Transcripts For CSPAN2 Eric Lichtblau Return To The Reich 20240713

Return to the reich, a biography of freddy meyern whose life tels incredible story of world war ii heroism area based on research and interviews with meyer himself whom the author was able to meet only once before his death at the age of 94, returned to the right is an eyeopening unforgettable narrative of world war ii heroism and this is one credit will story that i am very excited to hear more about. Eric lichtblau a twotime Pulitzer Prize winning journalist is the best starring author of the nazis next door and first law, the remaking of american justice. He was a washington reporter for the New York Times for 15 years while also writing for the Los Angeles Times the new york yorker, time and other publications. He has been a frequent guest on npr, msnbc, cspan who we have here tonight and other networks as well as the speaker at many universities and institutions. He lives outside washington dc. So, without further ado lets give it up for eric. Thank you so much. [applause] thank you very much for having me at your beautiful new facility. Its wonderful to be surrounded by so many books at a time when we need more people reading. Many of you have never heard of freddy mayer. I myself have never heard of him until just a few h years ago and it was only by chance that i came across his remarkable life story. I was having coffee with source from my last book on the nazis got into america after the war with a man named Eli Rosenbaum who investigated war criminals for many, many years at the Justice Department and i remember as i went into meet eli that morning i read an obituary, short story about a man in europe who had just died and the 90s after saving countless jews from certain death, a inschindlers list type of character but without any of the renowned or International Credit but i remember saying to eli as we sat over coffee and bringing up the obituary how is it that we have never heard of so many of the people who did such brave and heroic things during the worst genocide in human history, during world war ii . I had written a book on the subject but had never heard of this man. I was affairs to admit that to eli. He did not have an immediate answer but tell me someone who is still alive today, before they passed away, before i read their name in an obituary, and wish i could meet and he had an immediate answer to that. He said theres a man named fred mayer and a man not far from washingtons he said he gave mea short synopsis of his life story and a German Jewish refugee who fled germany with his family as a teenager just before kristallnacht in 1938 and who almost immediately joined in the u. S. Military in a sledge lean spy outfits called oss. He led an Amazing Mission parachuting back into austria into the region near innsbruck and collecting vital intelligencenn of the nazis at e end of the war that helped to bring about bloodless surrender of one of the nazis lastof battlegrounds in innsbruck. That had my interest peaked and i went out to see freddy mayer and West Virginia and all by himself and out in agi small cottage in the woods, 94 years old, he was still in Remarkable Health and w both physically and mentally. You see a picture i took of him here when i visited with him and he was still driving a car and in fact he drove meals on wheels for the younger people and he had a girlfriend in his 70s, much younger woman, and shoppe shopped chopped wood, shoveled his own driveway and not only physically but had this mental acumen as we talked about his childhood growing up in germany and the Espionage Mission himself. He could tick off the names and dates from 70 years earlier during the war of critical events during the Espionage Mission of tiny towns in austria where he had hidden out o as a y during this time there and i had never heard of these places and he would take them off without seeing a beat and he gladly recounted for me this incredible time in his life spanning a couple of years as a would be spy. In fact, he trained with oss right up the road from where i lived in bethesda that was training changed into a Training Facility fromm a pga Golf Tournament posh country club at the military blew the place away with bazookas and hand grenades and Training Missions for about two years during the war to train people like freddy. He went through his whole history and i remember telling him how amazed i was that for two months in innsbruck he could have lived under cover ado posing as a nazi officer and dad but he gently corrected me and said i was not a nazi officer the whole time and i will not try to do his actions fully. I cant do it justice but he said after about six weeks he said that he gave up his nazi officer disguise and became a french pow electrician working inside a german nazi factory and told me how he did not even have to change his name from frederick mayor and became and he told me with his big bravad bravado,. [speaking in native tongue] and i said how the words rolled off his tongue and he laughed as he said that but he showed me and told me how the nazis had captured him and tortured him brutally for days on end and strung him up from the ceiling on two beams while pouring water down his mouth and his ears and something he did not know later that it was called waterboarding and whipped him till his back was raw, beat him until a fault until he was on the verge of death and showed this in a room or and showing around house to the chin that knocked six of his teeth out and later looked at the medical reports that verified all of this. It was a memorable afternoon to say the least. I told freddy i wanted to write about his story and i did not think enough people knew about this but he was ambivalent. He said there have been things written over the years in a couple of books on oss missions, including his and there been documentaries some years earlier and he was not sure what is the point and whats the big