Transcripts For CSPAN2 Booknotes 20131130

She tells what it was like to see teddy the day after the accident and then she said he wasnt like himself create she said maybe it was because he had been injured in a car accident or maybe that the death of the girl that was with him but she said that he was not like himself to she points that out. She mentions that jackie had once called teddy the black sheep of the family. This is what rose says that she says i didnt see that. She said i didnt see that myself. I dont think he was but she knows something is dreadfully wrong and she is also very upset that the press is haunting her and the Hyannis Point compound and she can hardly come and go because they are there. Soshi as we know know meets with mary jo kopeckys parents and the kennedy apartment in new york. She empathizes and sympathizes and she says i lost my daughter kathleen at the exact same age of 28 is your daughter. So she does try to reach out to the family but i think she is really perplexed by exactly what happened. How could teddy have done this . He is the baby of the family. He is the coddled one of the family. He is the one who was often is a little like when his older brothers would get into trouble he would be the want to go to joe to tell him because they think joe would go easy on the little kid and yet its teddy who cheats at harvard and is expelled and joe says you are going into the army for two years, but she does but he ends up spending most of his time at the base just outside of versailles. It wasnt the harsh punishment perhaps the joe thought it was. Host she helps. Guest been a supportive mother that she was to her children and maybe not being able to admit to herself the more inconvenient truths about his life but she does talk late fairly frequently in her oral history and her journal about how the boys would misbehave and how they were encouraged by their father to come and tell them the truth. Host the funny stories. Guest but also telling the truth and then she would say, and that my husband would take care of it and she didnt seem to see the conflict between her victorian goal of having all the children be responsible. The r word was often in her writings to them but she didnt seem to see the conflict there between having joe at the head of the to take care of all the scrapes in this behavior so there were times in law school where teddy would crash the car. He is noted in charlottesville for going over the speed limit and being arrested but they also crashed a car during law school over in europe and what did joe do to take care of it. He was a fixture of the family. Host was teddy the one who was closest to rose or was that bobby . Guest i think of the boys it was joe junior to begin with because he was the number one son. He was the fairhaired lawyer and when he passes i think that role goes to bobby because he is so much younger. Rosa and her mother would say oh hes going to become a sissy because he surrounded by girls in the birth order. Rosie then says later on after his death, she is approached by a documentarian who wants information about the first film he is making and rose literally says i dont remember too much about his boyhood because he was the seventh child and he was in the midst of all these other children. I cant really give you details. Having said that though he was the sensible one. He was the smallest of the four boys in stature. He was the most religious and the most moral. I think theres a beautiful clip and you can see it on youtube of bobby campaigning for senate in new york in 1964 and his mother on the stage. They have this great entering dialogue going that i think really shows how close they were when bobby is killed and then goes to teddy to be the youngest son, the baby and the patriarch, i think then he really gets his mother for the rest of his life terry he knows just how far he can push her in teasing and how much he has to take of her ongoing letters about dont say this or this is a grammatical error or this is how you should speak. He takes as much of that as he knows he can and then he teases her about the rest that he knows just how far he can push her. He was really very lovely with her. Host we are getting close close to her time here. I wonder if we could finish about what roses legacy is and also her contribution to this whole kennedy myth. How would you characterize back . Guest i would say that her legacy certainly to the country is not only that she produced this potent dynasty, she literally produced it and in the most potent dynasty in American History politics. For all of the good that her sons dead and we should add her daughters and lets not forget Eunice Kennedy shrivers Special Olympics and gene Kennedy Smith who was made ambassador to ireland during the Clinton Administration and served 55 years and that rowland was was by all accounts very important in the peace process. So was her daughters as well. She produced this very powerful family, given very much back to the nation which is what the goal was and is certainly in the mental retardation area. As i made the argument in the book and today rose is very much a part of the queen mother of camelot. It is she that contributes from the moment these children are warned to this legacy which we must point out many politicians today from bill clinton and barack obama have attempted to draft behind the kennedy image in the kennedy legacy. Host thats great. I think we are out of time. Thanks for talking. Its always fun to talk about the kennedys. Guest its been my pleasure. Thank you very much. Next on booktv encore booknotes. The late Peter Jennings discussed his book the century coauthored by todd brewster. The book uses