Passing legislation to censor reading at a time of war. Within a matter of months they got this legislation overturned. It was amendment so they no longer were going to be prevented from publishing books with a political viewpoint and they ended up being able to publish any books they wanted. That said, some books did upset certain groups of people two books in particular that came under fire were strange fruit by liian and forever amber by kathleen windsor. These books were controversial because they had sex scenes and the publishers thought if the men want to read books that give them books with sex scenes but there were certain groups, religious groups that didnt want them going to the servicemen. The books one was banned by boston and one of the publishers thought this was even greater than the army was willing to distribute to their filters and he was actually quoted in the newspaper saying it looks like all you have to do is get banned in boston so there were attempts to censor and make it so certain could be printed and sent overseas that they were not very successful. We almost out of time. She will be signing her book after the presentation. Thank you again for joining us. Apostates be mac h. W. Brands recounts the life and political career of americas 40th president Ronald Reagan. Henry brant is the man of the American West born in oregon graduate degree in mathematics and history and taught at Vanderbilt University before austin where he holds the senior chair in history. He teaches history and writing to graduate students and undergraduates and has written several dozen books on American History and politics and is no stranger to the bestseller list, two of the books traitor to his class by fdr. Hes also written on Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and theodore roosevelt. Hes written historically on the events and can be seen and heard on the national and International Television and radio. Hes spoken several times over the years at the National Archives for his latest book reagan wife, they were held in the National Archives. At the Ronald Reagan president ial library researched and written correspondence monitored conversations with foreign leaders and give speeches and much more. The book has created from a number of sources into the Washington Post that the legacy continues to fuel the choices facing his wouldbe successors and the astute biography is further evidence that the 40th president continues to cast a long shadow over a largely conservative political order. Please welcome h. W. Brands to the stage. [applause] thank you for that kind introduction. Im delighted to be back at the National Archives because i can say that none of the books that ive written in this series of which reagan is the last would have been possible without the records in the National Archives. So keep up the great work and make it possible for people who might need to do what i do. The book im going to talk about today is in fact a final volume of the series i started about 20 years ago. And it was originally planned as a history of the United States and i was thinking five or six volumes and i pitched the idea to a publisher that laughed in my face saying in these days nobody would write that kind of work in history and if you wrote it nobody would buy it or leave it and this particular publisher said and i will be able to address the ages of some of you by your reaction to publishers if you think you are anyway, well there will durant who wrote the history of humanity in about 35 volumes. I knew the answer i was expecting to get was no of course not but the real answer was yes i want to be because i read about all of those but a lot of them and i was very intrigued, and quite charmed by the idea that you could be guided through by one single guide. I already am in the business of teaching but certainly in American History the work of the broad survey in American History is partial back to typically four, five or six different authors. I may have originally thought that was because in the academic world of the expertise is apportioned so you would find a colonial experts to write on the period and then on the other National Period and so on and that is indeed a part of the reason. After i got into the business myself as a coauthor of one of these books i also discovered the more mercenary reason is the more offers you get on the title page the more they graduate students are teaching in various places around the country that might actually adopt a book so i didnt want to write a history by committee. I wanted to do with it myself and i realized it was rather ambitious but i decided to go ahead after absorbing and sort of thinking my way through the initial discouragement and from the publisher at the idea of giving it doing it and i decided i would do it head on over to do give it in the form of biographies and this is because i looked at the bestsellers list and i thought it was relatively rare to see something on the list that says a history of this or that. But people like biographies. So i thought what i would do is write this history of the United States United States provided under the guise into the form guide of into the form of the biographies and the first volume in the series was about Benjamin Franklin. And i spoke about him now 15 or 20 years ago and i had the honor to come back and speak about a number of books in the series of which the final one is Ronald Reagan. So im going to tell you a little bit about why