deal was basically what he was saying and i said its a very big deal but theres a generation of people who dont know about the sacrifices the people like you made that and refugees like you made. I thought this was a story that really needed to be told. It showed not only this untold chapter most people knew nothing about and world war ii but had modern lessons going up about heroism and hatred and about the contributions for the people like fred mayer, jews and non jews alike made to america, a lesson that resonates today, perhaps more than ever during these fraught times. So, we agreed to talk about it later and i would come back out and visit him soon and two months later freddy died. It was a bit of a shock to me and i did end up writing about him far more quickly than i thought for the New York Times where i was working as a reporter then and worked and wrote his obituary for the New York Times in t16. Frederick mayor, do who spied on maxis after after freeing germany, dies at 94. I knew immediately that writing 700, 800 words for an obituary, the type i wrote that morning, that when eli first mentioned his name did not do justice and i thought that this really has the makings of a much fuller treatment in a book and eventually i did decide to write a book and i took several trips to austria where the mission to place and went through thousands of pages of records in the National Archives and i stopped in washington and Silver Spring where were there were reports not only on the mission itself but the beating of a freddy by his nazi interiors and the gestapo men who carried out these beatings and i looked at and photographs and talk to survivorsnd and one survivor frm the mission itself who, believe it or not, is 96 years old, the pilot who flew the plane and still lives in virginia and at 96 still flying a plane. He had these Amazing Stories about flyingnd the mission and dropping fred and his two compatriots onto a glacier, 13000 feet high, in innsbruck in tyrol in the austrian alps after three attempts and they were barely able to make it but finally they were able to put them in a position to parachute down but i also knew i did not want this book to be simply a Espionage Mission, or jason bourne, what have you. I wanted it to be about immigrant experience and that involves not only fred but his second in charge on the left ear you see hans [inaudible] and his twin brother who came to the United States right around the same time and also to brooklyn as did a freddy in 1939. They were fleeing the netherlands and became very different path than did freddy and i got to that in a minute but i wanted this to be about the experience m of someone you see here in the kid at age 11 so let me read to you the prologue of the book if you will which is set in february 1945 and airborne over the australian alps, february 25, 1945. The snowcapped alpine mountains look deceptively quiet, even peaceful, as freddy mayor crouched to the back of a b24 gaze down at the majestic peaks whizzing by in the frigid night air. Close your eyes and you can almost forget there was a brutal war being waged on the ground, 10000 feet below. S peering through the narrow hole on the floor of the bombay he waited for the final signal from the cockpit. Seven years earlier when freddy said nazi germany as a teenager return trip to the hellfire adolf hitler had made of europe but it seemed unthinkable. Here he was now at the age of 23, a parachute on his back and lflky bags strapped to his leg with the pistol and ammunition and supplies inside it preparing to dive back into the nazi stronghold in austria and doing it brought the americans know less on a new probable spy mission into boarding hitlers last stand in the alps. This was a life on a tight robe adventure that the barrel chested refugee head been craving for months. This fits him against man he once called countryman and somewhere below him the rugged mountain terrain were not the soldiers and anti aircraft designed to shoot down planes just like this one. The chances of success for the 23 man spy man team where one in 100 and that was good enough for freddy. Anything to defeat the fascistsd he said but he waited so long for this chance and he was desperate to make the jump. The mission had already been scuttled twice for the last five days because of bad weather. Less than half an hour earlier the flight creww had almost been forced to turn back yet again for italy. Freddy was determined that this was the night, the moonlit sky that separated him from the nasis on the ground below now would be calm and inviting, gorgeous he thought to himself and he felt tranquility wash over him. The cockpit relayed the signal, ready, ready, ready, go. Seated at the edge of the whole freddy pushed away and jumped. Now, fred and his family almost did not make it out of germany. Not just because of the discriminatory policies in the United States and in britain they kept out hundreds of thousands, even millions of refugees who ultimately perished in the holocaust but also because of the experience of his own father. Heinrich mayor who was a world war i hero as was and many other jews in germany who fought for the kaiser and earned an ir cross for his efforts in france during world war i. Heinrich perhaps naively and perhaps not thought that even while this nazi vice grip was tightening around his family after the rise of hitler in 1933 and his family would be okay. There are hard workers and their business would survive and his family was basically untouchable and so he refused to leave. Awrite about that at length in the book. I will read a passage from that but other people were fleeing for his friends, playmates were aing into hiding and fleeing to switzerland and other parts of europe because they feared the worst from hitler in the mid 1930s but heinrich remained resolute. No matter what your coney and policies the not season forests would not be run out of his homeland. Is freddy was expelled