Something that, he did not feel like he had done a good job or he feared he had not done the job. I think he was relieved that i didnt turn out to be a criminal or a drug addict. Well, i wanted to tell you its been wonderful having you here in austin. Stories i tell myself makes a Great Fathers day gift. And also, we appreciate you opening up your heart and sharing these stories and the kind of candor that you bring to it and its been a wonderful experience doing this with you and thank you. [applause] some of you have other questions, hes going to be doing the book signing so come on and get a copy and thank you good people for hosting us. This is book tv on cspan two, television for serious readers. Heres our primetime lineup. Tonight, starting at 6 45, William Walker provides an account of a world war i battle that resulted in 122,000 american casualties. Then at eight, author and activist David Horwitz describes the idea of aggressive racism on afterwards at 9 pm eastern, senator Barbara Boxer talks about her book the art of talk with senator amy for the shark. Then at 10, barry ratzenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild talks to book tv about how the guild works with authors. We racked up the tv at prime time at 10 30 with National Affairs under an editor vault yup in discussing his book the fractured republic. That happens tonight on cspan twos book tv. [applause] thanks for coming on such a beautiful day. Im john minard, and the director, welcome to another edition of our Signature Program on media. What a thrill it is to welcome our guest today, lesley stahl. A true trailblazer in the world of broadcast journalism and for the past 25 years she has served as respondent of televisions most respected and revered news program, 60 minutes. He was cbs news is White House Correspondent during the carter, reagan and George W Bush administrations and hosted the sunday Morning Program face the nation for eight years but it was five years ago that she took on her most important and rewarding job and that his grandmother. Leslies new book becoming grandma, the joys and science of the new grandparenting explores how becoming a grant can truly transform women and men. We will talk about that book today and a little bit more about leslies amazing career but please let me welcome lesley stahl. [applause] leslie, before we get to the book i want to ask questions about your colleague morley saper who announced on wednesday that he is stepping down from the network after 42 years. Tell us your thoughts on morley. Theres a sadness when the people who were the heart and soul of 60minutes almost from the beginning leave. And morley, Everybody Knows the sort of offbeat stories and hes done the signature stories of 60 minutes, the kind of peace where you say wow. No one else would do a story like that. He had a twinkle in his eye, he was a beautiful, whimsical writer sometimes that you dont always see television. And ive known him since he was cbs bureau chief in london. In 1969. Well, ive already dated myself with the book. He was always a person who cared deeply about the journalism side of what we do. And he is really going to be missed there. Hes also in my book. Not that i keep saying the book but hes in there as a grandfather. Host i believe tomorrow night theres a one hour special with all his best stories on 60 minutes. One question i always tend to ask authors is when they appear is when and why did you decide to write this book to market seems to be safe to say the answer can be foundin the title itself. Becoming grandma. Guest yeah but there was a publisher in new york who asked me to lunch to talk me into doing another book. Ive written a book before call reporting live, it was about my journalism career here in washington about the president that i covered and he wanted me to write a book about 60 minutes and i thought to myself you know, if i really pulled the back story, they would fire me and if they didnt fire me, no one would talk to me so i said no so fast. So there we were having lunch together and my granddaughter was about one at the time and i just talked about her, talked about her and he said you know, thats your book. This is what youre thinking about, this is what you are caring about and i went away and tried to think if the subject would sustain my interest over several years because i didnt stop working. I knew it was going to take years to write and i decided it would hold my interest and it did hold my interest. Host when you first learn that your daughter taylor was pregnant with her first child, what were your initial thoughts knowing you were going to be a grandparent . Were you frightened, were you amazed or what . Guest i was thrilled. I discovered in my grand tour of grandparents because i interviewed a lot that it you are young, meaning 50 or less, and your child comes and says youre going to be a grandparent, you look in the mirror and you say no, imtoo young. But if as was my case your daughter makes you wait and you think am i ever going to be a grandparent . She made me wait so long that i was thrilled, thrilled, thrilled. And so was my husband. Host we have a few photos from the book and we will start with, this is jordan. Thats the first one. Tell us about, what are you feeling there . Guest heres another reason i wanted to write the book. Im holding her, i think thats probably the very first time on holding her. A couple things are happening. Im falling madly in love. Im just looking at her and its hopeless, ive fallen off a cliff. And the subtitle is the science of grandparenting. I discovered in my research that like mothers, grandmothers when they are born actually secrete a hormone, its called oxytocin and its known as the bonding hormone and i am bonding with that child. I had such an extraordinary, deep, almost thunderous emotion course through me and i wanted to know what that was. You know, everybody told me theres Nothing Better than being a grandparent. Its the best thing that couldever happen to a person. Ive heard that, heard that no one