a router that Ronald Reagan and thought perhaps someone else and it has to do with the fact that in the first place the volume in the series before this volume number five, Ronald Reagan is volume number six Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945. So i needed someone who could pick up the story in 1945 and they wanted someone that could get me as reasonable as possible after having written five volumes in the series i wanted to end it with 63 i didnt want to have to do seven so that ruled out certain other potential candidates. When i started the series i did not intend or expect that it would be if president s. Ive sometimes been asked why he would Benjamin Franklin franklin not be president into the short answer was that he died just as George Washington was being inaugurated. He didnt have the personnel personality. This is fairly because of the way that i conceived of the series in the first place. It was going to be a history of the United States. And so i needed a biographical subjects that occupied some place near the center of american life. If i had chosen an and enter or select of some sort, then i would be testing the readers patience when i went from that particular life to the broad history. And they enable me to tell this story without diverging too far from the life and career of the president. So they turned out that most of these come actually after so Andrew Jackson was volume two, Ulysses Grant, theodore roosevelt, franklin and finally Ronald Reagan. Again back to the reason with each of these books, i tried to associate and choose the individual to somehow legitimize what i conceived in my head as the central task of American History during this particular period. So it was called the first america because it seemed during the 18th century with the emergence of an american identity Benjamin Franklin like everybody else of his generation, George Washington thomas jefferson, you name it they were all born englishman and a diet american. So, how did this happen . Like a guy andrew my book on Andrew Jackson was about the emergence of american democracy so hes 23yearsold in the year Benjamin Franklin dies so i want my figures to be stepping onto the adult stage. I will be the first to confess i dont do childhood very well and i dont want to spend a lot of time on peoples childhoods. Maybe it is my personal taste. I have written biographies in which they are the obligatory darling letters from little Franklin Roosevelt and there are lots of ways i could have chosen them but one or two make the point and lets get on to the adult life. So i deliberately arranged it so that my figures would be adults by the time they have to take over from the previous. Ulysses grant is 23 when was 23 when Andrew Jackson dies. Theodore roosevelt is just three or four years out of college when Ulysses Grant guys. So i want somebody that is an adult and its is sort of embarked on life at that point. I need somebody as well who seems to summarize what happens in america in the second half of the 20th century. I thought about Lyndon Johnson in the second half of the 20th century. And he would have been a good choice except for two things number one, he has pretty much stolen Lyndon Johnson from everybody else until he finishes. Now i think in fact until carol finishes, there will be room for one volume on Lyndon Johnson. But hes kind of dominating the johnson market and im not going to step into that one but even if that were not the case johnson steps off the stage too soon and leaves the white house in 1969. I thought about Richard Nixon and he carries it further forward. There is a problem with Richard Nixon. The enticement for the biographer is that nixon has that dark streak in his personality that the biographer is really like. So it is the unhappy individuals the ones that have the dark streak that are appealing to the biographer but they are not necessarily appealing to those publishers because just as there is a rule with broadway musicals, you know that you have a success when the audience comes out whistling the theme song. Publishers like it if your readers can be doing the equivalent. Anybody that would be whistling i dont know what the watergate theme song would be. If you lead them down then they dont go tell all go to walter for tell all their friends with wonderful book and everybody ought to go read it and be uplifted. It might be instructive that it would be uplifting. Because of the period in his life that worked well for him it was still in 2004 but the other reason is i had just written about Franklin Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt is the iconic president for the first half of the 20th century. More than any other president hes the one that is associated in with the creation of the modern american welfare state. She is the liberal launch of the age of liberalism that starts in the 1930s and i would say continues through the 1960s through the 1960s and the essence of the new deal and the Great Society is the liberal belief that when there are important social problems government, the federal government is the agency of choice it is a stalwart of the first resort. So when there is a big problem in the economy is in depression in the 1930s and a lot of people need relief, turned to washington in 1960s. When Lyndon Johnson wants to launch the war on poverty. Johnson and all the people that voted for him and voted for Franklin Roosevelt to the 59 of almost 60 that voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 