color photography and the stories of ordinary people to describe the past 100 years. This is about an hour. Cspan Peter Jennings, author ofor i should say coauthor of the century. Guest emphasis on co. cspan . With todd brewster. Youyou ask us in the beginning to read this like a novel. Why . Guest well, i suppose what we really want to do at the beginning is emphasize this is a journalists history, this is a journalists work, not an historians work. Todd and i like to say no historian in their right mind would take on 100 years in 600 pages, if the period at all. I think because we want you to pick it up and read it anywhere. I dont want you to think of it as encyclopedic. I want people to think that its experiential; that you can pick it up anywhere, and you can look at a picture or you can read a caption. The captions are quite long, as i think youve seenand you can just take off. And its driven by people stories. Todd is the real architect of this, and he likes to joke with me that while we did all of the interviews with the eyewitnesses for the television news, he says, you know, in the book, theyre really fullformed characters. but theyre not sound bites as they often turn out to be inin long history programs even. So thats what i guess we mean by read it like a novel. Think of it as an experience rather than a history. Cspan you say you did the interviews. Is that what made up the little vignettes, as you went along, from the individuals . Guest mmhmm. All of the eyewitnesseswe interviewed about 500 people. This is athethe genesis of the book is a Television Seriesend of the century, irresistible forfor a Television Network and for journalists; irresistible because this 100 years has provided so much brilliant visual material. And we wanted to do it. And somebody basically said, well, why dont we do it as a book as well, which i think is rather a way to people in television of saying, weve got to have something thats slightly more lasting here. todd came into our lives and, thanks to him, the book developed this character of its own, this life of its own, got finished before the television. But i dont think we ever anticipated it would be asas an exciting a project. Cspan how long is this series . Guest there are two series really. Theres a whole series for the History Channel, which is about 17 hours, which runs on the History Channel in april. Then there are 12 hours, which run in twohour blocks, on abc in late march and early april likelyquite different series. Cspan one of the first pictures in the book is Frederick Jackson turner. Guest oh, yeah. Cspan who was he, and why did you start with him . Guest well, we started with him because, while this is not a book designed to extol the american century, it is designed as aas a piece of work seeing the world through american eyes. And so we thought it would be helpful at the beginning to have some sense of who americans were at the turn of the century. And turners idea was pretty elementary and aand an attractive one. He was the mana rather obscure, notcertainly not distinguished historian from the university of wisconsin in the late 1890s who declared that americans were not simply transplanted europeans, but a different kind of people, shaped not so much, as we say, by their history or by their National Institutions as by their environment. He writes very brieflymay i . the wilderness masters the colonist. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. Little by little he transforms the wilderness. turner wrote of this inexorable pull west for americans. but the outcome, he says, is not the old europe. Here is a new product that is particularly american. we thought it would be useful atatat the turn of the century to begin to give some flavor of who americans were beginning to think they were and no longer really transplanted europeans, which, of course, changes right away in chapter two as america gets pulled back to theto europe by world war i. Cspan as you know, you were born above the United States. Guest yes. Cspan what year . Guest i was born in 1938. Ithis isim 60 this year. Cspan what town were you born in . Guest i was born in toronto. My father was a broadcaster. He was a broadcast executive by the time i was born, had been a radio newsman before that, became an executive for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. And then when i was quite young, about 11, we moved to ottawa because the cbc head office moved there, and so i grew up in aa little Anglo Community in rural western quebec, which was very excitingthe inexorable pull west. Frederick Jackson Turner would have approved of the environment in which i grew up. So i have this rather mixborn of urban parents of angloscottish stock growing up in french canada, sadly not learning french as a child but having a rural upbringing. Cspan did you stay canadian . Have you still. Guest im still canadian, yes. Cspan and whywhy then immerse yourself in america like thisor the United States . Guest well, i came to america in 1964 as aas a reporter determined to go and see the rest of the world. I got offered a job by abc. I was so intimidated by the notion of coming to new york the first time that i said no. And i woke up about six months later in a cold sweat and said, oh, god, what have i done . and i wrote them and said, could i change my mind . but i wanted to see the rest of the world, which was a very distinctly young canadian thing to do. I came here, was plunged immediately into the coverage of civil rights in the mid1960s and then worked for 20you know, i worked here for five, maybe seven years. Then went and spent aboutalmost 20 years in the rest of the world, always at abcs behest. My challenge when i first