Shapiro, founder of the Harvard Negotiation Program talks about how to resolve conflict between government. Thats a look at some of the author programs book tv is covering this week. Many of these events are open to the public. Look for them to air in the near future on the tv on cspan2. Good morning. Welcome and good morning. I am on the faculty of Political Science department here at the university. Also a Research Fellow at the peace and war center. It is my great pleasure and honor to have this conversation with johnny, the 2016 winner of the famed norwich military history award. What we are going to do today is have a conversation, you have read his bio you should take a look at the pamphlet that was handed out. He is a very famous journalist and he set up time magazines addition and lives in singapore and works for bloomberg. He has written this book called midnight theories. What we wanted to do was unpack this book and i have intentionally not read the entire bio because i think it would be more interest to the audience to have a conversation than to put the book into perspective. This book deals with events that happened in countries far away, over 70 odd years ago but i would contend that the book is so timely and so relevant to where we are today. It connects with headline issues that you see in the newspapers every day. The war in afghanistan, the war in iraq, americas engagement with the world, and americas leadership in transforming countries, what the 21st century will century will being in asia, the role of religion in conflicts, and if i might say, how important it is for politicians, when when they are running for office to be very careful in what they say. So i want to take you back, if you will a few centuries. I was born a long time ago, not that long ago, but, but i want to take you back a few centuries to india. Thats where for hundreds and hundreds of years there existed this multicultural, cosmetology and culture with christians and jains all living together, were tripping at each other shrine and this is especially true of muslims in hindu who did that. Even today, you can go to virtually any village in pakistan or india and you will find hindus worshiping at muslim shrines and muslims worshiping at hindu shrines. There are intermarriages when the partition of india took place after 150 years the british presence in india and another two to 300 years of another empire before that when the partition took place, it was a hugely significant event. But the point that i want to bring out, before we get into conversation is nothing is as simple as it looks. This is not strictly a religious conflict. I will give you a personal example. An uncle of mine rose to be the head of the indian air force. His family, like many, many muslim families did not leave india because it was their home. In the pakistani world, heres my uncle leading the air force against the Pakistani Air force, muslim to me muslim, patriots on both side, both owing allegiance to their own country so the big point that i want to make is that as important as religion seems to appear, that is not always the case. I want to start by asking you, after hundreds and hundreds of years, these people have lived together. In 1947, millions get injured or killed. Why . I was glad you started with an easy one. [laughter] i give you a oneword answer. Power. What changed in 1947 . What was different than the previous 150 years 50 years benchmark for the first time, power was there. The british were leaving and they were headed out and didnt have the money to maintain their empire in india or the portico will to do it and they werent wanted there. Hindus and muslims had lived together, but they were would have small riots break out and would last a day or two but you didnt have this mass scale of violence that you had in 1947. What you had was, had was, because the rich were leaving, Muslim Community and political leaders saw a future in which they would be a permanent minority. They would be cut out of power in india. Under a parliamentary system, the Congress Party which was dominated by hindus would always win. They would get the majority of votes wherever they ran. The muslim parties would be confined. In this system, they feared it was also a winner take all system where if you ran the government, your friends and family and cronies would get the contracts. You would write the textbooks in school. You would write the rules of worship and so on. So the political leaders argued that the only way muslims could be safe after the british left was if they had a state of their own where they were majority and ran the government. That was at the very top level. What happened is that political leaders, as you say you have to be very careful about how you talk about these things, they would paint these pictures for their followers of the terrible things that were going to happen if they didnt get their own state. Not only would you be forced to convert, but your daughters would be kidnapped and raped in your grandfathers grandfathers would be killed and so on. This filters down from the top level of Political Leadership in new delhi. Once you get down to the ground level, it becomes very simple and it becomes kill or be killed. About a year before some terrible riots broke out and its still unclear who started them, but something around ten or 15,000 people were killed over the span of four days. This gave indians a vision of what they thought would happen if they didnt defend themselves. So they started to arm themselves, they started to organize and you have to remember this was just after world war ii sue had a lot of young men who had been trained in the military in africa and europe, asia