Foundation. Their support for online cultural events has been absolutely unwavering and they are, oh my gosh, im so excited to see john nichols. Their support for these events has been absolutely unwavering and they have been so dedicated bringing author events to all of you whether you are watching in your home in madison or across the country or across the globe. Seen an incredible uptick in her audience of people from all over and it is just absolutely wonderful to see the response. Thank you to everyone here tonight and everyone who comes and to all the sponsors who made sure these events keep going. Without further ado i would like to bring john and mary to the screen and step away myself. Larry tye. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us. Larry, thanks for coming all the way to massachusetts to be here with us. [laughter] larry is on cape cod as we speak. You have about 100 people or close to 100 people with us and some more may join us as we go along and as was explained upfront we will take questions and i will ask larry questions at the start and then about halfway in we will invite some questions from you folks and wherever you want to take it we are very excited to go there. Let me just say a couple things upfront about larry. First and foremost, he is a journalist and his books are journalism at its very best. We live in a time where journalism is under attack and not only by political figures but also simply by the economic forces of the moment in which we live and the challenges we face. It is a great honor to be with a another journalist and someone who really has practiced the craft and some of the most creative and exciting ways. That is only the beginning of discussing larrys many talents and contributions. I will also mention that we are talking tonight about a new book they put out, demagogue, book on joe mccarthy former senator from wisconsin but i do want to say larry has a canon of books that are worthy of your attention if you have not read them already. His biography of Bobby Kennedy was brilliant and really took to the expiration of kennedys story and journey to some new and exciting places. His biography is of vital contribution not just on sports history but the history of really the evolution of this country and so many fundamental ways but finally, my favorite of his book is rising from the rails which is the story of the sleeping car porters and im of huge film fan of randolph and he was chairman on lots of washington and larry just capture that brilliantly. Its highly recommended of his books and we here tonight to talk about a brilliant new book, demagogue. I wanted to start out larry by asking you and i noticed that in some of your other biographies you have the name of the person in the case of joe mccarthy you chose a word, demagogue, why was that . Before i answer that question i just want to say that john is one of the many people that i interviewed for this book and to think stood out with my interview with him for he was one of the youngest person that i interviewed when i was trying to get a sense of people who really knew the mccarthy era and knew John Mccarthy and the other was that he was among the very smartest people that i interviewed and any of you who are wisconsin readers know his work from the cap times and from the nation and from all kinds of other places he is published. Having somebody who is as tuned in to not just mccarthy but mccarthys contact in wisconsin and the nation was extraordinary. The reason that i picked a one word title that was not mccarthys name was because this is a book that is about americas love affair with the earliest days until today and i felt that the subtitle would capture the sense that it was that front and center in this book was low blow joe mccarthy but that it was also important to see him in the context and the reason we are here talking about him 70 years after his beginnings of his crusade is because he was the archetype for this bully or demagogue figure in American History and that is the longwinded exhalation i hope to keep my other answers shorter, john. We are here to hear what you have to say so a little longwinded is okay. And the title you use the term the long shadow. The life and long shadow of joe mccarthy. Give us a sense of what you mean by that that long shadow . Is of the impact of what he did or is it really this broader notion of the demagogue . He partly cast a long shadow because of the impact of what he did and not just him, mr. Joe mccarthy, but the orchestrator of this whole movement mccarthyism and it is also to say that we just cant stop with his death and we have to look at how we influence demagogues that came after whether they be david duke, George Wallace or people who are in political to context today. I want is a one other thing. The temptation with a lot of the interviews that ive been doing on joe mccarthy is to talk about donald trump and this is a book about John Mccarthy. Donald trumps name was mentioned only in the preface and in the epilogue and yet his story and story of other demagogues is there and wait and every page of the book. As far as you brought trump up i will join you in trying to avoid it a very deep discussion of him but tell me when you started putting this book together it was around the start of his presidency, wasnt it . A week before the election in 2016 i signed up to write a different book and that was a biography of barack obama in the day after the election i realized we will not know Barack Obamas legacy until after the era of trump is over. It also became apparent to me the day after the election that what i thought was the story of almost ancient history in america in terms of demagogue is the story of today that we have not outgrown this affair and attraction to bullies in the ways i hoped we had. So, lets get into the book a little bit. One interesting element of it which is that you take a very casual approach to referring to him and i guess the way to say it is when you read the book which has a wonderful narrative throughout and just a great screen going through it, its a little bit like being, i dont know, maybe sitting out in front of someones house with a couple lawn chairs, by the beach