Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jeff 20240703

Scholars. For seven years he directed operation homecoming and taught therapeutic writing workshops during their deployment on domestic basis of his humanities in Higher Education over the wall street journal. And other outlets east co hes edited and essay collection. Hello, so glad you are here. It is my distinct honor to introduce into interview jeff his new book which i will note signing is at 3 00 p. M. And i think you will want to be here after you hear this. Jeff is well known to us. He has signed many of his books here in the state. Ofhe is the author of more than5 New York Times bestsellers. Certainly other books that come to mind his New Historical novel the old line about Teddy Roosevelt. And rather than read the standard bio i thought we have known each other for about 20 years younger we could say. I think it was just mentioned u. S. Government project operationre homecoming will work with our troops in afghanistan. As they were rotating in and out of the war. Helping them in many ways and burden their experiences. With their military family some of our ward to veterans recorded rvstatements as last shall be pt life into thehe projects. And at one point we found ourselves in by rain in the persian gulf from the Aircraft Carrier. We took a hilo and the uss i believe it would have been. He was teaching writing and you know how limited it is what you can take on a vessel in a war zone for half a year deployment. And one of these sailors 8 feet up paperback of one of his books. Think of all the possessions you can bring pictures of family and what have you he brought one of jeffs books he was out little shy it was tattered, his dogeared and he got the courage to say what you sign this for me . He was so warm to his audience he went to sign it the only unfortunates thing i know hes lefthanded he went to site thee comfort went flying off of it. So fair warning we are probably showing paperbacks just fair warning in the vigor of his signing. We see the public face of somebody. We do not always know what they gave back. That whole experience is pretty complicated its a tough time who is serving as a writer were going through some tough things it. I wanted to give you that introduction. Not the writer but the man. Thats a good way to pivot to you now live in gettysburg pennsylvania. Within the footprint the house within the footprint tell us about that is particular special between you and your father. My father took us kids, his family to gettysburg. I was 12. We went there as akn tourist lie to land people your due. He went there i had not done much research. We got to gettysburg my father was for all of his life and he was a good storyteller. New and when he saw when walking the battlefield of gettysburg. He became obsessed with telling that story totally unexpected that would happen to him. The obsession lasted seven years it took seven years to write a manuscript based on the battle of gettysburg it was called the killer angels. I love them people nod their heads. Think about the, early 70s which is when he was trying to sell this book what else is going on in this country . Its the end of the vietnam war. Absolutely nobody wants to read a book about generals which is what it was about me thats a bigger disappointment to my father he went through 15 publishers until he finally got a small independent Publishing House was going out of business. Theyel reluctantly and agreed to publish the killer angels theres 3500 public publish, that was it their first editions are very rare today but they are collectorsom items. The book comes out to note great commercial success. A year later in 1975 the book comes out in 74 which by the waynext is a 50th anniversary of the killer angels were doing some things around that. The book comes out and 74 it does nothing commercially. And the following year weve got a little surprise the telegram comes to my fathers house. Congratulations the killer angels have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. That was a surprise to everybody. Especially people who had no interest in the book. And still the book was not commercially successful. He went on the scifi story did nothing. He wrote a baseball story will talk about a little bithe later. In 1988 he suffered his second heart attack and passed away in his sleep he was only 59 years old. Five years later ted turner picks up the money the movie gettysburg comes out based on the killer angels. It becomes number one bestseller, five years after my fathers death. Those are the footsteps i am walking in and never would have become a writer. When it be great to go both directions like your fathers. For an after gettysburg. Theyll be my first book which was gods agenda. My tie to gettysburg is pretty significant. Now that i lived there my wife is a native born and raised in gettysburg gettysburg, the tie, the full circle, plenty of sense and. You know, its a wonderful place to be the home we live in is on the battlefield my attic is my office and head out the window of my attic. I have a perfect view of the round tops i can see little round top. My window right across the field will pick its to place. Its a pretty special place of so we dont forget it you when your your dads estate and going through his files that. I dont know if you call it a novel or a novella that manuscript that baseball manuscript. Dont you give him a why dont you give them a quick w the publishers wouldnt buy it. He could have thrown it away. I took it to new york, baseball