Watch the communicators tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan 2. Announcer this week on q a, author and Real Clear Politics Washington Bureau chief carl cannon. He discusses his book on this date from the pilgrims to today, discovering america one day at a time. Brian carl cannon, your new book on this date from the pilgrims to today, discovering america one day at a time. What is it . Carl it is a snapshot, it is a morsel. Like tapas. A morsel each day from january 1 through december 31, an essay on something that happened in American History on that date that tells you something you may not know and gives you an understanding of this country you did not have. Brian how do people find it . Exactly how do they find it . Carl how do people find my book . Brian no, how did you find the essay topics . Carl i do something that relates to whatever is going on that day. I have been doing it for 5. 5 years now. It is just a rambling thing. Brian for somebody who is not real good on the internet, they go to realclearpolitics. Com. Carl they go to a. M. Note, and they click on it. If they like it, they can get it in their mailbox. Every day, five or six days a week. Brian what about the archives and all the 5. 5 years of these . Carl we go back and forth with our i. T. Guy. That is the sore point. I wish you would not have raised it. Thats why they need to buy the book. Brian lets start with the first one. January 1, 1915, everybody stopped and stared. What is it . Carl the first female cab driver in new york. These essays are about 400 words. You can use in economy of language. Tell a story in 400500 words. This woman loved cars. She was a mechanic, she loved cars. This woman shows up on the corner and the first hurdle is, are her papers in order . There is a patrolman there. One up new yorks finest. He looks at the papers. Her papers are okay. The next hurdle, what are the male cabdrivers going to say . They go to the opposite corner and they caucus. They say in my mind one of them knows her. Whatever happened, they decide to accept this. We wont make trouble. We will be good about this. The third hurdle, and all of this unfolds in chapter one, how will the public it is a service industry, driving a cab. What will the public think . A few minutes later, someone gets in and she asks where you want to go and they say, we just want to ride in your cab. And in way, and that little incremental story, progress takes place. Brian how many essays . Carl 368. I do it every day, plus leap year. And a couple days i did a few of them. I guess it was my signal to the reader that you could have picked any of 1000 days. On one day, august 28, i could not decide and i sent three of them in. Brian how long does it take to research and write these . Carl when i do my Early Morning note, i get up early in the morning at 5 00 a. M. I Wander Around my library, come up with a subject and research it. They take about two or three hours to do. When i made this book contract, i thought i had already written a book, i would just take my notes. It turns out, i had to write a book. It took a while. I had to rereport and rewrite all of them is what i am saying. Brian i want to pick something right in the middle of the book. It was interesting how many chapters you devoted to the uss indianapolis. The first day i found was july 28, 1945, the secret mission. Carl most of these are one page, two pages. 450 words. I think one of them is three pages. I have to or three things i revisit. This one is five days running, the first one is the first week of august 1945. It is so many stories wrapped into one. First of all, it is a tragedy. All these guys are thrown in the water, world war ii. It was a big ship. Navy ship. A cruiser. It comes out of San Francisco. It had gone there for repairs. There is a secret mission. What is the secret mission . There is a thing loaded on to it, very heavy. It is uranium. It is the component of the atom bomb. It is so topsecret that the navy does not do the normal things. This ship, after it delivers its cargo, it has to rendezvous for what maybe is the battle of japan. It doesnt get an escort. Not many people are aware it is missing. It is sent to submarineinfested waters and they go into the water. 900 guys go into the water. Nobody is looking for them. What happens to them . The story is they drown. They die of dehydration. Sharks eat them. Its horrible. It takes five days in the book, but it took years for this story to resolve itself. The caption is courtmartialed. He is movie starhandsome. The men love him. He was a scapegoat. Years later reinstated by the he never recovers. He takes his own life. Years later, theres a boy in florida watching the movie jaws. In the movie, quint has a soliloquy on why he hates sharks, he was on the indianapolis. Many people who saw jaws in this country had never heard of the indianapolis. Brian why did you pick it . Do you remember . Carl i picked it because at the end of the five days there is a kid in florida, he thinks the captain has been railroaded, and he wants to do something about it. He does do something about it. I will not give away the whole story because it is a fun one, but Joe Scarborough has an interesting cameo and eventually the navy admits the