came to america was to work in every one of the 50 states, a silly challenge, but an interesting one. It kept me going. And thenand then i became overwhelmed by the notion of learning as much about the country as i could as i went along. Iiif you work in televisionyou know this as well as i do. If you work in television, one of the things we fail to do, i think, is to show americans about their country, and so ive always wanted to do that. So the idea of doing this project was, for me, yet one more great learning experience. Cspan you say in the introduction that your father asked you to go outside and describe the sky when youin the early days of whether or not you were going to be a broadcaster. Why do you remember that, and what was he trying to get at . Guest becausei think what my fathermy fathermy father was at hwe were at home in this Little English town inas i said, in western quebec. I was interested in being a broadcaster. My father was not only very good, but did a lot of live broadcasting, describing the opening of parliament and the visits of kings and queens. Cspan ddo you look alike . Guest no, not at all. I look more like my mother. And the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation did a lot of live broadcasting, took it as a Public Service to cover great events, and if you wanted to get ahead, if you wanted to do well, you had to describe things. And notas my father used to say, and not talk too much over the sound of the horses hooves. So he sent me out one night as a kid, as an exercise, to go and describe the sky. And i went up and i stood on the little veranda outside my parents bedroom, and i looked up at the sky and i said, yeah, man, look at that, blah, blah, blah and i was downstairs in five minutes. My father said, well, that was rather quick. and he taught me a great lesson, which im now trying to pass on to a lot of other younger broadcasters. He said, go up and look at the sky again and imagine that its a pie, and just take a little slice of it and describe the slice. Then take the next little slice next to it and describe that, and then talk about the relationship between the two slices, and youll begin to describe events and affairs and youll begin to have some notion of context. and hes right. And itand it taught me very young that as aas a broadcast journalist, the most exciting thing in the world for a broadcast journalist is to go on the air and do a live event. Youre totally in command. Theres nobody who can tell you to shut up. They can cut your microphone. Itits basically your decision about where you go and what you cover, but if you dont have a sense of context and if you have no history, forget it. Cspan i want. Guest so it was a good lesson. Cspan i want to show some of the photographs and get you to talk. Guest oh, yeah. Cspan talk about them, just like you would if you were on the air. And the first one is a picture of some young people in the coal mines of pennsylvania called the breaker boys. What do you see in this picture . Guest well, iif i may, without presuming too much, give a nod to katherine barbeau, whos our photo editor. Shes done a spectacular job. Whatwhat we asked her to dowhat todd and i asked her to do was toto look for the lessthanobvious picture, to look for the unpredictable picture of the time. And what you see with the breaker boys, of course, in the coal mines of pennsylvania is what drove the progressive movement. And because its a twopage photograph here of the alarming, appalling conditions in the mines at the timethe average industrial laborers workweek was 59 hours, but they often worked 84 and 85 hours. And these kids would sit in little bins trying to sort coke and other stuff and flint out of the coal itself. Horrible conditions. And what i love about this pictureand i must say i love all about themis the eagerness that i end up feeling of just constantly looking deep or as deeply as i can into every face. Cspan the next photographand these were just chosen at random to kind of signify the different eras that you wrote aboutis one of theodore roosevelt, who is the president at the turn of the century. What do you think of him . Guest energy and aa locomotive with pants, i think somebody once called him. This is at grants tomb, decoration day. And look at the guys in the front row to start withnot everybody paying attention. Butbutbut roosevelt brought in a stream of fresh, pure, bracing air from the mountains, and he just gave the country such unbelievable sense of energy. You gosaid Richard Washburn describing him after a visit to the white house, you go into his presence, you feel his eyes on you. You listen to him. You go home, and you wring the personality out of your children an extraordinary man of adventure. The panama canalwe were very struck by David Mcculloughs book on theon the panama canal and Teddy Roosevelts devotion of energy to that. Changed another dimension of america and the rest of the world. Cspan you have a list in the back of the book of 100 suggestions. Guest yeah. Im glad you noticed. Cspan how hard was that to come up with the list, and how did you do it . Guest well, to be honest again, i defer to todd most of this time because in forwe talk fortodd and i were talking about this just the other day to figure how much wed been able to dip into all of this 100 books and others, and todd much, much, much more than i. Theres so many good books about the century. Its such an extraordinary period. We just thoughtcan i look at it . That thethat in eachin each case here, what you got was aand underneath each book theres a good little description of why we think the book is a good choice. So under, for example, David Mcculloughs book about the