from dean a jew. Not when they [inaudible] not when the nuremberg laws planned jews from mixing with german blood and not when all his employees and families had to stop working for him because he was aeo jew. When it became almost impossible for him to buy Raw Materials like lead and t copper for his business and not when he and freddy dismayed watched the footage of hitler presiding over the 1930 olympics after banning non aryans from joining squad. Not even when word began to spread that the nasis were rounding up communists, homosexuals and other undesirables in the jews might be next. Not even then heinrich stayed firm but nothing bad will happen to us he kept repeating to his son as a matter of faith. You seea freddy here at about ae 11 with a belt around his waist and that is not just any belt. Bat was a military belt that his father had worn during the war and freddy used to prance around the house wearing it dreaming about fighting for the germans himself because he thought of himself first as a german and then as a jew growing up as a kid and its easy to forget that the golden time that the jews and other minorities went through beginning in the early 1900s this was a time when jews were at the top of their fields and business and in literature and in a theater and in science. Riyoung physicist named Albert Einstein won a nobel prize ten years before the rise of hitler and that all came crashing down. His father who built the hardware business that his own father had built and they belong to a synagogue that his father and this was a time when they thought it was growing not being taken away and it was so hard to give that up and they almost didnt make it out because the window of opportunity for visas should be blacked in with so narrow and i mentioned the secondincommand on the mission was on cons on the left and he got [inaudible] he got to the netherlands almost the same time as freddy but they had a different experience than freddy. Beginning with the hitlers assumption of power in 1933 he feared the worst for all of europe. His father leo was warning people when this was still germanys problem about the rise of fascism and political campaigns against Nazi Alliance and canada and in 1937 he began looking at visas for members of his family and cannot afford for the mall to get out and cannot get visas for them all to get out but he sent his two twin sons, again hans on the left and luke on the right to america, basically to escaped hitler and to escape the [inaudible] his friends and family members thought he wasas crazy and said this is not our problem and this is germanys problem and you will send your boys away to america with cowboys and indians and they saw this as a rash step. And they sought as an overreaction to a political problem that was still hundreds of miles away but obviously leo, in hindsight was quite present. He would write these letters which the family shared with me long typewritten letters which were both passionate and dutiful in the telling of mundane daily events at work but also the political mood of the day before and after thehe nasis invaded te netherlands. He would talk about Neville Chamberlain in england who thought was way too much of a pacifist and he would talk about hitler and hitler allies in the United States like Charles Lindbergh who he considered a traitor and was a known antisemite at that time and he would talk about business down the street that would pledge allegiance to hitler as he wrote them letters and did not realize what a threat he was but then he would talk about the kids schoolwork because they wrote letters back to him and how were they doing with their grades at school and like a typical father he said at one point to hans, please, please whatever you do do not overwork yourself and he said excessive exercise is going to do you win and theres no reason to risk energy. You are already a representative of the [inaudible] group and isnt that enough . Its amazing how even in the time just historic political crisis he was still dealing with the same mundane thing that apparent today might deal with. Then the letters to brooklyn simply stopped. By that time both hans and luke or fred were in the military. That is hans on the left and freddy on the right. They met first at the oss facility in bethesda were the military was blown to smithereens with hand grenades and bazookas in a quickly bonded. I love this story because you can see the affection and almost all in which hans held his friend freddy. He was 7 inches taller than him but he followed him everywhere but he was almost like a puppy dog as he would admit and he saw freddy as a fearless bit freddy was someone who did not follow ddlitary rules. He was always or never quite closely shaven enough issues were never strained enough and there were stories where the wargames he would break the rules and in one case, capture the Commanding Officers by outranking all the other men and busting through the military procedureses and demanding the surrender of the top general of the base. The next day that Commanding Officer called and said what freddy thought would be a chewing out over how badly he had violated the rules of the wargames but instead the general saw a grittiness and freddy today moxie, a daring joubert he said arent you glad to get out of thehe infantry and freddy was tired of endless training and [inaudible] he wanted to be in europe fighting the nasis who had driven them out of his homeland. Very much like to get out of the infantry and said you speak german and he said yes and do you speak french and he said yes and he said well pow would you like to join up with oss and freddy immediately but up his hand and said i would love stupid as this one problem, freddy had no idea what oss was. But he soon found out that this was a spy agency been set up by a man by the names of bill donovan, wild bill donovan as he was known. Before the cia was in existence this was an agency that meant