captain was blameless. It matters to those people who were on the ship, the handful who are still alive. Brian out of all the years, did you have one they got the most reaction . Carl people grab the book if their name is there. That is why Richard Ben Cramer in what it takes did not have an index. He wanted people to look through the book. People look up their birthday. Individual people have different reactions to it. One of the reactions i got a lot was to august 28. The one i did two days. It is the second one, the Martin Luther king story. I do not write about the speech, i write about a kid who was railroaded for a murder that day that he did not do and how that speech played in interesting roll it in him eventually getting him exonerated. Brian how did it play a role . Carl he was africanamerican and he was accused of this murder and he did not do it. He was convicted. When the case was reopened by a crusading New York Times reporter who went back and looked at it, his alibi checked out. And the reason it checked out was his 10 or 11 africanamerican friends all remember exactly where they were and that he was with them because there was the Martin Luther king speech and he was watching them with it. The chapter is, they had a dream, too. Brian here is one, august 21, 1959, this is one of those universal news reels. We will just watch less than minute of it and you can tell us the rest. [begin video clip] it is made official at the white house, president eisenhower congratulates the new representative of hawaii. Adding the 50th and southernmost part of the United States with a population of 600,000. During the signing, the president was flanked by Vice President nixon and speaker of the house sam rayburn. This is a historic occassion. For the second time in a little over a year, a new state has been admitted to the union. [end video clip] brian how big a deal was that for president eisenhower . That was a big deal. He looks happy and he was. That is not fake. He referenced a year and a half early. That was alaska. He was seething. He wanted hawaii. He wanted both. He got his way and pushed for it hard. When ike got angry, people came around. Like most American Military people, hawaii had a dear place in eisenhowers heart. It had been attacked. Pearl harbor took place in hawaii. Everybody in the United States took that as an attack on the United States. Some of the southern democrats argued it was a tactical one. Eisenhower would not have it. You can see he was happy that day and that was genuine. On that date, i write in my book the congressman who lost an arm fighting in the famed 442nd regiment. I consider him one of his guys. Brian Richard Nixon on the right, eisenhower on the left. Do you have any personal recollection of rayburn . Carl i think about rayburn and eisenhower and lyndon johnson. Ike was born in texas. I think of these three guys sitting around in the white house and running the world. I do not want to go back to the days when three white male from texas ran the country but back then it seemed like a better system than we have now. I think of them sitting over their bourbon and branch water and running the world. I dont think we want to go back to the days when three white males from texas ruled the country, but sometimes i get nostalgic. It seems like it was a better system than what we have now. Brian heres another universal newsreel. This one is from october 19 57. The best thing is comparing what has happened in the world since this was made. How much more we know about this kind of thing. [begin video clip] today, a new moon is in the sky. A metal sphere placed by a russian rocket. Here is an artist conception of how the feat was accomplished. Its weight estimated at 50 tons. The artificial moon is put to speed counterbalancing gravity and released. You are hearing be signal transmitted by the satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age. [end video clip] brian one of the first things i want to ask you about is not in the book but the handling on that was reds. Why would we not see that headline today . Carl we might. We have this russia scandal with the donald trump. Now it is the democrats. We are talking about russians again the way we used to talk about them then. Actually, sometimes what goes around comes around, and that is a deliberate pun about sputnik. When sputnik is up in the sky, it sent shockwaves through this country. People thought it is not just the soviet union doing this, the country thought, they are superior to us. They have a technological advantage over us. They are in the heavens before us. It was a shock. Eisenhower, were just talking about a minute ago, demanded to know about it. Why he did not know. The New York Times demanded the same thing. Congress demanded the same thing. Lyndon johnson raised hell about it. This was a big deal. A radio commentator said, listen now. That sound for evermore separates the old from the new. That is what he said about sputnik. Brian page 289, the headline is ground zero. The sky was that same unbelievable blue in new york city to use springsteens phrase. It would be eight decades later on 9 11. Almost instantly, the air was black with smoke, the street red with blood. What were you getting at with this one . Carl this is a bombing on the wall street by anarchists. We do not have a better word now. It was a terrorist act that killed a lot of innocent people, mostly working people. It did not kill wealthy one 1 ers or whatever the phrase was at the time. Widely condemned. I used it to show we have had these attacks before. There are three or four themes in my book, one, if things seem terrible, momentous inconceivable to us, we have had , them before. We had one in new york. People did not, talk about the wall street bombing. The bombing backfired on the people who did it, it humanized wall street. It reminded people these were human beings. It was an event that brought people together in the end. Brian 38 dead. Carl no warning of any kind. All of a sudden a bomb goes off. People in the street. Blood of running in the gutter. Brian they say the crime was never solved. Is it still on somebodys radar screen . Carl good question. I dont know. Maybe my book could be the next time, 385 unsolved crimes. Brian do you have any idea why it wasnt solved . Carl it was widely considered a political act. World war i had been this cataclysmic event. It had unleashed forces. The bolshevik revolution had taken place. People were questioning capitalism itself and were thinking there were a lot of people in this country, i do not want to say leftwing or right wing, but they wouldve considered themselves leftwing. They thought the United States had entered world war i and people had profited from it. There was a lot of hatred on the left toward wall street from people who thought this way. That is why said this helped humanize wall street. It helped dissipate some of those feelings. Brian i am jumping all over the place. October 5, 1947. Page 309. Guns then butter. You talk about the first tv address of president truman. To address a looming human catastrophe, the u. S. President employed a new technology. The first televised address from the white house. Anybody watch it . Carl yes. It wasnt like now, people did watch it and talk about it. From the beginning of Television People when it those things in their houses. They were expensive. They were black and white. President s embraced technology. That is one of the things we know. They embraced it so they can communicate. A lot of of people look askance at Donald Trumps twitter habits. His impulse to reach as many people as he can without a filter. It is an impulse all the president s have had. Truman was not the first. In this case you had a collection of forces coming together. The Marshall Plan. Herbert hoover once again coming into Public Service to organize relief efforts in europe credited with saving lives. One guy, herbert hoover. Truman tapped in. Second time he had been tapped by a democratic president. When i was a young reporter, he would still talk about hoover at these democratic rallies. Hoovers legacy is much more complicated than the president who did not do enough after the stock market crash or during the depression. Herbert hoover, Woodrow Wilson center. His efforts saved many, many people. He did the same thing after world war ii. Brian you talk about the Marshall Plan. How important was said and what was it . Carl the Marshall Plan was a plan to offer relief. Food, housing, medicine, clothing. Other things, too, but mostly food after the war. It was sold as an anticommunism measure. Greece was on the verge. Other countries, too. Eastern europe was behind the iron curtain and western europe, which way did they want to go . The Marshall Plan was a map to defuse american hate. It was not really motivated it was mostly motivated by anticommunism. Americans got it, it was to help people we did not want to see starve. It was altruism. Brian you go from George Washington to the current president. You have items on almost every president along the way. From your standpoint, what is the most interesting president in history to write about . Carl that is lincoln. But i could do every one on lincoln. I had to watch myself. When i got these morning notes i had written for real clear politics and looked at them there were probably 30 or 40 on lincoln. I learned something about myself doing this about president s. About how i feel about president s. There is more truman then roosevelt and that is interesting because Franklin Roosevelt is considered the greatest president in the 20th century. Some conservatives will tell you regan is there with him. Ok. Im being generous. One of the two greatest president s of the 20th century. Most scholars think he is the third greatest after toward washington and lincoln. But i find myself coming back to truman. When truman left office, he had 25 he had Richard Nixons Approval Ratings after watergate. Jimmy carter and george w. Bush had these low Approval Ratings. Truman, by the end of his presidency, democrats will not be seen with him. They will not campaign with him. They want to offer the nomination dwight eisenhower. It turns out he is not even a democrat. Senator fulbright shows up and says, we should go to a parliamentarian system. They cannot stand this guy. He has weathered well in history. In previous stories i called him the patron saint of beleaguered president. But he is more than that. He is this principled guy who is a