panama canal, just the building of the panama canal, under a wonderful book about new york life in the 1920s. Well do a little more description. These are books that just caught the eye, that seemed to catch the period. What we wanted to do with the book isi feel a littlei feel a little bit like were shilling herewas to catch the essence of the times. The wholeas i said at the beginning of the book, is verydesigned to be very experiential. Thethe eyewitnesses are designed to drive it in many ways. We asked them to just simply remember what it was like to live through the period, and so these books supplement what it was like to live through the period more than they are designed to be academic histories of the time. Cspan lets look at the next photo, which you often see it referred toarchduke Franz Ferdinand as the one who was assassinated the beginning of world war i, but you rarely see the assassin. Heres a picture youve got of. Guest gavrilo princip. He was a 19yearold student at the beginning of 1914. He was a stu. Cspan on the right there. Guest on the right. He was a student ofof ethics and literature and politics. And hes the young serbian who fired the shot. Im embarrassed to tell you that this reminds me of something much more contemporaneous. I wasjohnny burns of the New York Times spent an extraordinary winter in sarajevo in 1993 and i think in manyin many ways did more than anybody else to save the city of sarajevo, at least to keep the western attention on it. And i went to join him late in that winter, and hei took all of his clippings with himall of his news clippings because the times, for some unbeknown reason, hadnt been sending him his clippings. And in return he took me out as close as we could get to where princip had shoti drove there. Andand he took a little bit of rubble off the ground and gave it to me as his way of saying thanks to me for bringing his clips, and i still have it at home. Cspan now youyou know, thecouple of articles have been written about you that you took some chance when you went over to bosnia. When did you go there the last time . Guest ive been there several times. I went twoi went two winters in a row, 93, 94, which were the tough winters. I dont think i took any otherany more chances than any other reporter who went. It was kind of important to go. Not a lot of people wanted to go. Cspan what is it about you that makes you want to go do that . Guest i think it depends where you go. Sometimes i want to go just because i want to see. Sometimes i want to go because ive never been there before, and ive traveled a lot. In the case of bosnia, i didnti didnt want to look backi havei have fairly young childrenteenage children. I didnt want to look back 10 or 15 years from now and have them say, what did you do during that war, dad . i know thats kind of corny, but i didnt want them to ever accuse me, as a lot of people couldve been accused in the early stages of the bosnian war, of paying no attention to this humansome would argue the worst human disaster since the end of world war ii. Cspan how many kids, by the way, do you have . Guest two. I have a 19yearold girl, who goesis a freshman at amherst, and i have ana 16yearold son, who is awho takes exception when i refer to him as being a bohemian, but hes a wonderfully, worldly, sensitive guy. Cspan either one of them going into your business . Guest i dont know. You know, im rather struck by how many children of journalists or broadcasters end up going into the business. My instinct is to say i rather hope not because the business has changed so much. When i was a young reporter and going off to egypt, for example, theyd say, go do a thing on egypt. and you could, you know, go up and down the nile for two or three days, talk to local politicians, have a couple of good meals, take your time and file from egypt. The cnnization of the world, not to mention what the rest of us have had to respond to in technological terms, means youre in cairo today and calcutta tomorrow and thats very hard. So im not sure i want them to live a life which dawouldnt give them the leisure of learning as much as they could about the local culture. Cspan as we go through this, comment any time you want to on what impact you think things like world war i had on this century or this picture, where you see mr. Lenin there in the righthand corner and behind him, one of your feature interviews with Alexander Sasha brianski. He lived. Guest mmhmm. Born 1882, targeted for execution by the white guards. Cspan fellow there with the beard and the cap on. Guest thats right. Thats right. But managed to escape. Cspan did you interview him . Guest no, i didnt. One of our producers did. He died in 1995. Aa great many of our eyewitnesses are still living, but some of them have died. But ifif youand i know youve read this one. Heres aheres somebody who just makes lenins arrival back in russia so incredibly dramatic for us and i think in many ways works better in the book even than he does onon television because you can take the leisure of looking through it again. Cspan theres athethe next photo is of women in a railroad car smoking cigarettes. And one of the things it points out in the cutline of it is that men had leather seats, women have cloth seats, as you can see there. Whats that picture say to you . Guest well, this begins to talk about the the were were into the 1920s now, of course, which was new jobs, new fashions and certainly, for a woman, new morals. I think what impressed todd and me both about the 20s ultimately was the tension in the 20s. Thethe 20if youre looking for aa truly important decade in the century, you look at the 20s. Theres the cars coming, the Motion Pictures are coming, people