, where they accepted the offer to give him all the delegates and get the nomination for ted kennedy, the secret offer of the secret plan that was alive for almost 24 hours before it collapsed, what if that had happened. You can go on and on with this. I want to read this part because it touches on the question. The biggest of all is what if euGene Mccarthy hadnt run, what if nicolas hadnt provoked him with testimony about the Unlimited Power to wage a war in Southeast Asia without a declaration of the war if euGene Mccarthy hadnt run, Bobby Kennedy wouldnt have run it wouldnt have been assassinated on the night. Election night would have come down to johnson versus knicks in the matter the outcome is the candidate in 1972 and then Gene Mccarthy i did run and made the briefest decision of any that changed the party and the campaign and the movement into an important faction of the party and changed the course of history. The most important thing jay mccarthy did in 68 was saved lives. We have no idea when it would have ended if Gene Mccarthy hadnt made ending the war a president ial Campaign Issue in 1968. It ended after mccarthy ran. If the first president ial candidate didnt run until 1972, with the war has ended seven years later in 1979 . We dont know. They drove them out of the vietnamese army. They responded slowly to protests select years through the movement through win they were not able to achieve peace with honor in vietnam because the congressional support for the war kept dropping and that is a complaint about democracy. The Piece Movement forced them to turn against the war and the administration would have declared an inch of the war in 1975 if the Peace Movement have been forced them to. Would he have been killed in 1976, 77, 78 . How many more would have died . The millions of men and women who were active in the Peace Movement sav saved lives by forg the war to end sooner than if they hadnt taken to the streets and protest something none of them had ever done before for anything. Martin luther king jr. Saved lives by raising his singular voice against the war and Bobby Kennedy by adding his voice when it was a risky choice and the other leaders of the Antiwar Movement saved lives. There are thousands who forced him to get out of the theater april 301975. I received a draft notice in 1972. I had to be part of an army facility in south boston the place was both young men standing in line for their physicals. Some have doctors letters they hoped would disqualify them and others were going to pretend to be mentally ill to get disqualified. They were telling me when to report for duty then before my notice was supposed to arrive, president nixon ended the draft on january 27, 1973. If Gene Mccarthy hadnt run for president in 68, the draft wouldnt have ended in 1973. None of the young men i saw at the Induction Center that day were killed in vietnam because the political pressure of the Antiwar Movement forced nixon to end the draft. Many went on to have children and grandchildren and dont know that they owe their lives to those that stopped the draft and the war. There are thousands of families living in the amount today who wouldnt be there if the war had continued for another year or two or three. The last wor westward of gene my always should be no one is poor to stop the killing in vietnam than senator Gene Mccarthy. If i have to run for president to do it, im going to. Senator euGene Mccarthy august 17th, 1967. [applause] this question is about Gene Mccarthy and his counterpart you pointed out. I was one of those people who went door to door for Gene Mccarthy. Like young people today who gone doortodoor for Bernie Sanders keys also opened up the protest and possibility for the future that for young people we see what happens in virginia as a result of the womens march and would bernie did. So in the same way that you have so much accolade for Gene Mccarthy, my question is why does msnbc and other mainstream news covered the alternative to the establishment point of view and virginia took everybody by surprise. These were all firsttime candidates that were inspired by this new wave. Thats what i hope for when i listen to the news and we love your show that i would lik but o hear the other voice coming in. Its the other voice berney . By would like to hear about the county elections. The Party Establishment as the book shows is always the last moment to show them something new and important is happening. It was driven the Democratic Party in 1968 and its true in the party this last time around and its true in the Democratic Party this last time around no one saw him and trump isnt coming. The establishment of the party is always going to behave that way. They will be behaving that way 20 years from now and be the last to recognize any new and important phenomena. To know exactly where we point the camerafindthe cameras and nk television, that is a a complicated question im just going to leave you with this one note about how much coverage 10 p. M. As on msnbc. As far as i know, we did a reasonable fair amount of sharing the coverage between clinton and Sanders Campaign bus Bernie Sanders has never once accepted an invitation to come onto my show. So if you would like to see him there, i am not a person to ask about that. [applause] i dont know if it is a 10 p. M. Thing . When im his age i wont be doing this at 10 p. M. [laughter] at the same time Hillary Clinton has never accepted the invitation to appear at 10 p. M. Either but that didnt stop twitter from every night during the Democratic Campaign accusing me in equal amounts of being completely pro Bernie Sanders and hateful to the pre clinton or pro Hillary Clinton and hateful to Bernie Sanders. I couldnt cover it in any other way. [laughter] is one more question behind you there. I was wondering in 1968 and throughout the vietnam war the American People in a generation lost faith in the institutions and government and now this generation also has no faith and that was even before trump, so how do people build trust in institutions that want to strip the rights away from transgender people and people of color, people that are not white men that control everything in the government, so how can this book tell us that trust is restored in the institutions and power