they say yes government is the solution to our problems and that is where we will look. That attitude changed. It is changing during the 1970s, it was decisively reversed when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 and so in fact in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said the government is not the solution, government is the problem, and i would argue that this is the attitude that has predominated the american political conversation ever since. Its not that there havent been any programs between 1980 and now if you but if you compare the number created in the 1930s and 1980 when the new federal programs came off and then they can easily do what has been accomplished on that round since 1980 they can sell them and become hard with the fate faith of obamacare which is hanging in the balance being a good example of this. If there is one individual that embodies the term in american politics in the second half of the 20th century it is Ronald Reagan and having written about roosevelt i felt sort of obliged academically and historically to look at the counterpart to Franklin Roosevelt and i found myself in have to convince readers of the book one way of looking at roosevelt and reagan is that they are sort of the two of the american century. Roosevelt, the leftparenthesis and reagan as the right. So thats why i wrote about Ronald Reagan. Now im going to tell you a little bit about what i discovered or at least what i concluded. Im not going to tell you everything because of course i want you to read and buy the book. But im going to share with you some of the experiences i had in doing research for the book. A brief summary fills in he was born in illinois and grew up in the fall town of dixon. He went from there into radio in the midwest. He found his way to hollywood and he had a modestly successful film career was openly modestly successful. He never quite cracked the top of the marquee. He was okay after playing an easy role. He didnt have it within him to play the dramatic role. And i dont clean it myself this is just how i explained that it has to do with some of the research i did. There was research that came from a direction that i didnt expect at all. It wasnt something i found in the National Record archives. It was something that i actually will tell you i was doing the book tour and Ulysses Grant and i was doing an interview with a radio host and i believe the host was in chicago and we were having this interview and as it often happens towards the end of the interview was coming and people called incoming and towards the end, the host asked me what my next project was about what are you working on now, and i said i was working on Ronald Reagan. And the host at that point put access point put his hand over the microphone and he said when he gets off we get off the air theres something i want to tell you. Okay. Good. I expected he was an expert on things relating to Ronald Reagan there was some ideas was going to share so we get off and i am all ears. If you want to understand Ronald Reagan, what you need to remember is Ronald Reagan was the son of an aqua look father. When he told me that there was no particular news Ronald Reagan himself reported on this in his memoir and so i was waiting for him to say more because he wasnt giving me new information. He went on to say, however i speak on the subject as the son of alcoholic folder and i was for you there is a characteristic emotional style people in that situation grew up with, and heres the way it works. He said one day your father is robust friend and youre throwing the baseball around in the backyard and hes telling you for the stories and takes you out for ice cream and the next day hes eating the living daylights out of you. And every day when you wake up, you dont know which father youre going to be dealing with. And as a result of thismy host was saying, you grow up keeping people and emotions at a distance because the one person whos your who should be your role model out of one should be who shows you how to deal with the emotion is someone that is utterly and sometimes violently unreliable. I reread his memoir he and nancy reagan and the first thing that struck me was just a sentence where she said that now i will tell you this Ronald Reagan and nancy reagan were so close emotionally to each other that they were almost the entire emotional universe, one to the other. Add no one understood Ronald Reagan better than me and the and probably vice versa but i recommend it to you later published it as one of the most candid memoirs of anybody in American Public life in the last 50 years at least that ive encountered, and she said that as close as she was as close as i was to ronnie there were always moments when when the curtain came down and even i didnt know what was going through his head into his heart. So to admit that about her husband to say that about her husband i thought was a striking but there was another passage that i found me even more striking, and again its just a sentence or two. And it didnt mean as much to me as it did the second time after having the conversation. There is a moment described when he is 11 or 12yearsold living in illinois and coming home from school on a cold winter afternoon snow on the ground, the temperature below zero and he walks up to the house and just as hes about to walk up to the house he almost trips over his father passed out drunk in the snow and as hes writing this