to collect intelligence and do sabotage missions and it was a flight by the seat of his pants type agency that was put together, very quickly after pearl harbor because the United States had no centralized intelligence agency. Donovan was determined to create what he called a ban of amateur who could literally parachute into or tunnel into or swim into territory and both collect vital intelligent secrets and if necessary, directly confront and capture the enemy, whether nasis or in the asian theater during the war. Freddy and hans were going to be keep membersng of the team that originally were supposed to go into france. They were all suited up to dive into france in 1944, even before normandy and the mission was canceled literally while they were on the runway pair fred was so frustrated by their lack of action by their failure to the mission that he was making wild demands left and right and at one point he wanted to be dropped into [inaudible], give me a bag of guns, draw me into the concentration concentration camp there and i will free the prison is myself. They thought he needed to be checked into a Mental Institution because this seemed to be such a suicidal thought. In another a situation he led hs and three other jewish people from they hitchhiked up 20 miles in italy where they were stationed at that point to demand a new assignment and this works. The Commanding Officer sent them to a new unit also that had just been formed with the general eisenhower and ultimately after a lot of waiting and Training Missions that seemed pointless especially to freddy they did get an assignment. They got an assignment to parachute into austria and they but their mission was to mainly collect intelligence on what was feared by the United States would be a last great standby hitler in the alpine fortress in the austrian alps in the alpine readout they call it. It was a notion that i compare really to the [inaudible] of later times that was really a half built concept by the nasis, never completed to the point that the allies feared of a booby the entire austrian alps to mount one last final stand and go down in flames and take hundreds of thousands of allies with them. It was as much up to freddy to prove this wrong as to develop intelligence. He succeeded in that because he went undercover as a french electrician and found that the jet plane that hitler was supposedly building in a factory in innsbruck was basically grounded and that the Assembly Line had ground to a halt and that they had no materials to build and this was a critical intelligence to the allies and knowing as much of what then nazis could do and what they couldnt do. He also helped gather intelligence and bombings and targets in berlin. At one point, with the network of locals who had helped them and im skipping ahead a little bit here, this is one of the local spies. Local resistance fighters and it doesnt look like it but this was a hotel room in [inaudible] and she was anti nazi andnt agreed to hide the three men in her hotel attic and another woman, maria, also helped and she had alternative motives and she built those anti nazi and fallen in love with freddy. This was after they parachuted down into the glacier that you saw here and you see this glacier at 13000 feet but they needed help from the locals and from mama [inaudible] and many others and maria was quite taken with the Young American and she was almost willing to do everything she she would bicycle to drive in and out of town and she would give him food and agreed to carry messages back and forth for him and she became one of the linchpins of this Resistance Network that they developed. Also a critical importance were the sisters of this man who was [inaudible] the third member of the team and effectively their tour guide. He was a real nazi, not a fake one like freddy but he was a were mocked lieutenant and invented russia and throughout europe and he agreed to help the United States red in fact it was freddy who identified him as a possible sympathizer and defector and he was critical in developing this network of local resistance fighters who helped him on the ground and his sister worked at a hospital in innsbruck and with her help she was able to get a hold of the uniform of a dead nazi soldier and sneak it out of the hospital and freddy was able to become lieutenant mayor of the verb mocked and that was a general genuine nazi uniform. Wearing that uniform he did to some of his best work. That was when he snuck into an Officers Club in innsbruck pretending to be a recuperating soldier and i will read to you just a bit here from what happened once he got in to the Officers Club. He developed some of his best sources and material of his entire time on the ground. One night in the bar at the Officers Club freddy sat by himself, as usual. The small group of older officers sat together in a table nearby. One of the officers a captain in his mid 30s seem to be dominating conversation. He was drinking wine, lots of it and the more he drank the more in talked. Another officer noticed freddy asand beckoned him overboard bradley gladly pulled up a chair and figured they must have felt sorry for him, a young officer newly arrived at the club and sitting by himself. He soon picked up enough of the conversation to tell the drunk captain was an austrian who served as a knotty engineering corps andaz return to innsbruck sfrom berlin just days earlier n the nature of the mans injury was unclear but the engineer seemed to impress his drinking mates with everything he had done. He told them how he had been mstationed at nazi headquarters in berlin and worked on fortifying hitlers underground bunker. R. Now freddys interest was really piqued but he tried not toes appear too interested. He signaled to the bartender for more wine for his new friend. The captain kept talking, striking out one detail after another of the underground complex. He talked about the layout of the rooms, the thickness of