had gotten hot and so the book was published and it was called love of the game and Universal Pictures jumped all over it. Kevin costner jumped all over it. Many of you may have seen Kevin Costner and kelly preston. Most people dont realize that that movie is based on the book by michael. Outwice movies have come out by his book that he didnt live to see. E. Im in the movie, by the way. I got my one second claim of fame. [laughter] so hulu the incredible amount of writing hes done around the american civil war, world war ii, the revolution, the mexican war, we were just talking the mexican war and korean war books are just remarkable, remarkable books and introduces stories that we dont necessarily know. I will pair to where we are as a country in terms of a high school and middle schools and junior high. Something called the nepa test. Shorthand. We just had the results back this year for eighth graders across the nation, so only 22 of eighth graders are even proficient in civics. Onre the 14 are proficient in u. S. History. We are approaching 226, 50 year of americas founding and we are not going to g get that level of knowledge just through history books, we are going to need our novelists even our poets,oi musicians, we are going to need everyone but to the young people, what would you wantou tm to know about Teddy Roosevelt . Well, first of all, right off the bat, the easy one that he was president of the united states. I mean, you know, a lot of people ive heard this say about people in hollywood. If it didnt happen during their lifetime, it didnt happen and i think that maybe some of that foro young people. They have no reason to think back, no reason to Pay Attention to the important ones, but the ones who did things that changed our world, that changed what we are living today and roosevelt is one of them. Responsible for the National Fire service and National Parks and without roosevelt a lot of that land, yellowstone, yosemite, on and on wouldnt have been developed. There were peoplehr actively trying to run railroads through these places and one congressman, fellow from the midwest he provided a great deal of it. The panama canal which as roosevelt himselfim admitted had it been up to Congress Done the panama canal, it would have taken 50 years and roosevelt did it in 3. I could just keep on listing. I dont want to get involved, bog down so much in roosevelts presidency because as interesting it is and he established extraordinary a number of things fighting for the little man, i mean, fighting for the common worker against the corporate the sort of evil corporate empires an he was responsible for knocking down a lot of that, forming what would become a lot of unions to fight against corporate abuse. I mean, he did all of this stuff and thats his presidency and to back to your question, people need to know this the because a lot of the good that we have in our Society Today came directly from that period of time in our history, the first, decade of te 20th century and it was, you know, because of Teddy Roosevelt. The other part we think of Teddy Roosevelt in that strong way the man in the arena and the way he stood up to all of those special interest groups. I think people are surprised i feel well informed but his support for suffrage was was way out of character in the universities i think people know but as general public a lot of us werent told that he had booker t washington, eat dinner at the white house which president wilson certainly wouldnt allow. Theres so many ways that he was ahead of his time. Easy for me to sit up here and basically read you a synopsis of the book. My wife always gets on me, dont do that because then people have no reason to buy the book. [laughter] but, in fact, i mean, he booker t washington, the first africanamerican to have dinner in the white house ever. I mean, lincoln had africanamericans visiting the white house and fredrik douglas and so forth but Teddy Roosevelt had dinner with one and boy, did that cause a stink, i mean, newspapers attacked him for that, particularly newspapers in the south, in memphis there was a paper that said, no respectable southern woman would ever set foot in the white house ever again. On and on. There was a lot of that suffrage. He supported the womens right to vote decades before it actually came to pass. Again, that was an unpopular stance. Why do women need the right to vote . Things are going along just fine the way they have since the 17 80s. Well, he decided, no, thats not fine. That Women Deserve the right to vote when that was a very unpopular stance. So, again, i could go through, you know, all of the minutia but theres so much more to his character. So you dont have to repeat. In mississippi the teddy story is in here and we all know that one but you also remind us of the connection that when the africanamerican post mistress in 1903 was pressured and and forced. The people said they wont accept her beingre there. He closed the post Office Rather than let that stand and appointed her and at the end it was too dangers but she did open the first African American banks in the state of mississippi. What i like is that you dont focus on the presidency so much as you tell us about the dakota territory and the bad land. Tell us about that focus. First of all, i want to correct you on one thing. I dont tell you about it, teddy tells you about it. Yeah. The whole point of this is for me to take you with me and put you at his bedside and let him tell you the story and thats the way this book was written but the