at the age of 80 cities looking back seven decades and remarks i stood there for a moment and i asked myself what should i do. Should i wake my father and get him inside where its warm or should i just walk by and leave him there lying in the snow. For a young boy to be considering shillelagh flight out of here in the snow and with increased to death but my life be better if my father were to . That strikes me as quite a significant revelation. Now in his memoir its about how his mother had told him their father has this disease and this was the way that he was made to understand without alisam was. So dont hold it against him but at some level he was holding it against them very it is anyway this was one of the things i kept in mind in observing him and watching him and answering the question in all of this is how did Ronald Reagan accomplish what he accomplished . He goes off to hollywood in his career gets about this high they wouldnt go to the emotional wellspring that they have to go to if you were going to come they emotions you have to have some emotion inside of yourself to be willing to access so that you can see that part in the old. But he wouldnt come he couldnt go there. When Ronald Reagan decided to go into politics, he announced he was going to run for governor of california. When he heard he was running for governor and said no you got it all wrong Jimmy Stewart for governor, Ronald Reagan for best friend thats the kind of role that Ronald Reagan played. Even at that level his career fizzled out by the early 1950s. They hit had a three minute to give every sunday night host of the theater and he would just introduce the madefortv play and then that was the end of it so for the rest of the week he was a spokesman for the General Electric co. During the 1950s, Ronald Reagan was eventually a walking infomercial and this is what his career had come to an event in the early 1950s he lost even that job and managed to find a role. But there was no future for this guy into showbiz and they they had been one of sort of another and he she had no idea what the future was going to bring. Now anybody that had looked at Ronald Reagan in 1963 before he went into politics would have been hardpressed to identify those talents and ambitions and character traits that make for political greatness you can get a lineup of ten people any ten people of the street and include Ronald Reagan and so it is which one is going to change the american political world and you would have a hard time saying that this is the guy. As is the case with a lot of biographies, you dont start at the end and work backwards, but you conceptually do. The reason i wrote about Ronald Reagan is because he became the president of the United States. If he had dropped at the age of 52, neither mine nor anyone else would have thought about writing a biography of Ronald Reagan. It is because he became this person who changed american politics and World Affairs as well that were in arrested in the first half of his life but he looked back at the first half of his life and it is really hard to figure out what it is and that it gives rise to this thing thats going to become. So how did he do if . How did this person of unremarkable talent and Everything Else accomplish what he did. Reagan is in the middle of his career each year as he gives talks on behalf of General Electric so sometimes the talks are in the plans, lunchtime talks come at a the rotary club, chamber of commerce, you name it. And he always called it the rubber chickens who are. And he was often introduced by people who never met him before. The guy that is going to introduce him is someone who has never met Ronald Reagan. In fact hes only seen the name in print so he is a little uncertain how the last name is pronounced. And as a Ronald Reagan . So in that story the introducer is publishing the morning before he is going to give the introduction of new come and hes getting kind of anxious because he doesnt want to make a fool of himself in front of all of his friends. So hes wandering around thinking this over and encounters somebody else. Walking the dog and some kind of how the dog so hes going to make the introduction and asks the neighbor do you have been to know how his name is pronounced and he shows its Ronald Reagan. I was afraid i was going to get embarrassed. And she is walking past and desist by the way that its a cute dog that you have there. What is that . Its a bagel. [laughter] said this is a story that he told on himself. This is part of the answer and its going to sound really is a hack but its part of the answer of how Ronald Reagan accomplished what he accomplished. Im not going to give you the full but why blowbyblow of how viacom pushed what he accomplished. Before i do that im going to make a disclaimer. Those of us that are in the biography business we often use a shorthand and those in particular that right the financial biographies, we tend to say or speak as though the things that happened during the presidency of the person we are writing about were published by the person that we are writing about. I want to be the first to acknowledge that is not universally true. Sometimes it isnt even mostly true. Lyndon johnson did not affect the Civil Rights Movement by himself. By any means. They have lots to do with it as well. However it was in the 1960s and the essential role for the president diving that legislation through congress. And Ronald Reagan changed the political conversation but its