and a lot of them still had weapons so unlike previous riots when violence broke out, these organized squads, you can almost call them death squads were much more effective, much more deadly than previous attacks. They werent fighting with fists and knives are using machine guns. That such an interesting series of thoughts that you have tried to connect. Let me ask you, a lot of the trouble, i grew up in bombay so my family and i went through the partition. There was a whimper there. What i wanted to ask you was if you could unpack that part of your book we talk about the killings. Why were they localized . Why didnt they happen all over . This is something thats important to remember. I think a lot of people have this idea that the british left in all this violence broke out and people were killing each other. It wasnt bad at all. My family was here and my father was a child in bombay at the time and no memory of any violence. Most of india was unaffected by this per there was one particular province called the boone job which is now split between india and pakistan and this is where the border was going to go. They decided to draw the border to divide areas where muslims were in majority and hindus were majority. A new border was going to be drawn. The problem was, theres a Third Community in that area and they were a very Small Community with about 5 Million People but they were concentrated in the middle of the province. The border was going to split their community and half and historically, there was a historical memory of how they had suffered under a muslim ruler years ago. More recently in the spring of 47, muslim mobs had massacred several thousand. They had this vision of what would happen to them if the british drew this border and they found themselves on the wrong side of the line. Also, there were overrepresented in the army so they were heavily militarized. So it started the violence after the border was drawn. Thats why its dread spread very, very quickly. It was very concentrated in this area. It was muslims on the indian side who were pushed out and hindus were pushed out from the other side. As you have this movement of people, Something Like 14 Million People cross the border over the span of a few months. You had these long convoys of refugees, 250,000 people who were essentially defenseless. There were some soldiers that would try to guard them, but they would come in swoop in and they were able to mask her several hundred people at a time. But it was that, combination of communities with the new border that provoked them. So thats so interesting. By the way i want to commend you for still calling it bombay. A lot of have never gone use to mumbai. What what i was going to say, so this issue came to prominence along the border areas, but it didnt spread and the rest of the country. Does that tell us anything about how deeply embedded in religion this was or was it a local fact having to the more of a territory and advantage and revenge . I think thats right. I think this was easy to think of as a hindu muslim conflict, but you have to remember the leaders were completely secular. They werent religious at all. He barely knew the cron. He drank alcohol and was for bidding by islam. He was a man of fine taste. And he was a cambridge socialist and he didnt believe in any of this mumbojumbo as he sought. It wasnt about religion for them. It was again about territory and community. It was fear that was driving them. They were afraid that they were going to be massacred. The other thing thats interesting to remember, too, is that the strongest drive to create pakistan was not in the areas that eventually became pakistan. In northwestern northeastern india, they were the majority. They were in power. They didnt have to fear what would happen after the british left. It was the muslims in central india and other places who really pushed the idea of pakistan. Some of them moved when it was created. Many others did not. Many muslims never wanted to move and live in india now. So a personal anecdote on this issue, a lot of muslims felt about not creating another country called pakistan so my dad at that time was an upandcoming screenwriter and he hadnt yet made a big movie. People, he was very young and he was having a hard time and he had an offer from pakistan to produce movie. He said great, this this will be my big opportunity and my mother, she was a Freedom Fighter in india and she said not on the good life. Youre not going to that horrible country to start a movie. He said we dont have any money and we have two children and he came back and told me that when we were going up, my mother had her suitcases packed and he said what are you doing in she said youre going to pakistan to make money and im going back to my mother. Thats how intensely, the family felt. The question i have for you then is, i want to focus on the importance of leaders and the importance of the british. Do you think that if the british had stuck it out and said no, as they had many times over hundred 5200 years or if the leaders themselves had stuck it out, do you think there is a failing on either side, the british side . I definitely think there were mistakes made on all sides. I think there were failures and guilt to be assigned to everyone. Now you cant prove it counter factually. Even if it hadnt happened, theres no proof that india, unified india wouldve stayed unified. These pressures still would have been there. These fears, possible five or ten years later it couldve broken up along different lines. The other thing to remember is that in 47, the british only directly controlled half the continent. The other half were independent kingdoms ruled by monarchs who legally