talks about this emotion. It is , its a kind of loving thats unlike any other. And i wanted to find out what that was. Now i know its a surge of hormones but no one thinks that way and it really changes us. It truly changes us. Host i was going to mention the science in the book which you talk about and tells about some of the research you did, how you study about the science of it. Guest that was a big question, almost from the beginning. What was going on with me . And i discovered a book called the female brain which i recommend by luanne reason died. And she talked about the chemistry of women at every stage of their life. When they are children, when they are teenagers, when they are mothers and she talks about grandmothers and the grandmother part was very short so i did what i would do if it were a 60 minutes story and i called her on the phone and interviewed her and i said you know, its kind of crazy but i feel like i have fallen in love in the classic sense of falling in love and she laughed and said you did because the pathway, sort of the neurons of romantic love, boy girl love and the pathway for baby love is the same so you are feeling something very similar. Host and two years later, along comes chloe. Guest and along came to and i thought i might going to have the same feeling for number two . And i thought i would because it doesnt happen twice. Course, it did happen twice and i bonded with her also. Host i want to show a picture of you together. Guest thats more recent. Host right. Guest i find that among the many changes that take place in us, this is both grandmothers and grandfathers , that we cannot say no to our grandchildren. No matter how strict we were as parents, no matter how critical, no matter how much we were on their case, grandparents love uncritically. We love unconditionally and we never say no. Its always yes. I hated going to the park with my daughter. Ihated slides. I hated pushing the dam swing back and forth and my grandchildren want to go to the park, im there and im pushing the swing and its great. There i am going down the slide, imagine. Anything they want. Be on in this part of being a parent which you are. Guest you know where we are . Were at the easter egg roll at the white house. Host tell us you touched on there but what is different between what you felt for your daughter when she was born as a grandchild . Guest when you are a parent, even from the very minute that babies born, you are worrying. Parents dont ever really sleep until they go to college. We dont sleep for 18 years and if you have more than one, it could be 25 years because this worry is perpetual. We feel responsible. Mothers, when they give birth, secrete a hormone that makesthem vigilant. So they really are in a way almost fearful and that goes on and on. I remember all i ever did, i was covering the white house and i made lists and then i made lists of my lists, i was so afraid i was going to drop a stage with my daughter. And as i said, you could be a disciplinarian because you are trying to get your children in shape forlife. With a grandchild, its just simply joyful,. And its automatic. We are not thinking about it. It happens to us. And it is almost irreversible. I have met grandparents want that way but mainly, most of us turn into marshmallows with our kids and i do think its part of this theological change that comes over us. Youre also into the book about how the roles of grandparents have changed over the last three or four generations. Guest over millennia because in the way back old days in the caveman times, from both parents went out and hunted, both parents killed the field and left the babies with grandma. Grandma was responsible basically for raising the babies. That was the way mankind developed and as we became more and more civilized, grandma was still in the household and grandma was still raising babies. Its still the casein china and india. It was the case before the Industrial Revolution for the most part. If you didnt, if grandma didnt live in the house, she lived very nearby. I now think that when grandparents dont live near their grandchildren and dont see them a lot, that we actually physically crave them because we are meant to be in their lives. Its part of, its in our bones becausethats the way humanity develops. Host of course, economic pressures can also change the role of grandparents. You did say in the book a growing number of people are now custodial grandparents. Guest lets talk about two different sides. All growing out of really the recession. And its lingering effects on younger people, millennials so our kids who have young kids getting good jobs and making a good living. It takes two parents now to basically earn what one breadwinner earned just going back to my generation. And they are having trouble with childcare because it is so hideously expensive and they are having trouble buying things so grandparents , i came upon this statistic after i wrote the book. Ive read so many great things since i wrote the book. Grandparents are spending seven times more on their grandchildren today than they did just 10 years ago. We are paying for medical care. We are paying for their education. We are straightening their teeth. If, we are in their buying not toys, yes, toys but in addition, big ticket items we are buying the crib. Were buying the car seat so we are involved that way and if we are nearby, we are babysitting to just take the burden off the kids. Now, custodial grandparents, there is a seriously sizable chunk of grandparents in the United States today who are raising their grandchildren. They have custody of their grandchildren. There are many reasons, drug addiction, jail or death but its never a good reason. But grandparents can be surprised one day when they have just retired and are thinking of taking a cruise or playing golf or whatever and they find they are raising three little babies. This is not that uncommon and it is hard. My sisterinlaw who is a psychologist and who has some of these custodial grandparents as her patients says that