been moving in a liberal direction since Franklin Roosevelt was his Ronald Reagan. I will tell you what hes about to the cop should give you my scorecard on what he did accomplish. One of the secrets of the successes he focused very narrowly on a small set of goals in particular. He had two goals that that he created when he gave a speech. I will begin my book with the very people that like Ronald Reagan and those that worked around him. In the autumn of 1964 a week before the election when goldwater was clearly going to lose and lose badly to Lyndon Johnson but in order to raise money to keep the campaign from going deeply in debt and to energize bailout or agreed to this political novice on tv. They had given some speeches in california and she seemed to give a good speech so they put him on tv and its really not an exaggeration to say that 30 minutes before he went on television on that october night in 1964, the nation if you remember him as an actor nobody thought of him as a political figure. Almost nobody before he went on tv that night and by the time the speech ended with a respecting their head saying we nominated the wrong candidate. If we nominated this one we might have a chance of winning. In fact the story of the republican conservatism, which is a story of the conservative modern conservatism is how Ronald Reagan went from the free action. So the day before he gave that speech the very next day there was the committee being formed around the country. But he started thinking about it so the two goals articulated in every speech he gave her the 25 years of his political life read this to same things. Number one, shrink the government at home. Never number two, defeat communism at the broad. His insistence on focusing on those two goals told you id give you a scorecard on what to do on these. I would say he got one and a half. The one he got again all by himself but the one he got completely wrong was to defeat communism. They pushed to the brink of disillusionment and when they gave that speech in 1987 they said, mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It didnt come down right away that it came down in the next two years and was followed by the guise of the soviet union. They have a lot to do with the fact that the union dissolved peacefully and went out with a whimper rather than a bang but if there is a figure pushing for the american cited his Ronald Reagan. So she gets one out of one on that one and on the goal of shrinking the government at home and the way that he got half of this is significant in the way that we live today. When Ronald Reagan became president the litmus test for the republicans conservative as the balanced budget. While reagan entered office as that kind of a fiscal traditional conservative but during the course of his first term, he made a fateful decision to accept tax cuts without insisting on spending cuts. He said i want to cut taxes and spending and what he got was guaranteed of tax cuts bringing the top rate from 70 down to below 30 but he got the tax cuts and they take those to the bank they got promises for spending cuts but promises of spending cuts come any political realist knows that as much as the certain groups might complain about tax cuts they dont really complain that hard because those are the running running three elections if they tell the constituents guess what i need your taxes. Spending cuts are a lot harder they didnt get the spending cuts they got the tax cuts. They had the structural deficit that had been a large problem ever since the years. Reagan, not surprisingly blanketed oneal. He should have known. He did know but he didnt act on the fact when you make political compromises, you have to insist the two parts of the cover might stick together. If you separate them than you might get a part of it but youre not going to get the other part, so anyway, this is what Ronald Reagan accomplished. How did he accomplish it . I am running out of time. I want to leave time for questions so i will make this relatively brief. I realize this is not a republican city. I spoke in dallas a couple nights ago. They were interested in what im about to say that youre interested in politics i assume so im going to tell you the formula and you can share it if you want more buried if you dont want to this is a formula for how the republicans can reclaim the white house in 2016. And it goes like this. You should be as much as you can become and what is it about Ronald Reagan that conservatives today should emulate that is if you want to get elected. Speak conservatively 100 of the time. Ronald reagan and the first speech to the farewell address in 1989 was 100 conservative and this is why Ronald Reagan even today is an icon of the Republican Party because everybody from just about another dissenter to the most zealous of the Tea Party Activists can read the speeches they can watch the speeches on youtube and its almost chapter and verse the conservative message that they embraced iversons so if you like the rhetorical conservatives than Ronald Reagan is what i and you cannot read him or make any kind of slip from that 100 message so thats the thing you want to do in your speeches. But, there is Something Else you need to do. You need to this is why i told you the story about Ronald Reagan you need to learn how to make people smile. And i realize that this sounds minor but one of the secrets of the success was something he learned during those years on the circuit. He would speak