were independent and could choose to join india or pakistan if they had just left them unified. All the leaders made mistakes. They did try to compromise. The british, for a year had tried to bring the two sides together and about a year earlier, they had come up with a compromise. It was a very complicated rickety compromise where you have a unified india with a very weak Central Government and the muslim areas would have a certain degree of autonomy and individual providence would have other powers. It was a facesaving way for everybody to agree. And they did agree. But, then, almost immediately almost immediately after they agreed to it, the party leader at a press conference and he was being pressured by people from his party thing why are you giving up all this economy to muslim areas. We have fought for decades to keep the british out and this is our time to roll. He said something stupid like, you know, dont worry its not the same now and we will do whatever we want. Of course for anyone hearing this, you had to think how can we trust these people . Once the british leave they will be in power and they will turn on us. So they then backed out of the agreement and then it became virtually impossible to bring them back together again. They kept trying up until the summer of 47. They tried to get back to that, the americans are putting heavy pressure on them. They wanted a united india. They didnt want the army to be broken up. Between the time they struck that compromise and the summer of 47, thats when these riots started to spread. So feelings were getting him bettered in pittard. They had knowing each other for 30 years. They had argued with each other, they had friends in common, you would think they could have found common ground. So im going to open it up for a moment and let people ask questions. I want us now to close this part of the conversation to think about history. I had the pleasure of interviewing gordon sullivan, the chair of trustees a few weeks ago and he impressed on me how important it was at norwich to get this major in a huge, liberal education. He said without an understanding of history, he said theres very little that you can do in making sound decisions of any chain of command. I wanted to take us forward now, we spent trillions of dollars and the Strongest Army in the world has not been able to prevail against the enemy the, the caliban who has no gdp. Same thing in iraq. You can carry that through. My question to you is that in america, we have the saying, thats history. When someone says something, you say oh thats history. I want you to take what happened , im raising the pressure here so you go out and buy multiple copies of the book. Christmas is not that far away. You need to buy at least six each. We take us forward and connect us to whats happening in afghanistan. Its important in two ways, for americans, in particular, you mention afghanistan. The reason were still fighting in afghanistan, 15 years later is because they get a certain degree of support from the Pakistan Military and theyre allowed to regroup and the leadership is safe there and so on. They can keep it alive forever as long as they have that. Why does pakistan do this . Why do they support the taliban, why do they support terrorist groups and why are they building up their Nuclear Arsenal so rapidly. They do all of this because they view india as a mortal threat. Seventy years later, they they dont believe, they dont believe the military, they still treat them as a threat and a country that doesnt believe in their threat and doesnt want them to be surviving. That mentality is nothing new. That came out of just a few months, and that was cemented in the establishment among ordinary pakistanis. Its why the militaries have been able to rule for half of the existence because every time they take power they say they need you need us to defend against your enemy. That is their justification and the justification for the majority of the budget is that you need us. So for americans in outside power, its important to understand this mentality. You have to understand where it comes from. You also have to understand how its changed over the years. You cant start to unwind it until you know where it came from. You have to accept that at least when it was created there was a certain degree of legitimacy to it. They would be happy to see it fail within a year or two and be reabsorbed. Its not entirely crazy. Indians have no interest in taking over pakistan. Quite the opposite. But it did come out of Something Real that we have to accept and understand. Its interesting you bring up the saying, in the end americans also have a very healthy ability to examine our own history and examine be selfcritical and not feel like they have to hide things or sugarcoat them or ignore them. They can admit what happened in the civil war and their shelves and shelves of books. Then they can move forward. We can move forward. They still have trouble with this. The majority of population is young. They shouldnt have any personal connection to this, yet the phrases they use, the way they talk about pakistan is no different than in 1947. There still a sense of paranoia. Its because there taught a version of history. The indians get one version and the pakistan get another version in their mutually incompatible. They want to admit that they couldve been at fault. Maybe they did make mistakes and they can say maybe he wasnt such a nice guy and he was powerhungry and so on. Until they can come up with some sort of joint narrative, i dont think they are going to be able to move forward either. That is dangerous for the rest of us. We have to hope that they can get their. Before i open it up