are beginning to go to the movies. Radio is coming along. Women are beginning to change in quite dramatic ways. But whati think what struck us more than anything else was thewas the profound resentment and the sense of disorientation that other people had, who were not particularly part of this. But here you have two women, as many women did, displaying an overt side of independence that was characteristic of at least this development in the 20s. Cspan when you put this whole project togetherthe book, the audio, the television for History Channel, the television for abc. Guest its terrifying. Cspan . How many people, how much money . Guest to beto be honest im not quite sure about the money. Cspan somewhere i saw 25 million. Is that close . Guest wouldnt surprise me. It wouldnt surprise me if you think of this Much Television andand this much book, andand probably more than 100 people certainly by the time we are finished doing all of the television. Its an enormous project. Its the biggest project weve ever done at abc news. Cspan is it done . Guest the History Channel project is done. The book, thanks to todd, is done. The abc Network Series is not yet done. What weve done with thethe History Channel is quite chronological. In terms of the abc project, which is the sort of the network project, which will come late march andandand through april, weve taken ideas. For example, well devote one whole hour to lindbergh. Well devote one whole hour to the technology of the moon. Wellwell revisit iran. Well revisit vietnam. We will look for one whole hour on how hitler came to power. Cspan are you worried about the ratings . Guest no. Cspan aredoes it come at a sweeps week or anything like that . Guest no, no, no, no. Ito be perfectly honest, i dont think youd get this on in sweeps week, such is the new world of television that they wouldntthey wouldnt put this on in sweeps week. Thats too high a gamble for a network. But they will put it on in prime time. Im pretty convinced now that my management sees this as a longterm commitment, something which marks us as being different, something which they want to do because its important at the end of the century and not something which they think will get them a mass audience, though i have to tell you we were talking, you know, not too long after the book has been published and weve now had the experience of seeing the book sell quite well and i think thats wonderful. But what really is the most satisfying thing is to see people start to open up about the century. I was in arizona and i was signing a book for a man. He said, could you make it to suchandsuch norton. and i said, norton, norton, yeah. i mean, youre always looking for an historical reference at this point, and i said, i reci recognize the name. he said, yes, my grandfather designed the norton bomb site. and almost everywhere you go and talk about the centuryand i think this is going to accelerate next year for everybody. Were going to be looking for those, you know, memories in the family attic about the century. And more of us, of course, are connected to the past now, still, than we are to the, you know, hopeful technology of the future. Cspan in this next picturephoto, anything like this ever happen in canada . Guest im not sure what youre looking at. No. Cspan lynching at lawrenceville, georgia. Guest no. Americayou know, canadicanadasfor one thing, was at the end of the underground railroad andand certainly not at this particular period of time, but canada escaped, for much of its history, the terrible racial experience of the United States. Im not sure learned from it in every regard. Canada now has a significant nonwhite population both in the two largest cities, toronto and montreal, and the countrys not immune from its own measure of racism, but, no nothingnothing like this. Its raits interesting because when i grew up in the 1950s, canadians were a little pious about this and often looked at the United States with a misplaced measure of superiority, as canada didnt have this particular problem. And this is the one i remember so clearly growing up. And when i came here and was assigned to cover the Civil Rights Movement, i realized whata, how complicated it was, how much pain there was involved for all concerned in the country. Somebody asked me the other day what i thought was the saddest thing of the century, and iand i was caught slightly off guard and i gave some gratuitous answer about how man is still killing man with such vigor at the end of the century. The saddest thing of the century, of course, is that america has not managed to solve its racial problems. Cspan the next photo is of a preachera priest. As a matter of fact, was he canadian . Coughlin . Guest father coughlin, no. Cspan i dont know why i remember that because he was from detroit. Guest yeah. Cspan but what i do remember from doing a book on himcharles warren from the university of oakland in michiganis that he would have an audience, out of 120 Million People on a sunday afternoon, of Something Like 30 million or 40 million. Guest masterful performer. Cspan but youve lived through 34 years at abc, where you used to dominate, and thats all changed in the sense that thewith all the cable channels and everything else, your audience. Guest well, for one thing, you came along. Cspan well, but your audience isyour audience in numbers is the same, but the percentage is down. Do you feel the difference when it was 30 years ago . Guest well, 30 years ago dont forget, i was a very small fish andand, you know, living, as we all did, in the shadow of huntley and brinkley andand cronkite. What i do remember 30, 40 years ago was how people looked to the three networkstwo