the twalls and usually even where hitler usually slept. He is a brain for numbers and he used summary details freddy was worried he cannot commit them all to memory. Freddy scurried back to the room where he was staying and wrote down as many of these figures as he could, dimensions of the walls, exact locations and scrawled out a message that he would pass along to hans, his number two, hiding out in the attic who was his radioman and this is how it began. It is one and a half kilometers southeast of the rail station and it went on and on from there. Details of exactly where hitlers room was, where the planes were that went on Patrol Mission so you can imagine the effect it has among allied intelligent officials. It was one of them called a pendant strike. There were tears that went up from the allied intelligent officials when they read this. Betty was not done yet. He also was able to gather the exact locations of trains they were heading to italy to the frontlines and to detail the munitions and a member of the supplies and that led to a Bombing Mission that destroyed a caravan of 80 railcars heading afor the frontline in italy and probably shortened the war by any number of weeks, weeks or months. It was one remarkable mission after another, almost singlehandedly with the help of mostly of hans who was radioing the cables back to italy. In the view of many of superior officers with remarkables might missions they had ever seen during the war. But freddy never wanted to be a spy even after the war he felt like he had had his 15 minutes ofof fame and had the chance to continue espionage even after t the war and he turned it down. He felt like he had paid back his obligation to the United States and this was a photo that he took at the very end of the war with hans on the ground, freddy of the rights and the not the defector on left after they had helped to effectuate the surrender of the nasis and innsbruck. I went back to austria and was able to go to the exact same location. There was a local man who i showed the photo from the story i had done on the three of them and he said i know exactly where that is. Thats the backyard of my friends a few miles away. Within about ten minutes we werm there. We were in that exact same place. Okay, well i can to show you that but i was able to go back to that exact same spot and i still get chills as i think about standing in that spot and where freddy and hans and the nazi defector had basically helped win a war. I dont think that is overstating it. Later in life freddy gave an interview for a project with Steven Spielberg interviewing Holocaust Survivors and he was asked about what it meant to him to flee nazi germany and go back into austria and confront the nazis and help to force their surrender and his words were so powerful i ended my book with them. I will read them to you here. He said that it struck him as both a rare opportunity and a solemn obligation. Quote, i would like people to realize, he said, that the refugees who got a haven in the u. S. Did their best to repay that debt. I think he really did. Many times over. He repay that debt in absolutely heroic fashion. So, with that i would be glad to take any questions that you have. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yes, please. [inaudible question] did he ever go back to germany . And how was he discovered by the nasis as being a spy . Well, ill take the second one first. His ambitions got grander and grander with his successes and after he had developed such vital intelligence on hitlers bunker and on the train lines he, at one point, cable back to the allies that he thought hed found enough men willing to help him that he could take innsbruck, in his words. He thought he could get 500 men willing to help them and they arranged to send several [inaudible] of guns and ammunition and explosives down to him and they were waiting for days and there was ms. Commit jason and the ammunition ever arrived but his plans got so grandiose that the nazis realized something was afoot and they u began a massive round up around innsbruck of a possible resistors and he was caught up in that. So after the war he did go back to germany and went to work for voice of america, the American Radio Network and he was an engineer with them and in spots all around the world, in asia and in europe and he did go back to germany. He went back immediately after the war and he returned to his home town in germany when he was still with the military, just six months after the end of the war in late 1945, 1946. He was amazed to see the whole town had been bombed by allied air raids, except for his home where he had grown up and where his father had had his hardware business. And where his father had his hardware business, every house was leveled except for his seemed like a passover with god passing over his house as he talked about it. He sent back a picture to his parents in brooklyn which is very powerful. Hans had a different experience with his number two man on the his number two made you see on the ground. Also returned home to the netherlands. The letters from his bears as i mentioned had stopped several years earlier and had no idea what to expect so he went back to the netherlands and went back to his house and it was abandoned and he found a neighbor who told him that his mother and father and his little brother would also stay behind, had tried to flee and they been captured by the nazis and was sent to auschwitz. So his experience was very different in that sense. Thank you. Youre welcome. He married in germany or he came here and fred, he married a woman injured after the war and they had two children, and he divorced later. So at the end of his life he was living by himself when i met him in West Virginia. But he had sort of the a quiete after this remarkable couple of years, really couplebl of month. He lived in anonymity and he liked it thatty way i think. At the end of his life there was a movement by