truthteller. He weathers well. After world war ii, these africanamerican soldiers come back and theyre suffering the same conditions or worse. Lynchings, violence, after fighting for their own home. Truman, with the stroke of a pen signs and order integrating the American Armed forces. Something Eleanor Roosevelt could not even get fdr to talk about. I will answer questions. I must like truman more than roosevelt. I would not say it out loud, but there i have said it. Brian what is realclearpolitics. Com . Carl it was started 17 years ago by two guys who went to princeton at the same time. They weirdly didnt know each other. After college, they were political junkies, they were doing different jobs. One was a day trader, one was in politics. But politics was their passion. They saw a need where you can get a onestop shop of politics whether you are a conservative or liberal or libertarian. It turns out not only was our Business Model about to be blown up because of the internet. These two guys who knew nothing about the news business, that was a time when it was the right amount to know. We who had grown up around it had negative knowledge. Things we thought were true or not true. And they started this company. It is a free website. Anyone can go to it. It started it as an aggregation. We have 17 stories on our front page every day. It is left, right, center. It is unpredictable. Whatever your views are about politics, youll find them there. Then they started aggregating polls. Other people do it, too, but they were the first. When you aggregate polling, you do not run around with your hair on fire and think the race is going one way when it is not. You can sort of have a calm review of what is going on in politics. Now we have a staff. We have reporters. I oversee the original content. We have reporters covering the white house and congress. I am pretty proud of it. Our goal is to adhere to the old model, which is the model i grew up in, which is we are not taking sides. Were just trying to present the information and trust the voters to get it right. Brian where is it based . Carl it was based in chicago but we have graduated incrementally and migrated to washington. We have an office at the Mayflower Hotel and we are bursting at the seams and growing. It is really based here in washington. Brian how does it make money . Carl we stay in business is the oldfashioned model. Ads. We do not do clickbaiting. We hope there is an audience who wants the news without a lot of hype and so far it is working. Brian is it working financially . Carl we are growing. The paychecks clear. Brian how many people work on realclearpolitics. Com . Carl we are up to 5060 people. Carl small step, but we are growing. Brian what is available there beside polls and an aggregation of some of the stories and editorials . Carl there is video, video of interesting clips. Pretty good archives. So you can follow what has been happening in the past. The stories i commission and edit. Brian is this the best job you have ever had . Carl it is the best job i have ever had. Brian what over the years was your favorite job besides this . Carl when i came to washington, i thought i would be here two years and thought i would get back to california but reagan was president and that did not happen. I helped set up politics daily at aol. I just, you know what, i love what we do. I have loved it since my first newspaper job. I was a paperboy delivering the San Francisco chronicle. Brian where is your dad . Carl my dad is in california. If you were with reagan, he spent a year of your life in santa barbara. There were other people who do not spend on that time up there. He fell in love with that area. My dad grew up in nevada. I was born and raised in california, where my mother is from. But he, we did not know that part of the country and he fell in love with santa barbara. He bought a house out there. And after he retired, he moved out there. He writes for us. He does freelance work for us and an occasional column. He writes for state net. He is in his mid80s. He covered the scottish elections for real clear politics, that was a few years ago. He went there to do it. I will match his coverage against anybodys. He is the only 82yearold Foreign Correspondent on that story. Brian page 351, the First World War ended on this date. A ceasefire was signed at the 11th hour at the 11th day, at the 11th month of the year. In here are the words from Woodrow Wilson, you said he never said. Carl it is the war to end all wars . Yeah. You found this on a number of occasions. Carl that is something i try to do. We think we know history, we know some of these stories. But some of what we think we know is wrong. Now, the Woodrow Wilson thing is a much less arrogant and much more appealing, really a better comment. But it is not far off. But some president s, i mean i have Calvin Coolidge in here and he is famous, the quote you will here is, the business of america is business. He said that, but it is the opposite of what he was then. He said, he knows profit is not enough. And he said the real business of america is altruism. That is Calvin Coolidge. It is a particularly unfortunate misquote. He was speaking at the press club. If ever the what if ever there was a quote we