or even at the end of the bar and someone starts to tell a very long story and you come back to it and its very human in so many ways and i wondered what you thought to do that. I think if youre writing a biography of somebody you have to humanize and you have to make a reader feel like they are getting into the spirit of this persons life and whether the person is somebody who is a hero or villain and they ought to know them and so it was very conscious saying the way Bobby Kennedy i talked about him generally using the word bobby and that was a conscious decision and with this one it is lots of joes and not just mccarthy but it is to try to get in and see him for the inside. What did you see when you looked inside . I saw that on the one hand i want to go back actually to a quote that was one of the reasons i had no mccarthy in the back of my head ever since i did my research on Bobby Kennedy. It is a quote from the one person of the foreign of 50 people that i interviewed from the Bobby Kennedy book that was irreplaceable, a woman named ethel kennedy, bobbis widow. Said something about joe mccarthy that i not get out of my head and it was joe mccarthy might be a monster too much of america but to bobby and to me he was just plain good fun. The idea of joe mccarthy with good fun was counterintuitive to me i felt there was some side of him in the side of him that called wisconsin to overwhelmingly elect him in two different statewide elections that i wanted to understand and so i came out of this book feeling like on the one hand joe mccarthy became much more of a human being as opposed to the caricature that we study in our history books then i had ever realized and he is somebody that i would love to have gone out for a beer and sat down and really, understood all of his charms and all his ability to convince the ethel and Bobby Kennedy was a great guy to spend time with and on the other hand the documents that i looked at made him seem even more sinister than the history books did. The upside was that he became more of a human being but the downside was a lot of the political things he did and his motivation and doing them more we could see the papers that gave a more candid sense of that and made him somebody that if you went out for a beer with him at night that would be fine but if you assure a sack would not want to be on the witness stand when he was grilling you during the day. One of the most interesting things about mccarthy was his ability to joke with the people and about to attack or to jokingly attack them and we remember john times of John Patrick Hunter a longtime political reporter who battled with mccarthy throughout the 40s and well throughout the 50s for sure and when hunter would go to events he said he started to hide behind poles of the events because he knew that if mccarthy saw him in the crowd mccarthy would launch into a rather jovial attack on as the attack on hunter but it wouldnt be, it wouldnt be so meanspirited. It would almost be for the fun and the joking and the crowd and i think there was very common with him. I think that suggests two things about mccarthy. One is that he didnt quite understand how brutal he was being and being there with an angry crowd as a journalist being called out by mccarthy was putting hunter at a risk and i think that mccarthy didnt quite get that aspect of it but it also was that joe mccarthy really didnt see this as a bit of a game. He assumed that everybody was there, journalists or politicians that he was going after would understand that it was a game and they would understand the rules and they would be able to go out after with him and put it all behind them because that after all, it was a game. I think youre right about that and it comes out in your book for quite a few ways. You talk about these relationships that he had along the way and i dont want to take us through the whole narrative of mccarthy story because i do think people should read the book but i am interested in your thoughts about at the start of his career he was a new deal democrat at one point or at least relatively liberal character and that was that near me or merely opportunistic or do you think that is where he started and then evolved into Something Else . You cant talk about much of anything with joe mccarthy laid out the opportunistic elements. Was he really the liberal he started as or ultraconservative that he ended up as and i think that where he started out is where he had the most choice and he wasnt sure what would get him elected and we ran from District Attorney he ran not just as a new deal fdr loving democrat but i think as somebody who was fired up enough about that that he really believed that that was what was best for the country and that was also his irish roots suggested that the party of fdr was where he belonged and i think the only times he questioned his being a democrat and his being a liberal was when he realized he could not be elected from the area around where he grew up and he was game to do whatever it took to be elected and so some night, probably in the middle of the night when no one was looking, he went and changed his Party Registration to republican and, as you know the story, it wasnt just that he became a republican but the opening in the republic of party, the progressive wing of the Republican Party was taken up by Robert Follett junior and the opening was the stalwart republicans and if that was the opening joe mccarthy would take it and if it meant changing his ideology he was going to do that and he was going to do and he did whatever it took. I think that that was, if there is anything that ran throughout his life it was the theme of whatever it took. Were there people along the way who helped him make that change and im thinking of some of the folks up in appleton, particularly bens sister and others . There were a lot of people. He was his best friend and probably say just advisor and he helped steer him. The people of the newspaper in appleton at the post crescent helped steer him. He had lots of people who ended up being his enablers and being his benefactors and being his guys and he was willing to take advice from anybody who was willing to serve the ends of joe mccarthy. And