Holocaust Survivors group to give him the medal of honor, the highest congressional honor that there is. He had actually been put up for that award seven years earlier by the military, and they turned it down. He got several come he got some purple hearts, he got some silver stars and some nice metals which he showed me when i met him there. You can see them in this photo. But they passed him over in 1946 for top honors, the congressional medal of honor. And at the time of his death, even though he had his local senator in West Virginia Jay Rockefeller tried to get them that come he didnt get it didnt either. There was a feeling both at the time of the war and even at the time of his death that the medal of honor should be reserved for those in actual combat and that a spy didid not fit that criter. So we died without that recognition which i know he wouldve liked that, even though he didnt really mind the anonymity. I think part of him wouldve liked to be recognized even all those years later, but it didnt happen. Maybe its still will. Did he ever encountered it n the antisemitism in the oss . Not directly, and i asked him that. The jews were certainly in the minority, and he encountered it early on. In fact, he wasnt even allowed to join the military because ironically he was considered an a german jew, germans, jew or otherwise were not allowed to join the military and felt like this was the ultimate test 22. He had fled germany as the jew. Obviously under intense persecution and now in the treatment he was guarded as an end because he was german. He sort of got it coming and going. Once i got past that hurtled and the military t did allow people like him into the military, he found himself in some demand at oss because the spy chiefs realized they needed the Language Skills of people like him. They needed people who could speak german and french and dutch, as hans could, and italian. Because we didnt have the spy skills, experience that the british did in terms of collecting intelligence and we didnt have the Language Skills and they were desperate to find people like that and they didnt care what their religion was. Im just curious what the process of research was like . Because presumably many people were not alive by the time where the oss records or documents Public Record . Ss luckily, beginning in the 1970s a lot of these intelligence files from oss were declassified, or are on file now in Silver Spring, maryland, National Archives so that was an immense help and i was able to not only use those records but rely on some of the earlier work that hadel been done by interviewers. Theres a whole archive at stanford that was done of interviews with fred and with other members of the team and their supervisors at oss, and those included not just their written summary but also the tapes which were enormously helpful. I mentioned like Steven Spielberg project, he interviewed some 80,000 holocaust refugees. He interviewed i figured with fred in the 1980s, was incredibly helpful because in that interview be discussed not only the fbis mission itself but growing up in germany under hitler and what that was like and this news that was tightening around him. So there were records like that that were very, very helpful. In my own trips to austria, i mentioned one survivor, the captain who piloted the flight john building still alive at 96 remarkably. I was able able to pull together different sources and different archives of information. Any other questions . Thank you very much. Thank you for your interest. [applause] thank you, eric. Thank you for sharing your process and for reading. This was incredible. If you would like to get a book and have it signed by eric i presume this would be a good place to sign, and you can get it signed firstth and then get a book on your way out. So thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Coming up on cspan2 New York Times columnist david brooks offers advice a leading a moral life. He spoke at the 19th annual National Book festival in washington, d. C. And then Tufts University professor recounts the life of William Monro trotter, a late 19th century civil rights activist who used his wealth and leadership of the africanamerican newspaper the Boston Garden to promote racial equality. Tonight on the communicators mark randolph, cofounder of netflix and author of the book, that will never work, shares his experiences starting the online streaming service. On april 14, 1998, our cto hit a few keys and we were life. And it didnt take long and we got that first ding and we cheered and we began opening bottles of champagne and then two or three minutes later, ding, ding, ding three more orders. We were so excited and then we got two more orders and in all the excitement we kind of lost track of things until someone noticed that its been a while since the bell has wrong. Is it unplugged . Was her problem . It turned out out in the first5 minutes of being online we crashed all of our servers. Mark randolph tonight at 8 p. M. Eastern on the communicators on cspan2. Youre watching special edition of booktv now airing during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Tonight, global history. Enjoy booktv now and over the weekend on cspan2. They note. The president s from public affairs. Available now in paperback and ebook. Presents margaret is every president organized by the ranking by noted historians from best to worst, and features perspective into the lives of our nations chief executives and leadership styles. Visit our website cspan. Org thepresident s to learn more about each president and the story future and order your copy today wherever books and ebooks are sold. [applause] okay. Wow. So how many people here are from the Washington Area . How many from outside of washington . How many have never been to the book festival before . How many have been to all 19 of them . Wow. Okay. Were going to have a very interesting conversation today with one of the