should have gotten right, it was that. He was speaking to american newspaper editors. Ive been known to be a schooled in other forms. About wrong quotes. I have a couple of examples like that, where it is important in history to go to the original sources and do your own thinking and to see what people really said. Brian this is from april the 30, 1975. It is an abc news report. A lot of people will remember this day. It is the american evacuation of saigon. The vietnamese were fleeing with every available transport. Loads of men, women and children were appearing at the command ship. They were searched on arrival for the many weapons they had in their possession, weapons thrown overboard. However, the navy was caught by surprise by the way that many finally reached the u. S. Ship. Perhaps the great show of panic where the stolen helicopters, choppers crashing into the sea on arrival. People diving for safety. The blades of the helicopters were flying in all directions and they were no longer of use. As they came, the navy tried to decide what to do with the airplanes that managed to land on the deck. It was decided to tip them into the sea. Brian there are many people that live in this country right now that can remember that day because they were there. What did you write about on that day . Carl i wrote about the song that played over the radio, White Christmas which was an odd song to play in that part of the world. Playich was an odd song to on that date in any part of the world. And this was ignoble. This was not like dunkirk. The United States left. And we left without adequate warning to the people who supported us. We are not used to losing wars. This was a different experience for the people who lived through it, not just the people that were there. Years later Ronald Reagan would call it a noble cause. But it did not seem noble at the time. Whatever your view, if you are against the war this would have seemed like a waste. If you had supported the war, cut and run, it was a tough time. Brian off of this piece, lets go to White Christmas and irving berlin. Carl i thought you had a clip. Brian you are the clip. [laughter] carl it is not just politics. There are athletes in this book, musicians, horses, and jockeys. And i write about elvis, the beach boys, john lennon in new york. I write about bing crosby. It was an unlikely hit. It has never gone away. It stayed with us. It was written by an immigrant. That is another theme in my book, immigrants. Brian why did you dedicate the book to immigrants . Carl in american politics right now, i used to cover this last election. We have this broken debate on immigration. Liberals will tell you that donald trump won by appealing to racist impulses. I think that is unfair. Conservatives will tell you, which country does not defend its borders . That is defensive. We are not having a political conversation, not even a civil conversation, and what i wanted to do was take a step back and not debate the merits of an immigration bill, but remind americans that when somebody says america is a nation of immigrants that is not a cliche, that is a historic fact. Not only that, immigrants have been there at key places in our history when we needed them, making giving us something that we needed, an invention, an idea. Jose andres is a chef. He invented small plate dining here in washington just at that time that we were about to start being so fat we are all going to die. And i am only half kidding. Here is another example. When a group of immigrant scientists realized that nazi germany was trying to build an atomic bomb, they got authorized they thought that they needed to get word to the president and they got Albert Einstein to write a letter. He is the most famous immigrant scientist we have had. Because it is einstein, the president reads it and launches the manhattan project. Freedom of the press. The great freedom of the press case predates john peters anger is an immigrant. He is from germany. He picks a fight with the crown over the governor of new york. He is turning out a political newspaper. But he writes that you have to have freedom of the press. It is not in our law. We do not have laws. We are british subjects. He is put in prison by the governor. And when he finally comes out eight months later, he apologizes but not to the governor, but to his readers for missing a single edition of his paper. Another immigrant, a third immigrant enters our story. Andrew hamilton, no relation to alexander hamilton, is from scotland and he argues the case for jury nullification. He went past the court and talked to the jury. Which meant he went to the phrase of jury of public opinion. Hurrahs breakout in the courtroom 50 years before the declaration of independence. They exonerated him. We think that the founding fathers, that the country created freedom of the press. But really it is the other way around. Freedom of the press helped create this country. And there was an immigrant fighting and went to jail for it. Brian this is nbc news september 5, 1975. This is a political trip. Part of the president s campaign to lock up the nomination. So he was shaking hands as he went along, working the crowd. As politicians say. And it was a friendly crowd, accompanied by aides, he