they like that . , that made him appealing . They love that. I think ben was a extraordinary character and from the comments he made over the years to everybody from journalists to authors to his children they suggest that ben truly adored joe mccarthy and he understood mccarthys flaws and shortcomings as well as anybody did but that he was a loyal friend and stuck with him and never publicly repudiated mccarthy even when his temptation was to do that and even when he was telling his kids that mccarthy had gone off the rails again. I think that was a lot of people had a lot of loyalty to joe mccarthy, including somebody whose entire family was representing the iconic liberal first family of america, the kennedys. Bobby kennedy remained loyal enough to joe mccarthy that he, not only never publicly questioned him, but when his brother jack said stay away from mccarthys funeral in appleton in 1957 bobby said thank you, jack. Thats interesting advice that he flew into appleton with all these republican congressional people and on the one hand he went up in the choir loft so no one could see him at the funeral and at the Gravesite Service he stood off to the side where no one could see him but after the funeral he begged the journalists who were there not to put his name in those stories and not get him in trouble with his big brother jack but until the very end and until today for ethel the kennedys and generally and bobby specifically stay very loyal to him as mccarthy for all his flaws was the guy who inspired on a personal level that kind of enormous loyalty. Its also notable that john kennedy really danced around mccarthy rather than standing up to him. Don kennedy had a different relationship. Bobby was a more straightforwa straightforward, less plotting guy than john kennedy. John kennedy was always thinking of his next step and im convinced that the David John Kennedy was born he started plotting his president ial campaign. I think his father was doing that. His father did that absolutely but jack caught up quickly and in 1952 when john kennedy was a relatively unknown and unaccomplished congressman from massachusetts running against the very powerful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to take that seat away from the republicans the poppa joe kennedy had one big request for joe mccarthy which was stay the heck out of massachusetts. Joe kennedy had given enough money to joe mccarthy that wherever he asked mccarthy was likely to say yes and joe kennedy was smart enough to know that if joe mccarthy came to massachusetts and campaigned for the Republican Lodge lots of Irish Catholic voters who loved joe mccarthy, whether republicans were more likely or democrats would do what he said to do and jack kennedy ended up winning that senate seat by just the Percentage Points in a year of an eisenhower landslide where eisenhower one bite nine points and i think joe kennedy and jack kennedy were right. Mccarthy staying out of massachusetts ensured that jack kennedy won that seat. Jack kennedy, for the rest of his life had a certain kind of loyalty to mccarthy and when mccarthy was censured the only senator in the senate at that time who, not only didnt show up and vote but we dont know how they would have voted was jack kennedy, not exactly the kind of profile that joe kennedy was famous for talking about. I thought you would take us to that term right there. You know, you are from massachusetts and weve already spoken far too much about massachusetts here so lets talk about wisconsin. In that 1946 campaign that brought mccarthy to the u. S. Senate he took on senator robert the follett junior who would come back into the Republican Party after having out of it for a dozen years with a leading figure in his brother and the progressive party. Mccarthy obviously was making an opportunity to run and had the backing of the party establish meant but the follett was an epic figure in the state and it appears that at least early on he did not take mccarthy seriously or did not take them seriously enough. You just captured what is the through line for all of mccarthys campaign and his opponents seldom took him seriously and tom coleman who was the dean of the stalwart republic is in the state never took him fiercely as the guy to carry the cudgel against lafollette and tom coleman stream and im convinced its kept him up at night was somehow beating lafollette and joe mccarthy would be is the vehicle for doing and if its something he did not accept and he watched mccarthy and watched mccarthy go out and hustle the all of the publican activists, especially young republicans in a way that finally called him to be convinced that this was a guy so determined to win that he was a guy you got to get behind. The way i think that joe mccarthy beat laval it was partly what you were suggesting that look follett beat himself. It was almost like he was surrendering. I think he was getting older and have been in office long enough and his health was a great and im not convinced that he was sure he really wanted another term or lease not wanted enough to fight hard and to fight dirty like he was going to have to do to beat a guy like joe mccarthy so mccarthy raised legitimate issues in the Campaign Like whether lafollette had been captured by the rolling in astonishment and whether he still had the kind of rootedness in wisconsin that voters in any state want to see when they are electing somebody but also fought dirty and he was raising issues like the fact that lafollette owned a home in virginia and mccarthy was suggesting that that was a mansion and a place that will follett consider home and that wisconsin and if anybody should not have had to show that they had deep roots in the state of wisconsin it was someone whose family had given up as much as look folletts hat and serve the state, not just for the long time but really well but at the time will follett came back and started campaigning hard the campaign was essentially over and mccarthy one by, i was hustling his opponent in a way that lafollette realized at the end. And it was a very close and about 3000 votes, right . It was a close election and it was an unlikely election for mccarthy to be able to oppose lafollette