before audiences he didnt know that could have been skeptical and hostile but he would always warm them up with a story a joke and in fact if you read the speeches while hes in the white house nearly everyone begins with a joke. Now what is the purpose . The purpose is to get people to laugh because Ronald Reagan learned when he was speaking at all those places everywhere if you can get people to laugh with you, you are halfway to getting them to agree. But there is a larger message here and that is that i dont know if he thought this through he wasnt a particular reflective guy. It may have reflected his career in hollywood where he was a celebrity and wanted people to like him. Some of you are were no conservatives and i dont think to stereotype but you can decide for yourself if what i say is accurate. I would say most conservatives tend to be pessimists. I would say that a lot of them come across as grouchy even angry. Now i think that he would have to agree at least regarding the pessimism because the definition of a conservative as opposed to a person that is distrustful of change and if you are distrustful of change you think it is usually for the worse. But i would just say in the american politics and conservatism there is a stern often angry emotional undercurrent and i will give you the example for most of the time on the scene. Barry goldwater the philosophy was no different than Ronald Reagans philosophy on the issue. It was no different and i goldwater philosophy. But their appearance to the American People couldnt have been more different he was scary to a lot of people people, and the Johnson Campaign went to town on that. Ronald reagan by contrast, he was a friendly likable guy in he tells jokes and tells them smile. He is conservatism with a friendly face. In fact he was that example of an optimistic conservative. He said again and again and he fully believed that america is the shining city on the hill and it is going to get more shining as time goes on. Again and again putting on his tombstone in the epitaph Ronald Reagan said that americas best days are ahead. Now for somebody to say that in the 1970s when he is running for president after the 1960s come in the 1970s, between the vietnam war have arrived in the 1960s, watergate it wasnt the most natural thing. Remember jimmy carter in the socalled malaise. Americas best days are ahead. So here is how the republican candidate can win. Take that conservative message that is my one at. If ted cruz could have a character transplant anyway, i wasnt there [applause] Clark Clifford the longtime democrat attorney in the administration opined that Ronald Reagan was nothing more than a dunce. What you speak to the truth of that . While he definitely got half of it right. I could elaborate on that. He seems i could friendly guy if you saw him on television you would think he was somebody that i would like to get to know him have a beer with but the closer people got the more they realized there was a cool mist that his heart. He had almost no friends aside from nancy. There were people that he associated with but he never let his guard down sufficiently. I became convinced first he was no dummy. He knew a lot more than people thought he knew. Now im going to tell you something i got. I did interviews with pretty much every surviving Senior Member of the cabinet. And i will share with you what they told me. Theres almost in the same words everyone i talked to and i will let you decide what to make of it. Usually within the first five minutes, they assured me that they would say, you know, Ronald Reagan was a lot smarter than people thought he was. And i thought okay that tells me something but when they say then people thought he was because people didnt think that he was very smart at all three assertions smarter. None of them said he was the smartest person i ever met. So in fact robert gates was the number two guy in the cia administration and of course he went on to other things that he told me that he thought that reagan deliberately downplayed the much he knew because Ronald Reagan liked to keep expectations low. He could sneak up on people this way. I could tell you that reagan knew enough and she didnt know too much. And i think this is actually important if you are going to affect change from the position of the presidency. And in many ways jimmy carter is the one that shows what happens when you know too much because he became notorious for micromanaging. Im sure on an iq test he came at much higher. He was the one who thought he ought to master all the details and policy. If the big thing. And if bang. And if you try to master everything and spread yourself too thin you get nothing at all so they focus on these items and when Ronald Reagan wanted to focus she knew it was enough and i can testify to this having read the transcript of the debate could with Mikael Gottschalk where Ronald Reagan is going toe to toe, and its clear that number one is a masterful for details of what goes on in each nuclear arsenal. And she knew he had his experts and other people that would fillin the blanks fill in the blanks and fill in the details by necessary. So when he understood that you dont have to know everything to be present you have president you have to know enough and then you have to know who to hire so in this case i had a theory that and i have no way of knowing how to test the theory that if you could somehow take all the president ial elections in history and average out