reached for every hand in sight. [chatter] suddenly a young Woman Holding a gun appeared at the president s side. Secret service grabbed the gun and wrestled the woman to the ground as other agents formed a protective shield around the president and moved him swiftly to the capital. I think the secret service and the other Law Enforcement agencies that were on the job were doing a superb job. I want to thank them for everything they did in this unfortunate incident. Brian that was sacramento. Squeaky fromm, then a couple of weeks later it was San Francisco and sara jane moore. What impact did that have on the presidency and the country . Carl two women, slightly unhinged. They tried to take a shot at the president. It helped, it did not do much to the presidency. It endeared people to jerry ford. After the pardon of nixon, he had never run for president. And it helped humanize ford. So he comes back to the white house 17 days later. She could have killed the president. She bought the gun that morning. She had never tested it. It did not fire right. That is a scary thing. Anyway, ford came back. The reporters come to the white house. They say, can you tell us how you feel . He takes a deep breath and says, i just want to look at all of you for a moment. Can i just do that . That was jerry ford. Imagine the president saying that today, so happy to see the reporters again, he was happy to be alive. Brian november 18, 1867. Page 359. Im trying to help you. Carl you could have stumped me. Brian dickens in america, part one and part two. Why dickens . Carl his visits to america are fascinating. The first time he comes, he has been greeted as this hero. He is a massive celebrity. That was before there were mass celebrities. People wanted his autograph. They wanted his time, his hair, they wanted everything. A couple of things, one, there is no Real International copyright law. So all of these people are publishing his books and he is not getting a nickel from it in the United States. And he sours a bit on americans. At first, he loved this. Then he decided that americans are rude. He talks about in washington, people eat with their mouths open. He goes back to england and he writes a book, a nasty book about us. And then these people who have dickens in their house felt betrayed. He was dead to us. Then after the war, he comes back. He is different and we are different. And it is a very positive experience. I do it in two parts to set the scene. Dickens is the guy in some ways that helps invent christmas as we celebrate it. He has a lot to do with that. A cartoonist who is also in this book, he is the guy that portrays the democrats as donkeys and republicans as elephants, also draws saint nicholas, santa claus, as the jolly old elf. With a Christmas Carol and the other man, these are people who had a great impact on our country. Dickens is a visitor. The cartoonist is an immigrant. But again, the theme is there, america is richer because we borrow from these cultures. They talk about cultural appropriation, but they are missing the point. That is the culture is, appropriating other peoples habits and theories and food and conversation, ideas into your own. Brian how much of this do you agree with . Charles dickens, you write, concluded scholar jerome meckler found americans overbearing, boastful, vulgar, uncivil, insensitive, and above all acquisitive. Carl i do not agree with any of that. That was his first visit. On his second visit, he apologized. He said he was like, scrooge coming back. He was reformed. And it is dickens two that i think about when i think about how he thought about americans. He atoned. Brian page 369, breakfast of champions. We are talking about William Howard taft and how he ate. Carl wait a minute. Wait a minute. Before we go to taft, dickens describes america on his first visit, but this book is about the american identity. And as i sit here thinking about it, if you ask me what i think of americans, what i think comes through in this book, we are optimistic. I think we are inventive. I think what fdr said, we have a can do spirit. I think we are brave. We are more warlike than we would like to think of ourselves. But mostly we are problem solvers. It can mean anything. It can be scientific or social. We try to get it right. And we usually in the end, we do. It can take a while. Brian as i was saying, breakfast of champions. There is a connection here. William howard taft at his heaviest was 332 pounds. He liked to eat breakfast alone and almost never before noon. Anybody with a jangled lifestyle needs one psychic anchor every 24 hours, and mine is breakfast, thompson wrote. That was journalist hunter thompson. Carl that is not taft, that is thompson. That is the fun thing about this book. I can go from taft to thompson. How can you do that . You can write about what they had for breakfast. Taft was a guy who was ahead of his time. He had a weight problem. And he knew it. Stress increased it. He ballooned up. To be president , that was not the job he really wanted. He wanted to be on the Supreme Court and he eventually was. The exercise he liked was horseback riding. Insert joke here. You know [laughter] if you are the horse. But he kept a journal of what he ate. He was an early sort of