networks, really, nbc and cbs; abc being a nonstarter at the timefor this sort of centrality inin life. Ii think it is still trueii always think when i come to washington about the challenger disaster because i was here when the challenger blew up. Cspan you were waiting to see president reagan . Guest i was waiting to see president reagan in the white house and, you know, rushed to the bureau, was on the air for 111 2 hours. And when it was over, i went back to the hotel to come upon the bulldog editions of the times and the post. And i was struckgod, theyve got 30 pages on this story. and i was immensely struck by how the country must have been moved by watching the television. And i went to see dan boorstin, who was then the librarian of congress, and asked him to put this in some perspective for me. And he said, you know, television is what we had at theto replace the campfire at the time ofof western development. When the people had a disaster on the wagon train, they sat around the campfire and now people sit around television. they still do. They sit around more of us, but in the event of a nationalwhen john glenn went up again onon apollo, people gathered for that one occasion again around the Television Sets again to have this shared experience. But it hasin terms of how many options you have, its just changed unbelievably. Youdi donti dont think youd geti dont think youd get a father coughlin ononon radio again with the same kind of impact. The largest Radio Audience in america i think probably belongs to paul harvey, still on abc at 80, i think. Rush limbaugh and others, you know, sort of share a large audience, but i dont think anybody would ever have the audience or the power that father coughlin had. Cspan this is way out of context wwith our sequence here, but back in the back of the bookand i underlined it. Guest right. Cspan . You say, intellectuals worried about its impact on society, and what you were talking about there was the internet. Guest yes. Cspan you find people in the intellectual world that youve talked to that worried about what that impact will be, and what is thewhat are they worried about . Guest well, first of all, i dont think we know what the impact of the internet is. I think weve come to the end of the century generally nervoussome of us generally nervous about the impact of technology, generally wondering where it will lead us in the next century. And i keep running into intellectuals who are afraid that what the internet does is it puts so much information out into the Society Without any particular value on it. And so you never quite know what youre reading and you never know what source youre using. Its a problem for usless a problem for you than it is for usbecause the audience does not always understand the difference between you and the internet, and the audience is asked all the time now to make some value judgment about information. And i think the intellectual concern, to some extent, is that the internet has made so much information available, but it hasnt helped us particularly in understanding its relative value to other information. Cspan heres a photo of adolf hitler. What was himhis impact on this century. Guest remind me what page youre on because i absolutelyoh, i can look here. Page one sixtwhat i amthis is, i think, one of the most stunning pictures in the book and one of the most stunning pictures i have ever seen of hitler. There are a couple of others, by the way, of hitler posing in ain ain a studio as he practiced his picturebut heres a picture of such clarity taken at a rally in berlin in 1934 that you can look deeply into the faces of all the people. We were talking the other day about, you know, hall these years after the war, there are still books coming out all the time reconsidering hitler and his place in life andand rereconsidering the german involvement in hitler and reconsidering how he came to power, which well do inin at least one of the hours in the television news. I think you can accomplish an enormous amount just by looking at this picture. Cspan what was his impact, in your opinion . Guest . And looking. Cspan what did he do to us . Guest well, the only reason i pause is because i cant imagine anybody capturing that inin a single phrase. Clearly the competitor for thewith stalin for the most evil man of the century. Cspan could you ever have anybody like him again . Guest its an awfully good question. This is the ultimate cautionary tale, isnt it . If youif you understand in any way, shape or form that hitler doesnt just explode onto the scene, that hitler came to power in a series of carefully designed ways and ininin so many instances where there were opportunities to stop him, to dissuade him to reconsider. And so he came to power inone might argue, almost in a democratic process. So on that basis, yes, perhaps hitler could come again. Somebody asked me the other day where would i have wanted to have been a reporter at in history, and the answer is i would have wanted to be a reporter at the time of the concentration camps so that we might have served some useful purpose ofof preventing it or halting it or attracting the worlds attention to it. Cspan middle east expert dan pipes was here one time. Guest right. Cspan and hein his book on conspiracies, he totaled up 169 Million People that were killed, murdered, slaughtered this century. Guest mmhmm. Cspan what do you think, based on wlooking back at this century in your book, will happen in the 21st . Guest i havent the vaguest idea. Cspan can it happen again like that . Can that. Guest no. I mean, itits a horrifying tthought that it could happen again. But i think that one of the things you learn as a journalist, and ii