they are the Unsung Heroes because they are among us. And they are struggling. Very hard. And this is another interesting thing, whoever is raising the kid becomes a disciplinarian. So if you meet a grandparents who is helping to raise kids, they are not as permissive as those of us who see them from time to time. Host you have a whole chapter in the book devoted to a very special place called polk meadows and i love how you set up this chapter. The right its unseemly to got especially for reporter, were supposed to stand fully on the sidelines, keeping our opinions to ourselves and our emotions holstered. Through that when it comes to the story of hope many roots. Tell us what makes this place so special to you. Guest this is one of those planned communities. It was founded, developed by a single woman who was writing her phd thesis on the foster care system in the state of illinois and she was seeing child after child being rejected by foster parents and shunted from one family to another family and it was breaking her heart. She decided that if foster parents lived in a compound together, they wouldnt give up on their kids because the other families would help them andsupport them. So she taught the pentagon into giving her some Beautiful Homes on air force base that was being shut down. She wanted 12 houses. She found 12 families to take in and adopt, this was not foster care, adopt foster families so these were taking and sometimes four, three kids and raising them forever. The pentagon says, we cant give you 12 homes, thats ridiculous. You have to take a section so they gave her 88 homes. She wanted 12. She has 88 homes. What to do and by the way, she got 88 or just homes for 250,000. 88 homes for 250,000. Each one would cost more than 250,000 and so what to do with all these extra houses . So she put ads in newspapers and things like that and said any Senior Citizens who are retired and want to downsize from their big houses, you can come and live here for subsidized rent. A very low rent. So Senior Citizens from all over the country came in and filled up the other 70 houses and organically, they became the grandparents of these kids were all troubled, everyone was a troubled kid and they became, the kids would choose who their grandparents were. They didnt have to have a grandparent but they did and they would call them grandma and grandpa and they, to help the families struggle through a very difficult time. I tell a story of one man who lived there and he had been told that he wasnt going to live or than a year when he arrived. He had heart problems. He lived, and live because he became a grandfather, assertive grandfather there and it was a very volatile young kid. Hed been kicked out of a lot of schools. He was a troublemaker and he was punching the other kids so this grandfather would go to school with the boy every day and sit next to him just to calm him down and get him through school and she did. Good story. Were going to by the way, i want to get to questions and we have to volunteers here, gail and gary so when im ready, just raise your hand and they will come to you. This book is more about grandmothers, they talked about grandfathers. By the way, that is his daughter taylor. Guest that is the first hour of jordans life host but grandfathers and there is your husband aaron. Tell us his experience. Did it transform them . One of the things i discovered going back to the science is that taking care of grandchildren for a man can lift depression, it can make someone whos kind of logy and ill better. It certainly makes people happier. My husband has parkinsons disease and the weirdest thing happened. Right after jordan was born, his symptoms disappeared. Now, no one gets better with parkinsons, believe me. What happened to you . Did he not have parkinsons . We went from doctor to doctor to find out what happened. One said he had west nile virus. So for one year, we percent and free. He had been able to drive, he was driving again. He is a very slow walker, couldnt keep up with me when he walked, he was walking ahead of me. It was stunning. The parkinsonsdid come back and he has parkinsons but thats a dramatic , i dont know if its because of jordan but we cant think of anything else. Host guest heres the other thing about grandfathers. They are sitting at these little tables with their grandchildren, granddaughters and having tea parties with them and playing with dolls. And rolling around on the floor with their grandsons. You know, my husband was a very good father and a very devoted father but you hear people say you know, i didnt know my father that well. That well when i was growing up. Look at him with my kids. Host thats a great shot. Do have a question . Ive been watching you since, well, when i was younger. I will say a little kid. Im here with my mom, we are having a weekend away and im enjoying your talk even though i came in a little bit later but one of the things that ive read about is the importance of grandparenting and also the longevity. There was a study done by, it was i think i attended talk and they talked about the blue areas of the world where people are living to 110, 100 and above and those areas are where the grandparents are actively involved in. Guest i rest my case. In the families. And in our society as a whole, we have one child in this part of the country and another child in that part of the country and we are so into our independence where we just lose a lot of that. A lot of the parents of the family being involved when he gets sick, when you know, someone loses a job and so i think its just kind of tailing on to what you were saying, my grandchildren live in los angeles, i live in new york but what i discovered is that theres this trend, its happening and its becoming a big boom of people when they retire picking up, selling the house they lived in for 50 years, leaving their friends and communities and moving to live near their grandchildren. To be in their life, to help their kids and to help raise their grandchildren. So theres this imperative, i