dakotas in the 1880s, he goes on a hunting trip. Hes a big hunter and he goes out and he wants to kill a buffalo. Thats his motivation for going out there, what he finds when he gets to dakota territory, first of all, there arent a lot of buffalo left but he finds cattle ranching and he loves the land out there, the bad lands and what is today north dakota and he meets some people and some not so nice people and he gets excited. Thats one of the things about teddy you can talk about in his whole life, a lot of what he does and accomplishes is simply because he gets excited and he dowants to do something for himself that even against advice to the contrary he does it anyway. He puts p down a bunch of money, he buys a bunch of cattle and hires a bunch of people and becomes just that, a cattle rancher in the dakotas and goes back to new york and goes back and forth, but some of the things that happened to himre ot there are certainly in this book because they are fun, thats the one word i have to use to describe him from the writers point of view from being able to tell his story. Hes fun. I mean, what happens to him, you know, hes entertaining, he was entertaining to me and i certainly hope as a result of that its entertaining to you. And the other part is we and the way he was received when he got to the bad lands, he was harvard, wearing glasses and oudidnt know wearing glasses ws an offense, how did he establish Authentic Friendships . People know of him andow know of hisam name but he very quicky because he doesnt try to run the show he concedes he doesnt know what hes doing and he hires people that do and he respects them and so it becomes mutual and then as time goes by, i mean, hes there for 3 or 4 years andar as time goes by his sacrifice, the things that he does, some of the stories in the book, some of the things that happened to him and by the way you mentioned this, when he first steps off thehe train, fit time in the middle of the night ina, dakota hes wearing glasse, he has to wear glasses because he cant see and he gets told immediately, by the way nobody out here wears glasses and you can expect everybody call you four eyes and they do and he just accepts it and thats the way it is and he keeps spare glasses in the t room of his hat so he is good chance the glasses will disappear or a stampede of cattle which hes in so hes always got spares but hes four eyes and he accept that is with humility and he accepts all of it with humility and i think thats what makes him as popular as he is out there to the people that work for him. And that brings to the idea of the fiction and sometimes people think a writer is leaning on the word fiction. Youre always leaning on the word historical. Talk to us about the amount of research, accuracy. I had a well known historian say too me one time, you can create your own history and fudge things and do all of that. Well, that may be true for most people that write historical fiction, its not true for me. I do an enormous amount of research to get the facts straight, get it right. I make huge amounts of notes which i refer to during the writing, what happened, when it happened, who it happened to,en who was there, who was not there, thats so important. Where i began to hear from teachers, High School Teachers particularly that are using my books in their classrooms, what that did is added first of all, i was shocked because these are novels. Youre teaching history with a novel and when i heard was first of all, they said, we trust that the history is accurate but the other part off it is if you can give the student an character o relate to somebody they can get into they dont even realize theyre learning history. They are learning the character. Thats extremely flattering but that also added to the responsibility i feel to get it right, you know, dont play around with history, dont play games. Everything in this book particularly, everything happened, everything happened the way its written. These are novels by definition and theres fiction here, fiction is the dialogue because you are there. No one will ever know exactly what the conversation was between Teddy Roosevelt and his wife inai a certain situation. We will never know. Thats my job is to fill in those blanks but if im doing my job, if im doing it right, its seamless, you are reading as the events as they happen and the history as it happens but youre there, youre hearing it the way it happened between the characters and thats what thats what i try to do with every book ive done. I also think the part that the reason you have such a large audience these are very accessible novelsib in a sense f we can read and we can understand them, theyre not written in academic ways but at the same time yourese very precise in your language. Ayou mentioned a road and i dont thinkk you need the jacket. You have that level of nuance to to to make sure that its so precise but at the same time youre releasing a book more or less every year. Talk to us about the division betweenes researching it, writi . First of all, i will address the first thing that you said. I loveth putting in tidbits and thats for historians, thats for the people that know every blade of grass and everything that happened. I love putting things just to let them know ive done my homework because in gods in general, in my first book i made a mistake, i made a mistake on the color of the plume in jeb stewarts hat, who knew. Boy, did i hear about it. [laughter] said it was a white plume, no, it was black and i got letters. Okay, from now if im going