and it was the toughest election he would ever face. The easy thing was beating the democrat after he beat lafollette republican nominations and that was so when mccarthy shows up in washington in early 1947 he shows up there arguably as one of the biggest surprises in that new class of senators arguably the least qualified blue senator to be taking a seat like that but he also firmly from his earliest days gave indication that if anyone had paid attention that he was somebody to be reckoned with and he was throwing bombs before he even was seated in the senate. Essentially saying that striking miners we got to think about using the Death Penalty against striking miners. Whether he really thought that, no one will ever know but i dont thank you did. You just knew instinctively how to get journalists like you and me to Pay Attention to him and that was partly by being outrageous and partly by offering them without having to say it because he would put them on page one and it was partly by terming them. He was charming. He was. Before we get into that because i think thats vital. I want to do one more thing on that 46 election to close the circle. One of the interesting things was that mccarthy may well have one that 46 primary because of the rise of the modern Democratic Party because the Democratic Party actually in 46 after having been on the sideline through most of 30s and 40s in wisconsin had genuine candidates and genuine competition. Former mayor of milwaukee had come over to run for governor and was a good candidate for the u. S. Senate and you had primaries for congressional seats and suddenly some of the energy had gone over to this other place. I think youre right. The cliche story told about that election is that mccarthy elected with the support of communists and its irony but in fact much more important was the fact that there really was a Democratic Alternative that a lot of progressives who would have been tempted to go with lafollette into the republic and party and stick with him there ended up instead voting in the democratic primary in lafollette had not counted on democrats offering the first real return of an election like that in wisconsin and that was just one more miscalculation on his part and made mccarthy as a kingmaker easier than might have been otherwise. Absolutely. I think mccarthy himself perhaps a little surprised to get to washington arise out there and as you say very unfocused and didnt really find his mark. He did not find his mark in your being kind to him for he gets there at the start of 1947 and i dont think he really found his mark until early 1950. He tried lots of issues and some issues that were legitimate issues like housing, fellow soldiers from world war ii were turning and some issues that i think were outrageous and may have suggested an element of antisemitism by mccarthy like defending the perpetrators of one of the deadliest massacre of u. S. Troops during world war ii and the famous massacre defending perpetrators and suggesting that the jewish prosecutors couldnt be objective about it because they were jews. After all, this was a victors justice. He tried just about everything in terms of an issue to grab onto and it wasnt until february of 1950 that he found one that turned out to be magical for him. Lets talk about that. Lets also understand that because he was outrageous and a bit bumbling and because the Democratic Party was trying to get its act together winning the attorney general in wisconsin in 1948 with tom fairchild, truman winning the state in 48 but mccarthy was starting to get scared that he might be vulnerable and he wanted to make a name, right . He was looking for something i will go so far as to state my sense is that he was getting desperate to have some focus for his Senate Career because he was coming up for reelection. Yes, if you made it through three years and youre still looking like a backbench and like a patsy to take on by any ambitious democrats because you look so weak and ill defined he was desperate and he was desperate because he wouldve been an embarrassment to lose his battle for reelection and was desperate because Holding Onto Power whether or not he knew what he was going to do with that power was one of the things it was most vital to joe mccarthy. He made it in a very young age to appoint only in his wildest dreams could ever concede to admit that the idea of having all that taken away from him made him desperate which is why he was willing to do anything to find the issue to latch onto at that point. One of the great things in your book or that you discover in research was that he went to West Virginia with two speeches and in my right . So youre exactly right. In West Virginia or as his staffers called it wheeling west by god virginia were talking about february 1950 on the one day of the year were republicans across the country do the same thing which is on abraham lincolns birthday they use that as a way to rally their party and raise money and if youre prominent u. S. Senator you get invited to places like milwaukee or boston washington or new york but when youre a backbencher like joe mccarthy you get invited to wheeling, West Virginia prayed he shows up at night as you suggest with two speeches in his briefcase and one is a snoozer on National Housing policy which is something he actually knew a bit about. And kind of cared about. And had he picked that speech to give the night 70 years later you and i wouldnt be talking about him because he probably wouldve been that one term senator that we are talking about but instead he pulls out his briefcase a speech that im convinced he read the first time when he was delivering at that night. It was written by journalist and by various staffers who did the editing on it he holds up in his hand a sheaf of papers and is part of his speech he says i have in my hand a list of 205 spies at the u. S. State department and they are people that truman shouldve known about, the president should have gotten rid of and this is a scary thing. He was doing this at a moment in American History when we were scared to death about the soviet threat and it wasnt just the soviets but we had watched very recently National China turn into