for questions, i want to give you an opportunity, was there a time when you wrote the book where you sat back and said this really came out well and im glad i did it. Besides the only moment that happened when i got to my first ridgeview in the new york review of books and they called it superb. That was the only time. It was a long process. I started working on this book five years ago. I had been working at Newsweek Magazine for about ten years and ive left my job. My wife and i sold our apartment in new york and i put all the stuff in my inlaws basement. I lived out of a suitcase for year as i did research in india and london. I had no idea where this was going or what i wanted to accomplish. I was in a library ten hours a day just pouring through telegrams, paperthin telegrams and personal diagrams and letters and you vacuum it all up and you try to see patterns in it. At the time youre really just trying to get as much information as possible. Then i sat down and try to make sense of it all. It is very important to me that this book was to write for a general audience. This wasnt meant for professors. I hope they find new scholarship in it, but i wanted to make a narrative narrative that would be appealing to everyone. To try and find the narrative in this massive material, i cannot say there was a moment while i was doing at that i was fully confident that i succeeded. That was until it was published in somebody else told me it was all right. So we have a few minutes left. We can take a few questions. Just tell us who you are and go to the microphone. My name is sean markey. I have a question about craft and some of the questions you made and it might be a way to open it up a little bit. What was one of the harder things you struggled with and how did you work through that, or ultimately, what was the best you got from the outside reader reader whether it was an editor or a friendly reader that help to us something that wasnt working. The best advice i got early on was to make a timeline. It was so simple, but it literally, the book takes place in a fairly short two year period. From and i did a day by day timeline for those two years. Thats when you start to see these patterns emerging. Whats incredible is that these leaders, in the months after, there was 1 million things going on. They were just focused on the rise, there was an uprising in kashmir. There was things that were all happening in the same day. Most accounts treat them all separately, you dont realize that you wake up and you go to meeting about this and bad and he was operating on two hours asleep and got a letter from his girlfriend, its only once you laid out that way that you can get into their heads a little bit more and understand the pressures they were under to understand why they made certain decisions. There were some decisions that ive never seen explained before and then i realize he made a decision at the end of the threehour meeting where they talked about acts beforehand. I can imagine it would have been hard. The hardest part was making a narrative. You many characters in huge forces at play. It was chaos at the time. A lot of peoples memories after words were not all that trustworthy. If you hear the same story over and over again, that my aunt was on a train and everybody was killed but her. Ive heard the story dozens of times. Its generally not true because they stopped most of the trains. This is something that people have told themselves for generations and you have to sort of see the records at the time, just to know that no, that wasnt true because there werent that many trains and so on. So i went through the material and then finding a way to make it a chronological narrative which i did through using characters. saying they cant find the file and so on and just the British Library in london you can get through a lot more material very quickly. Theres a lot more personal papers as well. So i spent about three months in india and went back for a few weeks and almost a year in london. If you have taken the time on research versus writing it was about half and half. So then about a year of researching the wrote the first draft between may and december and then i accepted the job youd moved to bloomberg and fred the first draft and then they took me another year. In the class of 68 when you were researching the buck was there a moment for you that changed youthatschanged your mr understanding of the history my understanding was wrong. There wasnt a single moment. There were individual moments. There were days when you go to the library and you come home and you know that you found nothing new. Everything you read have been by someone else and then you find that it illuminates a particular angle and the combination leads to the new narratives that you create. So for instance, some of the best material was in the state Department Archives in maryland. Everyone came to talk to them and they had great details. There was a moment he called in the u. S. Ambassador to explain the decision and they said they are going to do this, they are going to hand over power will veto power in august but they knew pakistan isnt ready yet so they will hand over the power later. Maybe a few months or a year. How could they have thought this was a good idea and they havent thought it through. Somehow they thought they would want us to stick around to help so everything will be okay and we dont need to worry about the details so much. Theres things like that where the key decision is why did they decide to leave so quickly it seems so crazy and you realize they didnt think they were leaving that quickly pakistan is providing in the past couple of years even the current president has been