guy, you could argue that he discovered he founded weight watchers. He just could not always stick to it. Brian you go on to say that he described the contents of the meal itself. Food factors should be massive. Four bloody marys, pot of coffee, crates, i have pound of either sausage, bacon, spanish omelette or eggs, chopped lemon, and Something Like a slice of key lime pie and two margaritas for dessert. Was he serious . Carl no. But he was taking liberties. And if you look at the ellipses there, that was where the cocaine goes. My publisher asked me to drop it. Maybe kids want to read the book. Brian why do we Pay Attention to thompson . Carl look at the writing. Obviously he is exaggerating. He covers bill clinton. He goes down with bill grider, when he is working for rolling stone, and they interview bill clinton in 1991 and he was running for president. Thompson does the same kind of thing. He is writing the story and goes off in his flights of fancy. He has clinton grabbing the food and putting the big mac, stuffing his face. Putting the french fries of his nose. It is a style of writing. Gonzo journalism. He is the last practitioner of it. It is satire. And it would probably be lost in todays literal world where we have to do emoticons to show people that we are kidding or being ironic. Thompson was a brilliant writer. His observations, he would make a point in this event duration. In this exaggeration. He would paint a picture for you. You would see it. There was a great writer, jim murray, a Sports Writer for the New York Times. He would use metaphors. People thought it was great writing. It was a hybrid of journalism and fiction, and he was the best. Brian you say you get up at 5 00 in the morning and write these pieces. When do you send them out . Carl 9 00 eastern time. Five days a week. Brian have you ever missed a deadline . Carl i have missed deadline, but it is virtual journalism. We dont have to stop the presses. I try to get out by 9 00. I have missed a deadline. Couple of them in july. Brian what kind of library do you have . Carl i have 2000 books. Now i have an excuse to keep them. Brian how often with those books do you find your items . This,when i first started there are a halfdozen websites. The library of congress has one. National archives, New York Times, the History Channel has a good one. And i pick something. Something every day. After a while, i think that is not very original. And so i began keeping a file of dates i wanted to use. I had this tickler file. It was more timeconsuming and in a sense more rewarding. When i really started getting going on this a couple of years ago. Now i usually pick something i want to write about and find a date that corresponds to it. That is more difficult. That is where the books come in. But it is more rewarding. Brian whose idea was it to put these different columns together, these different essays into a book . Carl you know, there is a publisher called sean desmond. He came down and we were having a cup of coffee at the mayflower. I do not drink coffee, but he was having coffee. I was having an adult beverage. He asked me if i knew anybody who wanted to write a book. And i took that as an opening. I said, im thinking about turning my morning notes into a book for you. He said that would actually be interesting. It came out of that. Brian and 12 means something. Carl 12 books. The idea is that they put one book a month. Sometimes they do more than that. Originally, it is one book a month and they are all going to be bestsellers. I do not know if this will be a bestseller, but i hope it will be. I want people to read about their country and maybe fall in love little bit with their country again. Brian december 10, 1869 in wyoming. State of equality. Page 386. Carl mhm. Brian this chapter begins remember the ladies. Carl Abigail Adams had written to john adams. It took a while. It took wyoming a long time to give the vote to women. Brian how much did it take off people that before they became a state they were able to vote. You say that they had difficulty becoming a state because people resented the fact that people have the right to vote. Carl look, women were going to get the right to vote. There was no excuse for this. And they did not really offer a reason, they just said no. It came down to wyoming, and you want to be a state or not . Wyoming said if that is the price of it, then fine, were not going backwards like that. And you could argue that it took another 50 years or more. It took six more decades, but you could argue that after that, after wyoming did that, it was just a matter of time. Brian i once asked a historian from the university of Southern Illinois who was an expert on lincoln and editor of the grant papers, was there anything about grant you did not like . It was funny. I was in the library and he said, follow me. He walked over and he picked out one book, and in there was what he had said about jews. Carl i knew that is where you are going. Brian on page 397, grants folly, you talk about this relationship and the beginning, grant and what he had said about jews. Carl when grant was commander in the western theater, there were privateers who would come in and they wanted to sell army stuff. Several of them were jewish, but