the iq risk the standard schoolbased iq if you could average out the winners into losers i wouldnt be at all surprised if the winning candidate wound up with a lower average iq in the losing candidate. And this simply goes to show i guess you could say it shows the limits on iq as a measure of important stuff but it also goes to show a couple of things. One is ordinary American Voters are not necessarily drawn to the smartest person in the room. And they are not produced to the effective result as president. You can hire smart people but not judgment. Next question sir. Thank you for a great presentation. Im looking forward to reading your book finally began looking at some of it. As you pointed out he emphasized the importance of the words and the importance of focusing. Is said, i looked at the title Ronald Reagan, the life, comparing it to the second memoir which is a little bit less bold, so i was wondering if that title of the second memoir influenced your title of the book and how what do you think your purpose is probably definitive like that of president Ronald Reagan. Of course she liked lou cannons book. The subtitle is a title like that and choose in fact i resisted. I wanted it to be called just reagan that the publisher thought somehow this conveyed that it was a biography. [laughter] i dont know what else it would be. While the author has control of everything that goes inside of the book the author has almost no control sometimes the author is asked to consent to what goes on the outside of the book and the outside of the book included the title. The contract says that the publisher in conjunction will determine what the title is. So i happen to like it. I didnt want to put life in time that is twice. He said whats the assertive about this. I wouldnt be the one to claim this is a definitive life and furthermore, it is way too soon for anything to be definitive about someone were too soon in the sense that we are still too close to the event in the two sentences sense is. What is the meaning of the end of the cold war . Well if russia and Vladimir Putin decides to revise this hostility with the United States and if in five years there and that the United States and theyre aimed at russia that will start to look as if 1991 wasnt that big of a deal. So, we dont know exactly how all this plays out. Technically although i may i want to help with the records at the library and records available elsewhere there are a lot of records they will become available in the next ten 20 who knows how many of the next years and it will probably be 50 or 60 years before anything really approaches it. But there have been a couple of the viewers that have been kind enough to say that this is the definitive life and im not going to argue with that. After cow. He covered him as a journalist from the california years through washington. And for obvious reasons hes interested in the beat and focuses on the political life and he has two volumes. One is president reagan and one is governor reagan and each one is as sad as my entire life. He gives a wonderfully short attention to the Ronald Reagan before the policies. So mine in this case thats why the publishers of the life because it really does include the first 50 years. Its mostly 50 to 94. In this town it is easy to run into people who with reagan and i talked to quite a few folks that did meet with him in the white house and they all told the same story that went they were going to the meetings, he would read something to them and then when they got to the question and answers, he wouldve turned to one of his aides were cabinet officials to say why dont you take that or george why dont you. And that always made me wonder how much beyond the two big ideas, how much of the agenda was his agenda or did he just continue to continued to be a walking infomercial as president . Stack very good question. I think that the agenda of the details on the other issues were filled in by other people. And i will give you the sort of extreme example that turned out badly that we can look at the ones that turned out reasonably well from the republican conservative perspective of the deregulation of the parts of the economy, he agreed it was regulated as of 1980. And the regulations are to be lifted as he would have set to unleash the independent spirit of the American People. But he didnt get it down into the details of what was printed the deregulated or when you get he said this is the basic principle now you put it into operation. Now that particular area in which an attention to detail he blew up in his face and either he would acknowledge this was in the iran contra scandal. He was concerned over the fate of the american hostages. He entered the white house while there were 52 american hostages held in iran and he made a big deal for not affecting the release of the hostages. His account of the hostages were at least on the day that he was inaugurated over the course of the next few years of several americans were taken hostage by hezbollah which was supported by the government of iran and they became involved in the negotiations to attempt to believe the hostages. Even the details of sending weapons to tehran in the hopes that it helps bring the american hostages. Now here in going to tell you the other choices are used. I accessed a diary and its clear that he understands the connection between the shipments to iran into the release of the hostages. Time and again time and again he writes okay so the current