to talk about something as minuscule as that its going to be right and that way historians know im doing it the right way, but, im sorry, whats the other part . [laughter] i get passionate about that. I dont remember the question but that was the answer. [laughter] about the dialogue, we know that you are using dairies for various books but you we believe the dialogue that youre having to create because of all what you just talked about. Theres apo really powerful momt where Teddy Roosevelts moving to these stages and when he is president and he could no longer interact at the level you wanted to with the dakotas and theres a line that say you outgrew us. I wouldnt call a melancholy book but the framing of it is about sacrifice and laws and that comes up in world war i. You want to talk about how you framed this book. As youre going first of all the dakotas and the spanishamerican war, the San Juan Hill, you go through that hart of it which is certainly important, governor of new york and then onto presidency. The scene that youre referring to, i want to mention that because hes president of the united states, he o goes on a tr in his train and he has elaborate car all fixed up for him and the trains go all over the place and hes giving speeching everywhere and its a back slapping sort of handshaking kind of a tour and he goes to the dakotas and by years after hes been out there as a cattle rancher and two of the people that have worked with him come to see him and he spots them and they come and he invites them to come aboard the railcar. Hes excited to see them and they come, they are all struck by what they are looking at, hes giving them a tour of the rail car and they sit down in comfortable chairs and he Start Talking to them, they say we brought your old horse, we had him, we thought you might want to go on a ride with us and i cant do that, im president of the united states, the security people, they are not going to let me do that. Okay, so theyll are sitting arod talking but they have not talking very much because they realize they have nothing in common and these are people who meant more to him than anybody on earth 20 years prior and thats what the line youre referring to they feel like hes outgrown them because he has kept on going and they are doing the same thing they were doing 20 years ago. And it is bittersweet. Its a bittersweet moment about that. The thing thatin youre referrig to is roosevelt when hes in cuba which is by the way San Juan Hill is cuba, its not puerto rico. A lot of people dont know that. When hes in cuba, he makes a point of mentioning that if hes killed in combat, theres no betterer way to go. With his honor and so forth and being killed in combat would be okay with him. Well, 18 years later, he wants his son, four sons to enlist and to volunteer to go fight and they do. And one son quinten becomes a pilot and shot down and killed in july of 1918 just before the warwa ends. And that moment is devastating to teddy and his wife both. They never recovered from that in some ways it pushes teddy toward tend of his own life which is a contradiction because you would think he wants his sons to, you know, go out in blaze of glory and when it happens hes crushed by it and again itss growth. The realization that your children mean more to you than just, you know, having them do glorious things. You do a remarkable job in this novel about giving us the domestic life including the lifelong grief after the death of his first wife. Talk to us about expedition if you dont mind. He wants to explore everywhere. He goes to africa on a safari which i dont get deeply into because the more important is when he goes to the amazon. The river of doubt is what the river is called. He goes in an expedition, brazilian explorer and soldiers and the idea that theres this river and they know where the source of the river, they have no idea where it goes, they dont know if it ends up at the amazon or goes out in the woods somewhere and they want the find out so he gets involved in this expedition anda its a bigtime thing. I mean, all kinds of indian workers and natives that help them out, canoes and enormous amount of supplies and very quickly it becomes obvious that unwieldy and isnt going to happen very well and theres serious rapids, things that wreck the canoes and dump the supplies in the water and they have to stop and build new canoes, this becomes a major expedition and major undertaking that they didnt expect. Roosevelt is sick and getting sicker by the day, he has no business at his age being on this expedition. Hes in his mid 50s and he was ailing and he had no business being on the expedition and it nearly kills him and the way this turns out and they do eventually, i mean, obviously he survivors but the way they find where the river goes and joyful success but it kind of taught him a lesson that, okay, you really cant be doing this kind of thing anymore and thats hard for him to accept. I want to we might come back to Teddy Roosevelt if you want. I want to talk to you about how do you you have the civil war and how do you decide what youre going to move to next, whats your linein of thinking,o you think in series, do you think in next book . Well, i i do ive done several series, so that makes it easy, once i figure out where the series is going to start then i know if im going to do a trilogy or i did two books of war in the pacific, pearl harbor and midway. Well, that was pretty easy. I know where im going with that. The hard part was not doing a third bookhi which would have