trying to to bring all the parties back into peace talks is but it never worked out and they never had the capability to provide security inside of the country or its borders. What is the solution left, what do you think they can do to fight and win a telegram . I oversaw the coverage in afghanistan and i wish i had a good answer. It has to be a negotiated solution all the parties work towards that. So i do believe they want him to come to the peace table now that they are not able to do it. Now on the other hand, if they said we are not giving you any more safe haven whatsoever and we are taking out all the leaders then i think it might change their minds. The positiv positive development ive seen so far and its not a breakthrough in is the fact china is now involved in had interest in stability more than ever before partly because they want to develop liberals and so on. But also because they are worried about islamic extremism in western china and china is the one power that has influence over the pakistanis than we do so they are the ones leading to try to bring them to the peace table. Theyve offered to host talks. Its going to be a long process but if they sustain the pressure to coordinate with them in the South China Sea in all these issues we need to help on north korea and on afghanistan. So, we have to sort of even if we compete in some areas we have to work with them and others. So i dont anticipate a breakthrough anytime soon but if they keep pressuring them and they can hold their own at least if they keep losing to the 28th territory but then if they can hold their own maybe they will get to the point that you can bring them in. What it will look like in the end i dont know because you obviously have to preserve the liberties that have been created. No one is going to give those up now. But there will have to be some part of the solution eventually. Just as a followup to this, do you think that the american continued presence helps or do you think he would strike a balance. I think that we are still needed there now its on o our logistil help and intelligence and so on. I also dont think we should necessarily rush to draw down zero. You recognize to someone in the back. Can you talk briefly about your perceptions into what may have changed in the writing of this book, can you talk a little bit about that and were you surprised by the things that you learned and how that might affect our memories . You have to write about them carefully obviously especially that he was much more of a politician than people give him credit for this. He used against the british because it worked. He had Great Success in the 20s and 30s but he was also fairly vain that he was surrounded by the miners telling him what a great person he was and how infallible he was and even the leaders would come to him as if he were a guru swift led to a couple of things. First come he never understood the way that muslims saw him. They must embrace my message. He couldnt understand that they would see him dressed up having the chance and so on. He never understood it was projecting to a lot of muslims said they saw him as a religious leader and not as a secular democrat. By the time it came around, he was in his mid to late 70s and he was a little i dont want to use the word senile but he wasnt as sharp as he was before but no one would tell him that. Everyone would still act as if everything he would did was gospelwasgospel so they were sto spread. There were reports coming in and rumors about eastern india and now it is bangladesh and the rumors were brought up at a prayer meeting and he was trying to say dont retaliate for dont use violence or fight back. Instead all of the tens of thousands who are at risk you should kill yourself instead. The latest message was heard in the province is that hindu women were being raped and there were local politicians at a much lower level to use this message and rallied them and went out and committed a massacre over several weeks in the province and its Something Big in the Muslim Leaders blamed him for inside you are spouting this stuff and its causing us violence. He would have acknowledged that. He felt his spirit was pure in hiandhis meaning and intentionse good. But he didnt understand the impact. And there were also times in the compromise that he mentioned that he fought against it the most and dragged out the negotiations i think they have accepted much earlier it is possible to compromise. There were moments in the process where he would have been good as a spiritual figure involved in the politics because it was hard to make compromises to. I was intrigued after watching the news but in the book, they were very egotistical and narcissistic to some degree and seemed not to catch on to things that reminded me today. They were great in their own way and part of the reason why they had a certain degree of selfconfidence to do this. They just knew here was this figure that had come down and was up on stage and they were just there to be in his presence to listen to this guru. And again, he knew this when he was a younger man and was receiving all this he wrote an essay for a magazine under a pseudonym that warned against the danger letting this stuff go to his head and that the party and the leaders needed to be wary not to let this happen so he knew it was a danger that he still would have been. Jenna and the same way had been fighting for recognition for years and years and all of a sudden once he started promoting pakistan, hundreds of thousands of people would come to the rallies and he was surrounded by guards waving swords and uniform and he loved it. He was the most vain of all three. He counted every little recoton his uniform and