called it craving but we want , we dont want to miss this. Let me ask you a question now that i made my comment. Do you feel its a trend, a new trend that we are now, weve gone through this expansion of everyone just doing their own thing and now its like wait a minute, now we are not more of a consumer or leaning toward not becoming a consumer Oriented Society and do you think we are going to get back to our roots question mark. I dont know about the consumer side, thats going to be hard to break but i do feel that there is this almost compulsion on the part of these older folks to be near their grandchildren now. Some of the younger folks arent necessarily thrilled that motherinlaw is going to be moving into the house. So what i say in the book and what i feel is, dont move too close. Dont move into the house. Live nearby. They need our help and you know, no matter how bad the relationship is, everybody has to suck it up because its good for the kids. They really benefit from having grandparents. Grandfathers actual job is to tell the little kids about the history of the family. Give them a sense that they go back and that they come from something. Which when we all lived in a familiar compound, it was a natural thing. A multi generational, living together to talk about my mother, my grandmother, where we lived, if we moved to the United States, where we came from so there are just endless benefits for a child. Thisunconditional love that i talked about, Everybody Needs to have that in their lives. And thats our job as grandparents. To let them know they are just unrelentinglylovable. Before we get to the next question, now that cspan is in the house i wantto talk a little politics. Both Hillary Clinton and donald trump are both grandparents. It appears that one of them will be in the white house. And either one will be the first president to be a grandparents in chief since george hw bush. Guest i write a lot about fdr as a grandfather. I love this. So fdr would have his morning staff meeting in his bedroom. And he would be eating breakfast on a tray in bed and he would have cabinet members, the treasury secretary would be there sometimes , is Foreign Policy advisor, all his assistants are raid and when his daughter anna got divorced, she moved into the white house and with two little kids. Like, five and six or six and seven and they would burst into the room in the middle of the staff meeting a lot, not one time, a lot and he would say come on, get up in the bed and one would be here and one would be there and he would just, in the middle of the staff meeting read the funnies to them because the funnies were a big deal in those days, they dont do it anymore but reading the funnies and he acted out all the characters and the treasury secretary would be rolling his eyes. He was a delightful grandfather. And doting and indulgence. Now, eleanor was a different sort. I discovered that eleanor was a distant grandmother. Shes a grandmother that proves the rule. But franklins mother, the great grandmother sarah, she was the indulgent, permissive, madly in love kind of grandmother. They called her granny. Guest host we have a question there but then we will go over there. Guest i wanted to go into politics. Host that was the original question. Guest when we knew hillary was going torun for president which was gosh, millennia ago , i thought that he was going to become an issue for her. And in fact, marco rubio was making it an issue. Thats gone. There all, well, trump is older than hillary and as you say, the three leading candidates if you include Bernie Sanders are all grandparents and i have this theory that the baby boomers are devoted, have devoted their life to being young and these people do not feel like the old 69 and 70yearolds. They feel, i feel, we all feel they have a lot of energy and youthfulness. I say its the age of grandmother, the age of the grandfather but grandmothers are reallycoming into their own. It used to be a stigma. Somebody said to me, oh my god. You cant admit your grandmother. You cant say youre that old and im hoping that this book gets rid of that silly stigma. First of all, baby boomers. We are such a giant bulge in the society. We are all going to be grandparents. Soon. We may all, a huge number and weve determined attitudes and cultures, whatever age weve been and we are going to change attitudes toward grandparenting and i hope my book helps with that. I was wondering, what advice you have for either parents or grandparents or both when they have maybe a disagreement about how the kids should be raised. That is an excellent question and this is not an advice book, by the way and me getting advice about mothering or grandmother in, you dont want to listen to my advice because i was a working mother. I dont even know how i held it together. But i do write a lot and tell a lot of anecdotes about how the balance of power in a family shifts the minute that grandchild is born. And we know that our children hold a key to the thing we want most on this planet which is those babies and we are terrified of antagonizing and working though worst sentence in the world for a grandparent is no, dont come over today. Or dont visit next week because we want to hold the kids we are all walking on eggshells. We are so careful. Now, sometimes you just cant call hold your tongue, its justtoo unbearable. For example, i was there when my daughter sleep train jordan. My skin was coming off. I couldnt stand leaving her in the crib to scream, we didnt do that and i swear i didnt say a word. We left to go back to our hotel and my husband said to me, i cant believe how critical you were. I said, i didnt say anything . He said you didnt say anything, didnt shut up. Maybe you said this five times. We didnt do that with you and you turned out okay. But generally, my impression is that im holding my tongue. You know, grandmothers i think and grandfathers should hold their tongue. I think this generation is doing a better job than my generation. Becausewe were really in terms of grandmothers, we were