hope historians know this even better, is not to make predictions. Wouldnt it be horrendous to think that anything like the first war, which had such an impact on theon the century, could happen again . And yet, you know, if you and i were younger, wed be out the door tomorrow to rwanda, wed be off to kosovo, wed bewed be off to bosnia, wed be off somewhere in the world all the time covering slaughter. But on that scale again . I went back to cambodia inive forgotten the year nowthe late 1980s, i guess, and the hardest thing for me to grasp when i went back was could it ever happen again . But it happened the first time ininunderunderunder the pretty clear glare of the rest of the world. Cspan photo of a uaw union group at a General Motors plant ofhow are the unions doing in 19. Guest 37 . Cspan well, how are they doing now compared to where they were back then . Guest oh. Well, you know, in the very short run, unionsome unions are having something of ahahaving something of a comeback. Some people in the Labor Movement are feeling better today than they did last year. Again, i think itsits awfully tricky to be gettingto make predictions about where the Union Movement is going. We live in fat Economic Times at the moment; more people have more wealth today than at any time in the century. In 1937, at the time this pictureone of our witnesses isis victor ruther, walters brother, who talks. Cspan another photo in thein the group toin the book, too . Guest i have to go and si have to besee what page youre on. This is a big book. I have to see what page youre on196. Cspan yeah, hes the. Guest talks a little bit abouttheres a wonderful story in here aboutabout how a woman faints in an auto plant on the west side of detroit, and victor ruther goes to her and says, do you think you could do the same thing again tomorrow . he manages to get her to do the same thing again tomorrow, and thats how he effectively gets people out on strike and gets Union Membership up aup again. Cspan another photo is a russian child weeping over a dead mother. I dont know if you remember this photo. Its on the screen now. Guest i do it very well andi do remember it very well, and iwhen i look back at this picture, as i do so often, its a picture weveits a picture repeated so many times. Its just a very intimate picture. You know, seven million citizens, civilians, succumbed to the violence in world war ii. Many of our witnesses tell about what it was like to go through those horrible winters. Ive often wondered why we put this picture in, except i guess its just so stark, yet so intimate. If youifif you hadone page forward or one page back, im embarrassed to say i cant remember, in this global nightmare you get sometheres a fabulous picture of trying to get supplies into leningrad during the winter. And those of us whothose of us in subsequent generations just dont have anyone of the things i note about the depression, one of the things i feel about the second war, about the fmy grandfather was in the first waris how subsequent generations just dont have anyas hard as you try, as hard as you try, its very difficult for usimpossible for me, in many casesto understand the depth of this. Our eyewitnesses are very good at trying very hard. Cspan how many photos in the book . Do you know . Guest i think about 500, i thinka lot. Cspan we have a picture of somewhat appears to beit says prisoners lined up in an uniidentified concentration camp, and thats another theme in your book; thatthe holocaust, the jewish life all through thethis century. How did the jews come out of this century in thein the world . How are they looked at . How do theyyou know, have they assimilated inin the world, in this country . Whats your view . Guest no. Well, yesthe answers yes and no. I mean, iarent you struck asas much as i am by theby the prevalence of antisemitism still inin the world today . You and i areagain, are talking at the time whenwhenwhen its been a struggle to get the swiss banks to look deeply into their history. Wewewere talking at a time when General Motors and ford are accused of collaborating with the nazis in world war ii. Iii think weii cannot imagine a time when we will not or should not be haunted by what happened in world war ii and by the determination to wipe out a race of people. I dont. Cspan did you have any particular way that you covered this whole issue in the book . The way you covered in thehow about the Television Part of it . Guest well, iiiagain, itrying to find a phrase for it is difficult. I think we wanted people both in the book and in the series toto feel less the glamour ofthe glamour and the glory of war than the horror of war. Have youyouve had paul fussell on your program whenever . Hes abe a wonderful guest for you becausemilitary historian. We were much affected by thehis harsh appraisal of war and how man went from the honorable soldier of world war i to the soldier of world war ii, where everything was a target and everybody was a legitimate target, where citizens were bombedwhere civilians were bombed by both sides. So ii hopeand todd, i think, will agreethat weve taken a rather harsh view of war. Therestheyouyou cannot escape that america comes and saves the world in many cases, but you cant all escape the fact that americas late to come into both wars. Cspan whittaker chambers. Was this. Guest ii. Cspan waswas thiswas this. Guest well, the picture is. Cspan . Issue brought to a conclusion in this century . Guest no, not for some, and not for some because alger hiss continued all these times. I interviewed alger hiss once here in washington. He went all theseperiod protesting his innocence. Thethe picture of whittaker chwe could have chosen several pictures