spent most of the summer when the death squads were forming sort of working out with the flags would look like that they would use on Independence Day and so on and the kind of circumstances of that what he was there. So you do have to worry if you are a leader you have a responsibility you cant just sort of let this stuff go. Two quick things i found fascinating about how the normal indian folks didnt want to leave. It would be interesting if you have an insight why they had a deep feelinhave adeep feeling of separation. Second, the flipside of what happened, so speculatively and the two leaders then more religious maybe theyd have different perspectives and wouldnt have been so gained and they thought about that in other words the deep secularism which wasnt evident. Could that have led to the failings and then third the two hours of sleep deprivation that he was legally impaired he could be more legally intoxicated by alcohol so that the dead is a subject for us how they are making decisions while they are impaired so that is a cool thing that you uncovered for this. It was fascinating to see they did everything themselves. There was a leader. Hed never been an executive said he tried to run everything himself. The reason he only got two hours of sleep is because he was dealing with negotiations and sending out invitations to a conference. When the riots broke out they spoke to new delhi and hindus were going out and massacring muslims in some came to his house and said theres a bridge between new delhi were muslim refugees are coming across the border and being held because the gangs are waiting for them. They now have 4 Million People and he runs upstairs, gets out of a drawer from his father, goes to his friend and said heres what we are going to do, dress like refugees and were going to fight across the bridge and shoot him and his friend says no obviously youre going to tell the police to go there and do this but that was the mentality that they had. The religious question is interesting. Id never thought of that before whether that would have made them more humble. He was fairly religious and was in that humble so i dont know that it would have been a guarantee against that. And it would have been a problem in other ways because after thee riots broke out there was a lot of people who didnt want the muslims to stay bu stay it willt across the border including from politicians and they fought against it and said no. We are t argued the multiethnic society. We are not going to allow this. It was an unpopular decision and this is what he was assassinated in for the rights of muslims. Speak to i can give is over centuries. Most of these places religion wasnt all that organized. Every village shrine and mosque that if you are living in closee quarters together basically its the same food. Some people dont eat thi need r that the same spice and dressed the same way to the relationship between men and women are similar to your children will go to School Together in many cases and most people generally want to get along. [inaudible] and it generally works. Muslims had legitimate fear politically about what would happen. But there could have been a compromise that would solve the fear if they have t they had toe at first accepted and not just pretend everything is great and Everybody Loves each other. There were tensions. I never thought of this issue myself but theres another piece to this and more religious. India is a very religious country and what these people were really like, there were all these stories and everyone knew these people were about. So the other side of the coin is it didnt seem to make a difference at all of these religious people knew these people. No muslims really believe its interesting in some of these local elections the organizers of the route and try to get votes and one of them wrote back to the headquarters and said its great these people think that it is a long bearded imam was very religious into this or that because that is the image that they were portraying and they had never seen him so they were able to manipulate. Lets go back to the audience please. You mentioned one of the major flaws as they exited quickly and left a lot of details. Any other major flaws in hindsight now . There wer there were a bunch. I will say im less critical than many are partly because i feel they wanted independence and theyve been asking for it for years. The responsibility was to prepare for it and they have influence over these death squads. They were not ordering it themselves but lower levels of the parties people were involved in procuring weapons so it was their responsibility to stop this before the violence truly profound. But in the long run they contributed to dividing the communities. In 1909 they decided that they would create special seats to run for the legislatures and only muslims could vote for those particular people so then you got parties breaking down across the religious lines and they would sort of weaken the opposition and so on. But that was early on. In world war ii there was a moment in which fdr pressured the british very heavily to give up and grant independence so they would join the fight against the nazis and the japanese and churchill singlehandedly resisted. The rest was ready to do this but churchill was not and he threatened to resign if they kept pressing him so they backed off. I think this wouldnt have happened. There was no real momentum so you could have added power to the government. The british would have stayed and there would have been a longer transition then in addition to leaving, they underestimated the threat. It wasnt surprised. People were telling them this is happening. I need more troops. On