the first wave into the workplace. And as i said before, we were barely holding it together. We didnt get the balance quite right and our children, i think are very conscious of that family work seesaw and they are weighing, putting more weight on the family and i love the way kids today are raising their children. Hats off. My parents are coming down this weekend and they held their tongue i have to say so thank you. I have two questions. First, you plan to retire and move to los angeles real soon . Guest i have no retirement plans. Secondly, related to that do you find there are some advantages to living in a different city, flying infrequently and being the fun and permissive grandparents. Guest i find no advantage to living acrossthe country from my grandchildren. None. If and when i retire, i have thought about moving there. Its in my head. I dont know that i would because i love living in new york but i thought a lot about it. Because i dont think its an advantage for anybody, for our age group or the children and no matter what the relationship is, we can help our kids. No matter how bad the relationship is, we can still help our kids so theres no advantage. Host we have time for a couple more questions in the back and the front there. This is a suggestion to you leslie. For your next project, my motherinlaw who died about a year ago at the age of 98 sat down with her very Adult Children and her somewhat less adult grandchildren and recorded nine hours of memories of her life. The grandchildren sat around the table and asked her questions. She talked about her childhood, about three years in school and she was a teacher and spent her entire career helping children so this is very easy for herto do. Those recorded nine hours, we all have now on our cell phones and all of our recording devices to send to our children and her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren love to listen to those recordings. Guest thats fabulous. This is a project you should do for your family and write about in your next book. Guest im hearing such great things after i wrote the book that i wish were in there. I love that idea. Host in the front there. Id like to know what your grandchildren call you, what is their favorite name . Guest what do my grandchildren call me . If youre a grandparent, this is huge. What are they going to call us . I wanted to be granted, thats what i wanted. My daughter said you are not going to be granny and because she runs my life, she said no, you are not so i thought if my grandchildren, my granddaughter tried to say leslie because all my mothers grandchildren called her by her name, thats what she wanted. They tried to say leslie. How would it come out . I thought it might come out lolling. So my husband said to me okay, you are lonely, im pop so we are lollipop. And you know what . Until very recently they were too young to get it but one day, the fiveyearold said your lollipop. She got it. Host leslie, by the way will be signing copies of her book outside the studio and you can purchase a copy of that. A few questions. I think i heard a story about this photograph, how that was taken so wonderfully. The kids are sitting quietly their reading. Tell us behind the scenes of this photo. Guest we obviously staged the photo. I have a big book, im reading. If the older one was paying attention, the little one was jumping up and down and vice versa. We could not get them to cooperate. So we taped an iphone into the book, put on frozen. They are watching frozen. Host a little seethrough for us, we want to get that out. Guest thats truth in advertising. Host last few questions, i want to talk about, we are with a news network here and iwanted to talk about your career. Talk about getting your start at cvs and your first big break. Guest i was hired because of affirmative action. Ive been a reporter in boston and affirmative action came into force. I heard that all three networks were looking desperately for women and minorities so i applied and i was hired in washington. And within a couple of weeks, there was this breakin atthe Democratic Party headquarters at watergate. And nobody thought it was a story. So they decided well, its the democratic headquarters, we will send the new girl. And the arraignment came to her three days later, they still didnt think it was a story so they sent me to cover the arraignment and there was one other reporter there. Bob woodward. And he told me all along, dont ever let them take this story away from you. I got cover watergate. Host and then you just celebrated your 25th anniversary at 60 minutes. How do you explain the lasting power of that program . Guest well, of course we are an outfit that does it the oldfashioned way. We really havent changed the way we do our work, the subject matter, even that clock is the same and i think the fact that we are still in the top 10 shows you that there is a huge appetite for serious balanced reporting. We are not supposed to tell you we are where we are coming from in our own mind area and i think the public appreciates that. Its very hard to find that now. And i think, i think some websites might think about adopting our model. Part ofthe model is that we actually get time to think. If you are reporting today, you are immediately putting it out on twitter instantly. It happens and boone, you are on the air. It takes us weeks, months to put our stories together. A good story needs that. Host the book is coming grandma, its a terrific read. I want to thank lesleystahl for joining us here today. Thank you leslie. Guest thank you. Host thank you all. [applause] are going to go back there but leslie will be signing copies of the book, thank you. Next on book tv, Joshua Cooper rommel, coceo of Kissinger Associates talks about his latest book, the seven cents with authors Malcolm Gladwell and jacob weisberg. Host hi. Thank you everybody for coming. This is great. As a writer for most of the last few months ive been getting up every morning saying to my wife what if nobody read this book . I woke up this morningnd