red china and we watched the atomic spies ethel and Julius Rosenberg be arrested, tried and convicted and we were about to teach our children that something that younger listeners tonight wont be or wont believe but it was the socalled duck and cover strategy which is when the atomic bomb comes you put your hands over your head and you duck under your desk and you will be okay. That is how petrified we were. Joe mccarthy, he understood those fears better than just about anybody and understood that rather than just saying they were traitors in our government and a few named and counted the traders that that was the cowboy way to capture americas imagination. He also understood something that i think was the ultimate incidence as the zone which is if he delivered a bombshell of a speech like that in washington the journalists who are listening would have known who to call instantaneously at the state department for comment. Had he delivered a speech like that in the afternoon as a lunch speech the journalists on a deadline wouldve had plenty of time to call their washington colleagues and find who to call for comment. He delivered the speech at night and he delivered it with only two reporters who really mattered in the audience and one from the local newspaper and one the local ap reporter and what happened after words was just what mccarthy drained of within two days he was on page one of every newspaper in america and he never turned back. This was the birth of joe mccarthy in terms of being associated with the anticommunist issue and this was the birth i think that night of mccarthyism. I would agree with you and the other interesting part was that it was, it really was the seat by his pants. The number changed all the time. It changed and it went back forth a bunch of numbers but it truly came back to most was a 205 that we think is what he said in wheeling and in his personal and professional papers this wonderful stash material at Marquette University there were a bunch of different numbers in the various versions of his speech appeared there were 205 and i was crossed out but the other number he kept coming back to was 57. Without making two light of it one of the places that a pal of his suggested that he go up to the number 57 was he loved hamburgers and steaks and it was suggested that maybe on the way to his dinner he stopped at a restaurant poured heinz 57 sauce on in a number caught his imagination. I dont believe it but on the other hand i think that given how statuesque the number 205 was it could have come from anywhere because they were not to divide names in his sheaf of papers there were not 205 spies that we know of to this day at the state department. This is where it gets juicy because as you say, its not something that couldve been checked out and challenged and the numbers were not steady and the reality didnt line up with what he was saying and yet in relatively short order he was sharing National Hearings and speaking to the whole country being paid an immense amount of attention and at least or a time people who shouldve gotten in his way or shouldve slowed him down the media as well as the Political Class gave him a lot of space in which to operate. So, on the one hand i want to agree with you and i want to just say not just because we are but one of the only newspapers that was right on joe mccarthy from almost the very beginning was your Capital Times and a lot of people took it on the chin by being right in the way he attacks them but the truth is that even when people call him out at the beginning it looks like he had a free ride but he was called out very early on by a senator named millard from maryland and he headed up the special committee to investigate mccarthy and he did not mean a word but call mccarthy a fraud and a hoax and what happened was he sent the lesson to anybody who attempted to likewise call him out and that november so he delivers the speech mccarthy delivers his famous speech in february 1950 and that spring his Committee Comes out with a report calling him the hoax and that November Mccarthy is in maryland having a recruited a republican for running against him and having gotten his wealthy texas benefactors to back this republican and having lent the republican, a guy named butler, mccarthys bag of dirty tricks and having beaten an incredible titan of maryland politics the same way he took down Pablo Follett junior in wisconsin and that sent a shockwave through the senate and the message was very simple. Take on joe mccarthy and be aware of the bulldozer. And yet he did take him on. I just have to say a word about Margaret Smith because shes a favorite of mine. She was the only woman in the senate and a senator from maine and Margaret Smith took on joe mccarthy early on even though mccarthy and his classic charming side had promised market smith that he would put her name for Vice President for whoever got the nomination in 1952. Margaret smith had enough conviction that she authored what was called a declaration of conscience condemning mccarthy with his on american activities in the way he grilled witnesses and ignored their rights and the way he, everything about his campaign was offensive to her. She took to the senate floor and client found six moderate publics design on an mccarthy tried to do to her what he did to millard tydings. First he was master of the namecalling. He dumped her snow white and her seven dwarves. And her fellow senators. Then he took to maine and tried to beat her and smith was Strong Enough as a candidate that he couldnt beat her but she lost, she ran in a much closer election that she had the time to before and lastly, what i want to say about Margaret Smith is she was a relatively unexceptional senator. The one thing we remember about her today and this suggests something to other demagogues and one thing we remember about her is that she had the courage to stand up to joe mccarthy at a time when almost nobody was. That should be encouraging to people who find that courage but over the years there generally are not many of them. As we speak of the long shadow before we go to questions i do want to note that Margaret Smiths speech calling mccarthy out for what was then an incredibly