plan is we send them a new shipment of antitank missiles and they release the two hostages. Now in fact its always written in the future perspective because then he would go on to say okay we have a new deal and now they are going to release the hostages finally. And in that i carry its clear he says the hostages. About hes not being attention to details of the shipment, and in particular he stopped paying attention to the connection between the profits from the arms sales to iran and the money that is going to the cautious to the connection. One comment about the connection when some of you will remember when he went on television after the story broke and he got up in front of the American People speaking from the oval office and he swore that this was not armed for hostages and if you look at him and listen to his voice and read the body language, he certainly sounds sincere. If he had been a better actor than he was, i might have been willing to say okay he was just acting. But i think that it was at one level more complicated now, but also simpler than that. Reagan had a deepseated belief that the United States never did anything wrong at least not for long. Now, some of the psycho from talking to Ronald Reagan, his son. And he was a teenager when Ronald Reagan was in politics he was the youngest of the children and he was of a liberal mind and kind of rebellious. And he tells the story about how they were watching a movie one day which they were getting beaten up the way that they did they did in American History and he pointed out to his father and said they really got a bad deal from the United States government, dont you think so . She said it made his father uncomfortable. He didnt want to believe that this greatest country on earth ever did stuff that was basically wrong consistently wrong. So he said my father with no. He knew for example that slavery was an evil institution and it was supported by an illegal in the United States for 300 years. But between what he knew and what he felt, there was a gap and so when he is talking about we didnt trade arms for hostages, there is the part that knew there was a link and other parts had no the United States doesnt do that kind of thing. Now, in his defense the defense is appropriate here, he might have said while you know, the arms were going to tehran and the hostages were in lebanon. They were not getting arms themselves. Now, he knew that linkage and if anybody had viewed come if any democrats used that against him they would say thats absurd. It was absurd that it is the kind of thing that i think he believed. And its not i have seen other people in politics and you have probably seen it in your own life and other people around you. Its one thing to know something and it is another thing to feel it or believe it. And oftentimes often times people live in this state of dissidents where they know one thing that as if it is the real deal. Now Ronald Reagan i am convinced didnt know if the profits from the arms sales were being devoted to the contras. And i say this on the basis of first of all the reaction he had when he was informed by the diversion. Everybody saw him his face went white and he was shocked by this. But i talk to the Financial Security adviser at the time and i asked him the question this way. I said did you feel as though it was hung out to dry as a result it was poindexter and oliver north and he kept on him when he was away and poindexter said no. That was my job. My job is to protect the president from stuff he didnt want to know. He told me one other thing and this is, maybe im anticipating the question. By 1986, Ronald Reagan was 76yearsold by the end of the year and he was the question came up later whether the diagnosis of alzheimers which he announced to the public in 1994 whether there were some buttons of that early on. Some people thought they saw things as early as 1984. Some of you remember the first debate between Ronald Reagan and walter mondale. He didnt present himself well at all. He knows how to memorize his lines and he couldnt get over the closing statement. Everybody all the candidates memorized the Opening Statement and closing statement. He repeated himself. The wall street journal, the friendly wall street journal the next day asked the question of the headline is Ronald Reagan too old to be president . Writing later he said he thought that those were the initial symptoms. But John Poindexter told me he thought one of the reasons the scandal got out of hand the way that it gave that there was this stuff going on in the west wing that he wasnt aware of is that he was becoming forgetful and people would tell him stuff and he would forget. This will culminate in a very poignant but also a very scary moment when hes two years out of the white house and he is being asked to give evidence to justify in one of the criminal cases and so he gives a deposition. And in the deposition of a couple of hours, he assessed the whole long list of questions and he answers more than 80 of these questions with one form of i dont know i cant remember i dont recall. And these were not just questions of the detail. They were questions as basic as do you remember who you are chairman were chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was . I dont recall. And they really got heart wrenching when he was asked to you remember who michael was cut he was Ronald Reagans closest friend for closest political
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