bn canal and fourth is hiroshima and i had people give me grief because they wanted more of the story and i had a publisher, thats good, we are done with that. I had to come up with Something Else but, you know, its hard sometimes ie agonize over topics and i think everybody writer hould. It shouldnt come easy to anybody because if it ever comes easy, its not going to be very good. Its a challenge to find out what im going to write about and once i find it i have to get whole hog,h do as much reading, go to the ground as i can, walk the ground. Thats the lesson i learned from my father at gettysburg. If you want to write any of the stories, go there and youll get something out of that. I didnt go to the river of doubt in brazil because its not a wise thing and one other place that i didnt go which im embarrassed to admit, i did a book on the korean war, tough story, my be my best book, including one from the marine corps which im proud of but i wanted g to go to chosen, the chosen reservoir is in north korea. I actually had a guy from the state department say to me we can get you in. There was no more to that sentence. [laughter] and so my wife weighed on that one and said, no, youre not going to north korea. But thats a big part of it. See it, feel it, walk the ground and i try to do that in every book ive done but the research is key, the research is the biggest part of it. It takes long tore do the research than manuscript. I can write a manuscript typically in about 5 months and thats every day. Thatss fulltime. 7 days. I lose what track of the day it is. Its that that involved with both feet but im very fortunate that i can do this fulltime. A lot of writers cannot write fulltime. My father had to teach at Florida State to make a living because he couldnt make a living from his writing so ive been very fortunate about that and i dont take it for granted. And turns out the site that you went that that includes vic . Absolutely. The other partso that is different the character in this book . This was a challenge because in every book ive done theres different points of view. Usually 3 to 4 to 5 characters and you go back and forth from each point of view and that moves you through the timeline. And thats the way ive done almost every book. This was very different because theres one character, theres one voice and youre with him, youre with him at the end of his life,e, youre with him as e refers back to all these different events in his life and youre traveling in his memory with his memory. Thats different for me. Ive never done that before. I hope it works. Earlier we talked about your father writing for love of the game. That brings to mind, you have youre a storyteller, deeply gifted storyteller and take the book that its about baseball. It makes me think, well, i will write about babe ruth or jesse owen, the life that you will tell the life of an iconic american . Weve agonized, my publisher and editor debated this for hours trying to figure out who would be a good character to write about and there are all kinds of names but none of them are teddy, none of them have the kind of story that he has. I will tell you that my next book which will come out next may, we just put it to bed, its finished edited, its called the its called the that dow of war and its on the cuban missile crisis. And thank you for that. Ive done this ive spoken to a number of audiences and i mention what the book is about and i test to see what your response is and because if your initial response, instinctive response, ah, i have a problem. [laughter] the positive groan is a good thing. Thank you for that. Theyll be out next may and thats a story that talk about Young Students and those of us of a certain age and there are some of you in this audience know exactly what the cuban w missile crisis was like and what we went through and you remember duck and cover and all of that and young people have no idea and they need to know because thats as close as we ever came to Nuclear Holocaust and its an important story. So im very happy with that. Thatll be out. We are talking about some other ideas. I dont want to get into that too much but, you know, im always looking for ideas. One thing im getting away from is the war story, the pure war story which is one reason i didnt do canal and hiroshima is toin try something different. This is my 19th book. You know, for me, its i dont want to ever become formulaic. You can sort of do it by blueprint and i dont ever want to do that. Thats one reason im accepting the challenge to do some of the other stories. The other part when you moved into world war ii and certainly with korea and certainly the new book, youre in a different area because you have living participants, no one from the revolution is going to come back and challenge, civil war. Talk about how that worked when you started writing books about living veterans . I will specifically mention core beach i had a veteran friend of my wifes family sit in my living room. He was a machine gunner and he talked about freezing cold, 40 below zero. He talked about having sleeping bag on his chest and he told me he would answer any question i have except dont ask me about my friends. Fair enough. He wouldnt talk about thehe guy next to him, what might have happened but he told me all kinds of things. He told me when he gotos frostbite. He suffered to the end of his life he lived because of the frostbite he got at the chosen reservoir and they said they stacked them up and they are getting ready to evacuate them and they wrap their