destructive approach and use of his platform came full circle during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings because when Susan Collins voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh you had Mitch Mcconnell on the floor of the senate comparing Susan Collins supporting Donald Trumps nominee for the Supreme Court to Margaret Smith. Susan collins was somebody who was incredibly helpful to me for the book and someone who i interviewed. She was helpful by long before i was writing my book agreed she held the same gavel joe mccarthy had as chair of the permanent subcommittee on investigation. When she decided after 50 plus years of all his closeddoor hearings being under lock and key she decided to make those transcripts public. Those gave us a sense that joe mccarthy unhinged. When i interviewed her i knew that her role model what as a senator was Margaret Smith. I said are you intending to take this to heart in terms of what you do as a senator and it is very clear that she adores Margaret Smith and that she sees herself as a model of following in Margaret Smiths footsteps and her opponent in the Current Senate race, very Heated Senate race in maine and doesnt do that and everyone is using this Margaret Smith model estate rather than looking at her as Susan Collins role model but is saying you let down market smith and whether she has are not the voters of maine will decide in the selection. That was political answer, my friend. [laughter] but i honor your reference there because i think the documents that you got from those hearings the materials that you got access to was incredible. You brought out a lot of new material as regards to joe mccarthy. So, i was really lucky to have that material and john, you know from knowing me a bit it wasnt because i was charming but that i got those materials but i think that in terms of the wonderful market files the reason they opened them up was two reasons. One is i was enough of a past that the only way to get rid of me was to open it and the other is i had in a currently important ally who was Greta Van Susteren and the tv wonderful tv personality and the market people were extraordinary in helping me pick sense of those documents and i think they were surprised as i was that i got the access and sadly, rather than them being open generally they were open for the time i was working with them they are now back under lock and key again. But you wrote the hell out of them. [laughter] i appreciate you saying that. Thank you. Before we go to questions, and looking at the hearings and going chapter and verse to all of them but what was the most striking thing that you learned from looking at those documents . The shocking thing to me was normally we expect the politician to be more outrageous when the cameras are there watching what they are doing. And then when they glow in closed sessions nobody is watching so you can be reasonable. Joe mccarthy flipped that script. He was more reasonable in his public hearings then another hearings which is a sign since he wasnt especially reasonable there of how unhinged he came in the private hearings. I think he did a couple things. One was any notion of witnesses having real rights when out the window and they were presumed guilty from the start. A second was he held in violation of Senate Traditions one man hearing and when the one man, joe mccarthy was gone, he turned the hearings over to sophomoric staffers like roy cohn to do the grilling in the violation of peoples rights on his behalf and the other thing was that i think he used those hearings as a test run for witnesses who would stand up to him and who were eloquent and they didnt show up in public hearings and the ones who are more easily pressed and more easily caving into him they were the perfect patsies he wanted in the public. He got to run these wonderful test runs and any sense of any rules and propriety went out the window because nobody was there to keep him in check. And it was an incredibly giant incredibly disproving American History moment. Not only when needed those public hearings was he doing Senate Hearings but ended up on television and i think thats one less thing i want to bring out is in your book, you do a very good job of talking about helping us understand the intersection of modern media and the demagogue. Again, the history book version of what happened to joe mccarthy is that it was a leprechaun like lawyer from Boston University joe welch went mccarthy attacked welches young associate he defended him by saying have you no sense of decency and that was the moment that turned everything around. I would say two quick things about that. One is welch was as good an actor as he was a lawyer and he had that line ready to go knowing that mccarthy would step over the any sense of propriety that it was attacking his young associate or doing something. He was ready to go with that line and the other thing is what brought mccarthy down in my mind is the public scene, day after day, televised testimony that joe mccarthy was not this heroic champion that they started out believing and that he was more like the town bully and in the course of those hearings he went from the gallup polls telling us he was starting out with a 50 favorability which meant as a popular public figure in america the only one he trailed was dwight eisenhower. Roy cohen was a brilliant and arrogant young player with a record of successfully prosecuting communists joe mccarthy in in 1953 when he took over the permanent subcommittee oninvestigations. And roy cohen was his alter ego. Roy cohen reinforced every bad instinct in Joe Mccarthys phone roy cohen was the first choice for that job, but if we were doing a what it we would say what if we had hired the second choice, the second choice was probably kennedy and would joe mccarthy have been a different joe mccarthy without roy cohen whispering in his ear. It was the oneday liberal icon Bobby Kennedy but roy cohen, flashforward from roy cohen being a enabler, helping bring down mccarthy. I had him kicked off a lot of the controversy that gave us the mccarthy hearings. Flashforward 60 years, roy cohen is now an officer again, you still brilliant and arrogant and i kind