they were brought there by grants father. He had a difficult relationship with his father. You get the idea that he is really mad at his father. He issues this hasty order that no jews can be in the district. You have to leave. And his wife is appalled. The other Commanding Officers do not want to follow the order. Lincoln rescinds it a few days later. It is just stupid. But grant regretted it the rest of his life. He atoned for it when he became president. He put jews in office. He spoke about it. He wrote about it. He atoned. No one is perfect. Brian march 12, 1901. Andrew carnegie said that there are three stages to life, you put it in your book, the first third of his life was acquiring his education. The second third, acquiring wealth. The last third, giving money away to worthy causes. Carl this repeats itself over and over again. It is part of the american identity, you come from nothing and you can make money. Then the question, what do you do with it . The first thing people do with it, in this day and age in that day and age, they buy their mother a nice house. They buy themselves fancy things. After a while, they realize that is not enough. There are very few people where that is ever enough. They need some other reward. They want to give it back. Bill gates does this. Modern billionaires do it. It is part of the american identity. Brian how often do you weave your own personal views, something you feel strongly about . Carl probably more often than i realize. I do it sometimes knowingly, like with willie mays. Brian you had a lot of baseball in there. Do you like baseball . Carl i love baseball. He was my hero when i was a little boy. So i have a couple of references to him. I try to be fair to yankee fans. I have dimaggio in there. The beach boys are in there twice. I was a member of the Beach Boys Fan Club when i was a little kid. [laughter] so some of that. But you know, when it comes to political figures and historical figures, i try really hard to not just give my view. I try to give a fuller view. Brian does anybody edit your copy in the morning . Carl there is a great editor, we stole him from the washington post, called tom cavanagh. I probably could not have done this book without him. Brian does he edit your daily . Carl that is what i am talking about. That is the daily note. Brian what is the difference between digital journalism and hardcopy journalism . Carl we did not pick paper because we were in love with it. It was a Better Technology than papyrus. This new technology is here to stay, it is digital. And whatever comes after digital. The important thing for people like you and i, oldschool people, is to take a model from oldschool journalism and getting the quotes right, being fair to both sides, not doing snarky stuff, just being honest and true to the craft. And helping those migrate to the new technology. I think that is the challenge. Brian you can find this book in any number of places. If someone is intrigued by the website, realclearpolitics. Com, they can find your piece every day where . Carl on the lefthand column. And they can find a lot of other good stuff by our reporters. Rebecca berg, covering politics. James arkin, covering congress. I will leave somebody out. David is our analyst. Look, it is a good website, it is free, and i think they will love it. Brian carl cannon is our guest. The name of the book is , on this date. Thanks very much. Carl thank you for having me. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer for free transcripts or to give us your comments on this program, visit us at q a. Org. Programs are also available as cspan podcasts. If you enjoyed this weeks , hereiew with carl cannon are other programs you might like. N other talks about his book book. Discusses his doyle shares stories about Popular Culture and history. You can watch these anytime or search our entire Video Library at cspan. Org. Next, we are live with your calls and comments on washington journal. Forward to todays solar eclipse. Then come our live coverage of the eclipse continues with a coverage fromasa trusting, south carolina. Tonight, on the community communicators,he we will speak with mr. Oreilly. When you talk about modernizing the media rolls, how do you look at the media market . How is that reflected in the rules right now . You talk to the average consumer. How are they envisioning media, digesting content . It is not a segment of the old three Major Network channels. You have a wider swath that is heading toward their palette, and they are digesting so much more from different searches different sources. The past commission failed in this respect when they viewed things like radio only competing with radio. Market, everyone is fighting over the same attention, same advertising dollars. We t can watch the communicators tonight at 8 00 eastern on cspan two. This morning, washington live to discuss todays solar eclipse. We will talk with a nasa specialist to talk about the eclipse and the Science Behind it. We take your calls and you can join the conversation host cames host todays washington journal comes to you live from the Goddard Space Center in maryland. Were hours away from the total solar eclipse. 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