feet and the only thing they had which was straw that the doctors had to foresight to gather up rice straw as they were going up the hill andd so they had the straw to wrap their feet in, thats all they could do to try to protect help the frostbite. Thats just one example. He told me a lot of things that are in the book and his name was eugene pete sanders and i asked him why he got called pete and he didnt tell me and something about being 5 years old and i will leave it at that. I had the first copy of the book came out, the frozen hours is the book, the first copy of the book and i have a photograph he was at the hall and i was giving him a copy of the book and six months later he passed away andr that was really tough for my family. Well, thats one example of respect. Thats one thing i talked before about getting it right and dond play games with history, part of it when you have living veterans is respect them and tell their story the right way, tell the story the way they would appreciate it. So that was the difference in having livering veterans. World war ii, i had some living people, i had an example of a fellow who was in the 42nd infantry, the Rainbow Division and went up to liberated in the concentration camp and what his experiences were, i have his journal and actually some photographs and that allowed me to write that chapter with authentication. These are 18yearold kid walks up to the fence in concentration camp. They dont know what they are going to see and what they see becomes part of the story and its authentic because this guy was there. That theres nothing theres no substitute for that and, you know, one of the advantages and i will go back to the cuban missile crisis story is i can write with authenticities because i was there. Thats the first time that happened. When i introduced you i talked about the workshops that you were doing with troops and again on domestic bases, you know, in the persian gulf during the war and military families were also present too. And you gave tips and, of course, paired up a mutual friend actor steven lange who is in star gods in general and yallow know him from avatar as the colonel. Do you we have so many kind of selfpublicked writersre her, people that inspired to tell their family story, maybe if its just for their own family members, what do you have to say if somebody wants to get their story unlocked, personal story . My function in operation function was to lead writing workshops, richardson, base in alaska, colorado, and i was at the persian gulf on the Aircraft Carrier and the missile destroyer. What an experience. This is active duty, were in a war zone and my job was to convince these young people to tell their story and give them some hints of how to do that. Not all of them were young, a lot of senior people. That was one of the most gratifying things in my career. What i try to tell people if you want to do this, you want to tell your story and i dont care what your story is about, the topic doesnt matter, it can be about your grandfather, your dog, your next door neighbor, i mean,oo it makes no difference t you have to have a passion for telling that story because if you dont, if you dont have the passion for writing the story, why would anybody else want to read it . Why wouldod anybody care . Thats the first thing. Thats the wrong way to go about it. Write because its a story that you want to tell. Dont worry about whether or not you can write. I get that one all of the time. How do i know i can write . You dont. I had no clue. You sit down and write, just write the story. Let somebody else figure out if youre a good writer or not. Take me there. Show it, dont tell it. Show it. Take me with you. If youre going tong tell me abt talk about your grandfather, if youre going to tell me about your grandfather, take me there, dont just tell me about them, dont just tell me what kind of guy it is. Sit me down with him and have a conversation, you know, show it, dont tellll it. On and on, a lot of it sounds cliche and i realize that. But it applies and if you want to be a writer just do it and my father used to teach creative writing in Florida State as i would say and he would teach his students the big method. If youu want to be a writer you have to employ the bic method. In butt in chair. Its not going the happen if you dont put your butt in the chair. [laughter] so we have about ten minutes and were going to give that time force audience. Please have a question, not a speech because hes going to yield his last ten minutes to you. F if somebody has a question if not i will ask a few more for the last minutes. When i want to relax, i read your books, what do you read . Thank you. Who doo you read . Who do you read for enjoyment . It surprises people that i dont read fiction and theres a reason for that. I am scared to death of being accused of plagiarism. If i read your novel and one line comes out in my story by accident, thats the pure definition. Any accusation of it and in these days its easy, you can go on lane and type in a line of dialogue and find out whose book itt was in. Its easy to be accused of that. You know, i know what she went through andmb Steven Ambrose wet through. No fault of their own, things just happened and it can cost me my career. Thats the reason i dont read fiction. What things can i apply from Teddy Roosevelts life . I dont think anybody can be like Teddy Roosevelt. Thats not always practical and he was and to a fault he was open to any experience and live beyond yourself, live for others, liver to do