red trunk and a guy named donald trump and donald trump was entering the world of new york real estate. His dad and he recognized he needed somebody to advise and instruct him out to get involved with that world and who better than the guy who had learned at the knee of joe mccarthy in a cutthroat environment. Roy cohen passed on mccarthys lessons trump and trump has said repeatedly during his presidency if he gets into trouble i sure wish i had a roy cohen by my side to help me out ofthis. What i think hes saying but it would be on pc to saythis is i wish i had a joe mccarthy at my side to tell me how to deal with this. That takes us to the second question you referenced in your joe mccarthy and Bobby Kennedy. You are in the rare circumstance here having done biographies of both men. Lets in Bobby Kennedys head for a moment here and figure out how much did Bobby Kennedy agree withjoe mccarthy. How much . I want to say one thing, if theres anybody in arguing litigants, watch john for the embodiment of how a journalist asks morequestions. You dont often see it goes all you see is the storyof the state. Ive done a lot of these things and these are terrific questions. We go to Bobby Kennedy and drew joe mccarthy. They were on exactly the opposite trajectory in terms of their career. Body kennedy starts out as a joe mccarthy staffer but a joe mccarthy true believer. He believes in mccarthy and his cause against communism in the cold war era. He started out his life as a cold war democrat but he was cold war and the relatively conservative guy. Hes on his way to the iconic figure in modernday American History. Joe mccarthy starts out his life as this liberal with Bobby Kennedy one day and hes on his way to becoming the iconic postwar conservative but even 70 years later he remains an icon too much of the conservative movement in america and the idea that the intersect was for a single reason thatwe talked about going on. It was joe kennedy said they ought to come together and whatever joe kennedy did, whatever joe kennedy asked for bobby did and whatever joe kennedy asked mccarthy for, he saw a union. I think that joe kennedy who was a classic realpolitik, machiavelli and political figure understood if bobby would get tooted by the master and its ironically the same feeling i think President Trump bringing in roy cohen yearslater , they both felt their songs ought to know how to fight in dirty politics, tough politics, whatever you want to call it and they had that and i think a lot of lessons joe mccarthy taught bodykennedy , body ended up using later on behalf of the neocons. And from our questions from the crowd here tonight you will understand that your in a town filled with researchers. There are several questions about how you did the research on the book and one of them is that the Historical Society in wisconsin, you find materials there that, was there any material that stood out. Were doing wonderful materials at the Historical Society and i dont want to say too much about that because i just did the last edits on it last night and i cant remember several names but the name at the Historical Society, what is it called . I think youre pretty much there. Whatever it is, some of that material will be in there. Be safe to understand the context of wisconsin politics, the staff at the Historical Society and the documents were almost as good as sitting down with john and dave zwiefel. Im an idiot for massachusetts knowing something about the kennedys but nothing about wisconsin politics and anything i got right i would go to people like john anything i got wrong about wisconsin is on me. Im the biggest is, that is sort historicalsociety worked wonders on me. Hes an author and historian. I know mccarthy material in the Historical Society is well done because i just did an articlefor the magazine that youre writing for , dan cohen and the rise of the modern Democratic Party which intersected a lot, its an incredibly valuableread. One more quick thing in terms of the understanding, the history of mccarthy in wisconsin. One thing that authors depend on his that they can learn from auto biographers and there are lots of great biographies of mccarthy and the idea that people like thomas reed left his papers to the Historical Society, thats interviews with people who are long gone like van susteren who i would never get to, rather than just that they can read what i quoted and that the onlything worth hearing , read his actual notice from his interview and we all have a responsibility to do that that we can build in every new biography and yet it is rare for people to do that and i was really lucky that people like him did it and it was in the wisconsin Historical Society. That is very true andvery appropriate. One question relates to the book, it is brave and i dont want to overcome to let you one way or the other but its great to take on somebody whos had a lot of books written about them because you have to assumeyou can write something more, you can add to the canon. Youre too polite to phrase the question it ought to be phrase which is why did the world need hundred first biography of joe mccarthy and partly its because youve got a spot and you assume you will Say Something different, partly its because the story seemed timely for the reasons that weve been talking about in terms of being a story not just about our history but today and partly it was i almost walked the plank and fell off and exactly a week after i told my publisher and my wife that i was not going to get access to the marquette archives and to all the papers from the as the Naval Hospital that i was counting on to understand mccarthys Health Situation which i think was critical to what ended up happening to him. In both cases exactly a week after i said it wasnt going to happen i was shocked that it happened. And it was lucky for me it happened. I had to break new ground, who knows . I did have the transcript of the closed door hearing that had been out but nobody had taken a deep dive on them. I was a pain in the neck as i said and people ended up for reasons, whatever saying yes. This book is getting a lot of attention right now. You had one of those lovely authors favorite interviews in the New