paper they created a peacekeeping force to go to the province but he didnt have the details so he was busy drawing his flags and this supposed 50,000 army force that went there ended up being less than 2,000 people with actual rifles so they were not able to suppress the violence quickly. The only way to have stopped this would have been a massive application of force very quickly and they didnt have the troops in place to. There were mistakes made that itbutits important to take the responsibility. You go to india or pakistan today and it is far too easy for people to say it was their fault they did it to us. The british were not helpful in some ways but they are not entirely to blame. Youve written a wonderful the candidate of any limits to how many you sign perperson . The more the better. [laughter] thank you for writing this book and the intellectual exercise, the time youve spent connecting with our students and faculty and classrooms. I want to congratulate you and thank you for coming. Best of luck. [applause] if theres other questions we can answer them individually. [inaudible conversations] when i tune in on the weekends usually it is authors sharing releases. Watching on booktv is the best television for serious readers. They can have a longer conversation and delve into the subject. They bring you author after author. I love booktv and im a cspan fan. Retired colonel Patrick Murphy, why did you write a book . I spent 25 years in the army then i ran for congress afterward, and that was my sort of proverbial look behind the curtain and it scared the street with the state of the political system. When you look at the polls about three quarters of americans are unhappy in the direction their country is going and with government. And i as a constitutional conservative count myself as one of those and i believe that that comes from the fact that our founders set up this system where the individual has a starring role in government and plays a supporting role but its sort of flipped on its head and ability to the title of the buck government is the problem because i believe the government has gotten way too big and i believe both political parties, career politicians on both sides of the aisle facilitate that and actually youre seeing that play out right now in the republican primary in the fact so much of the conservative base is rallying around someone and completely outside of the republican establishment. Is that a good thing taxes to make a very good thing. The Republican Party needs to have this to go through because i believe we already have one party whether you like it or not thats what they espoused. The Republican Party ostensibly is supposed to be the party that is intellectual descendents of the founding fathers. They shouldnt be channeling Milton Friedman and standing for government but they dont. You can go back to two terms of president george w. Bush where we have a Republicancontrolled Senate and republican controlled house and we double the federal debt and be slathered on government regulatio. We created a new entitlement and a new government agency. They are not governing as conservatives and i think that is what led to the situation now. People talk about colonel murray as a constitutional conservative; what does that mean . Is a reallife example of that . I am a reallife example of that. I stopped calling myself a republican even though im a conservative. Im a constitutional conservative, and i doubt its simple. I believe our constitution is along the lines of the Owners Manual foownersmanual for the. You need to adhere to it. There is no statute of limitations on that. Politicians do the same thing and to me being a constitutional conservative means adhering to that and limited government and individual liberty. Especially the tenth amendment. Weve gotten away from that because i think our career politicians wouldve broken the code. The bigger the more powerful, the more expensive the federal government is, the better it is for their incumbency so i do believe that they are supporting and defending their incumbency as opposed to the constitution. You refer to the book as an after action report on the 2012 elections. Whenever you do any kind of an objective you write an after action review and take a look at what you did right and what you did not so well and how to improve things. Thats what this started as and the more that i looked into it the more i realized that i dont believe a political cycle if youre not happy with the direction the country is going i dont think a political cycle fixes that. I dont think that electing the next great person fixes that because i think it is systemic so thats where i came up with solutions when you do the review you cant just complain. You have to provide solutions in the mind is that its right in the constitution as article five of the constitution which affords the ability to call the convention is to state whereby they can propose the amendment separate and distinct in the federal government. Was the selfpublishing process like for you . Id never written a book before but i never ran for congress before either, so i was blessed with some wise people who have done some things and so when i found a couple of editors and i found this Publishing House that wa was sort of a step above the selfpublishing they were helpful and so it was about about a oneyear process to refine it but it was terrific to be able to codify the fox indicated in the book. Retired colonel Patrick Murphy here is the book government is the problem. Book tv on cspan2 and we are at cpac. Don watkins, at the Iran Institute will argue that measures to alleviate income inequality actually end up hurting low income americans