good, live to leave something behind. I have desperately tried to do that in my career. I didnt start at all. Well, its probably going to outlive me, hopefully a hundred years from now, maybe your great grandchildren will be reading my books. What an incredible thing that is. Thats the way i like to look at it. The otherea thing i really like about this book and i did not know this about Teddy Roosevelt, didnt have the frame, his life story cannot it only be told without his two wives but this is a story where the domestic lifefe really neighbors, his relationship with his kids particularly his daughter. This really comes through, how did you decide, you probably have given more to the family life which i thinknk is a right idea. Its chronological. You have to you are covering enormous amount of history and as it happens, the deathhis first wife which is to me the most the second most difficult part of this book to write and to read to me is the death of his first wife and what how that happens and what it means to him and how it continues to affect him for the rest of his life. Hell never speak of her. Its just there. Its an episode that happens and occurs but he has to go on with his life and then the other hardest part of of writing this book and i will just say this is thee end because he was done. I was done. And i didnt want to be done but thats just the way the story goes. Thats my job is just to take you through the timeline and follow each episode or each part of his layoff as it happens. Was me more expressive of grief . I couldnt hear all what you said. Was he more expressive after the death right. I know you said after the death of his first wife he never spoke of her again. Right. By the time clinton died was he more expressive of his grief at that stage of life . I think so because first of all i think his own mortality was sort of staring him in the face and also he had edith and she was a different person than alysse was different. His first relationship with his first wife,e, storybook, romancs and stars going off and this kind of stuff but edith was the mother of his children to his attitude was very different but i think he was so sick and Failing Health at the time of clintons death that it just was it was just a part of everything that was going on. So it is a very different experience and his reaction to it was very different. We will take maybe one more question from the audience but please use the microphone so that thero cspan audience can hear and the others in the room. Theres a microphone at the podium if anybody a has a question. You talked about stepping foot on various places before writing about them. Ou did you go to cuba, San Juan Hill . No. Theres some limitations and i will tell you about a couple o. Going to cuba being a tourist, these days its easier than it was 20 years ago but i did not do that. The other is i wrote a trilogy inin europe, the first one is rising tide and its africa and i wanted to go in the worst wayy to the Libyan Desert because in the Libyan Desert, montgomery, all the british and german stuff is still there, its the desert. Nothing happens to it. How cool would that be to go see all the tanks and all this stuff and again the state department, the state Department Said well, we really dont think that you can goca to, you know, one of te big cities and be a tourist. But we really dont want americans wandering around in the Libyan Desert by themselves and i had s to take that to heat and accept their advice. There are some places i cant go but when its possible, when its reasonable i will say i definite i will go. Im not surprised at all that if the National Endowment of the arts we were able to get in some places in a way the state department didnt just for the record. [laughter] we will maybe end with this and any c last comments that you have, we talked about youre in this Historic House in gettysburg. Youre not just a writer of history, talk about historic preservation, Historic Sites mean a great deal to you. I just wonder if you want to talk about the idea of preserving history. Yeah, i was on the board of the battlefield trust for 6 years and learned a lot about battlefield preservation and Historical Preservation in general. Ira mean, i bought an old victorian house that was in horrible condition and my wife and i, we restored it. We fixed it up. I appreciate what goes into that, but as far as battlefield, its been said so many times, once they are gone, they are, gone and once you build a strip mall across, you know, wherever, youre not going to get it back and so i very strongly believe in that. I very strongly support it. I put my money where my mouth is and i would implore all of you to take at least some interest in in preserving, you know, what we have because we have less of it now than we had ten years ago and less of it then in ten years before that and its ongoing. So thats thats my commercial, i strongly strongly hope that you would supportup battlefield preservatn or Historical Preservation of any kind. Thats a great note to end on. The mississippi and everyday citizens and nonprofits are committed to that and i hope at 3 00 oclock that we will see you in the signing and my friend, thank you, sir. Remarkable book by an incredible human being, so thank you. Thank you. [applause] this year book tv marks 25 years of shining the spotlight on nonfiction authors and their books with talks with more than 22,000 authors, nearly 900 cities and festival visited and 16,000 events. 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