York Times the other day and im wondering whether you think as much as you moved the needle and as much as this book did add to our understanding of mccarthy that it would be getting the attention that it is if we had, if barack obama was president of the United States or if there was a different person in the white house. Good question, short answer no. And longer answer, i wouldnt have written the book if there were a different person in the white house but it is partly a matter of luck, partly a matter of timing on any book getting attention, especially on a historic figure that weve seen so much of in the past. Let me ask you now as we circle around again, the question about the impact of mccarthy and im a big fan of your useof that term long shadow in your subtitle. What are the things joe mccarthy did in going after fellow travelers and people he accused of things, or that he targeted a lot of africanamericans and not just him but the whole red scare of people who had been involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Do you think that mccarthyism slowed down or had an impact on the rise of civil rights and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in this country . I think mccarthyisms greatest impact is the one we know him for which is anticommunist movement and i think the way he did as much damage to anticommunist score maybe more but i think there were three other movements that remain important movements today that mccarthy jumped in on and did some really despicable things. One is i think that the evidence that he might have been an antisemi. Number two is he was clearly a gay basher and was one of the orchestrator of what was called then the lavender scare and the other is the short race, he was on the wrong side of that and i think mccarthyism when its used broadly today by every day sort of people that they dont like, it should have a wide net to cast because joe mccarthy had a wide net and i think i dont know whether at his heart he was a racist or antigay or really antisomatic, but i think he was willing as an opportunitys to play to anything he thought was going to work. What he was i think maybe ironically more than anything was antielitist and anti s notion of what elites were he was antieast coast and antiwest coast and antiwall street and that was playing to a lot of populist sympathies perverting a lot of populist these. The reason i use the word demagogue rather than the word populist is i dont think he was apopulist. To me populist and has lots of upsides to it. He was a demagogue and theres not a whole lot of upsides to being a demagogue or a bully. Its an awfully goodplace to circle around to. Ill make one last question rather than when you leave on a perfect and that is youve written so many books. Are you working onSomething Else now . I am and i got to tell you briefly the title of it. I got to soon of the deadline for this book and its my rewards myself and the publishers award to me having spent three long years with joe mccarthy and its a book called the jasmine. And the subtitle does abetter job of explaining what it is. Subtitle is how duke ellington, Satchmo Armstrong and count basie transformed america. And i think there are three bitter people that you could spend time with and i think this is an incredibly uplifting story of how they changed the racial horizon of america and set the table in many ways for the Civil Rights Movement. What a way to clean up having dealt with mccarthy. Thank you, i hope so. This has been fabulous and we have to ask a few questions from folks. Weve had a wonderful grout of about 100 with ustonight. I want to thank the book smokes, library folds, all the other people that helped put this together. I want to remind people it is the wisconsin magazine of history you and i have written for and that you will have an article coming out very soon and i think with that we will turn it back. Can i say really quickly, i want to thank john who was a terrific interlocutor tonight, and i want to thank someone was wonderful and assembling this program and having to deal with my obsessing emails from the left. Thank you. Youre not among the most annoying people today. Im here to say thank you both so much, this is absolutely wonderful and its the kind of conversation that the book club wants to have and i appreciate you making our time youre in the middle of this july evening and to all of you gathering from all over the country to watch this, thank you as well. I do also want to mention the madison institute, many of you found out through them they are always wonderful to work with and i know fred is here somewhere, yes. And i also want to mention our book signing partners in theroom. Larry is only here because he wrote this book and we really get to do thisbecause you buy the book. Please click the button here at the bottom. The green button. Im sure larry has a local bookstore as well. So support great local bookstores. I want to support your bookstore and i want to make an offer that maybe nobody will find attractive. When you put in your book order if you want it personalized, if you want it signed normally we be doing a book signing, just indicate that when you put in your order. I will send a signature personalized to you and im sure the bookstore has no problem letting you know that. I want to say one last thank you which is a friend whos an extraordinary person who you dont see on the screen here today but he was supportive of me and the body kennedy book and this one and hes an extraordinary guy. Thank you all. Weeknight this month we are featuring book tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight we focus on covert operations. First, former fbi special agent bond talks about the early years of the us war on terror and chris level talks to a former cia director to provide an inside look at the intelligence organizations operations. And later, the book the great secret which looks back at thesinking of 17 allied ships in italy in december 1943. That starts at 8 pm eastern enjoy book tv this week and every weekend on cspan2. Youre watching book tv on cspan2. Every weekend withthe latest nonfiction books and authors. 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