of whittaker chambers, but in this case you have one whichwhich talks a little about his past in the communist underground. Cspan diddid you. Guest . And that he lived a life of deceit. Its not a flattering picture, nor is it meant to be. Cspan did you reach your own conclusion as to who was right and wrong in this . Guest never. Never. Did you . Cspan diis it a touchy issue, do you think, still . Guest yeah, i think, you know, therell continue to be people on both sides of the issues for a very, very long time. I think more and moreor, increasingly people have come to conclude that hiss was guilty, but youll still find people out there who will support his claims of iof innocence. Cspan another name that has been used, even recently, is joseph mccarthy. Guest i think what stuci think whatwhat absolutely fascinates aboutus about this particular picture is there you see carthy withmccarthy with all of his admirers. And, you know, accuse first, research later. Cspan did people know. Guest the mostdestructive anticommunist of his time. Cspan did people know of him in canada . Can you remember that when. Guest yes, but nothing with the same power that we had here. One of the very first things that abc ever did as a network was towas to televise in full the armymccarthy hearings. Nobody else did them. I was surprised at the time. But, clearly, one of the most destructive politicians of the time. Could he come again . Yes, but i think itd be a good deal more difficult. Cspan why . Guest because i think people wouldi think people would be quicker to jump on him now than they were. President didnt jump on him very quickly at the time. Took a long time before edward r. Murrow worked up that quite astonishing level of courage, which i dont think we would think of soi just dont think people would keep him at arms length today as they did then for such a long period of time. Again, forforfor those of us who didnt live through it, the picture of mccarthy has on the backside of that page the testimony of lee grant, an actress who was blacklisted and went on to campaign for years to abolish the policy of blacklisting. But the horror that people lived through as a result of mccarthyi think its very hait is immensely difficult for people of this generation to understand. Cspan what did he do wrong . What was his big sin . Guest accuse first, ask questions lateraccuse first, ask questions later. Take advantage of thetake advantage of the paranoia of the times. Cspan the next picture is montgomery, alabama, and it kind of represents the number of thepicked out of herethatthe whole Civil Rights Movement. Whatwhat did television do with this story, do you think . Guest well, of course, this is wherethis is where television begins toto play an enormous role in the Civil Rights Movement, and not to mention where a lot of Young Television journalists names werewere made. This is when television, probably as much at any time in its modern history, plays a role ininin enabling the entire country to participate in a tragedy. Fromfrom montgomery, memphis, all through the south in the mid1960s, television was everywhere. It was on the news every night. There was nothere was no escaping in the south in 1964, no matter where you lived in the country, what was happening. Cspan what kind of marks would you give americans on race today . Guest as we said before the program, isnt it great . ithats why i like to sit there and ask the question. Well, i think again it depends who you are, doesnt it . I mean, im always struck by my black friends who say its noits no better today than it was 30 years ago, and thatthatsthats awfully hard to hear from a black friend. Theres no question that the growth of the black middle class in the country has been enormously significant. But blacks and whites, for the most part, in america continue to lead separate lives. I mean, youre asking for a grade. You couldnti couldnt give a grade. Ibut its painful. It is painful today. Ii have one particular black friend who is very successful, and it doesnt occur to her, even though were very close friends, to invite me to black parties . Pretty tough at the end of the century. Cspan Randall Robinson sat there and talked about his brother, max, who was. Guest right. Cspan . An anchorman at abc. Guest partner of mine for a long time. Cspan . Andand said thatthat max robinson thought that Frank Reynolds was a racist. I never asked anybody else whether or not they wanted to counter that. Did you see Frank Reynolds as a racist . Guest oh, i knew frank very well, and, you know, and thethis was a trio of broadcasters frank and me and max. I was in london; frank, here; max, in chicago. I think max was wrong, but i think max was atroubled deeply by the challenges of being black and being the first serious black anchorman in the country. It was a burden thatthat people enhanced by asking him to be more sometimes than he was; died young, a troubled man in many ways. But i think he was wrong when he thought of frank as a racist. Cspan heres a photo of a man in wisconsin, president for 1,000 days. Guest yes. Andand sosomebody once said to us, when they first looked at this picture, you dont have to look at it from the front to recognize who it was. cspan his impact, in your opinion . Guest well, hes my firsthes my first president person. We concentrate on five president s inin the book, he being one. I was in dallas shortly after he was assassinated. Heihehe was a great hero, even in canada. And when he and mrs. Kennedy paid a visit to canada, they were treated as conquering heroes. Too short. We have justhave you talked to sy hersh on this program . You know, we did a Television Series about the other side of kennedys in conjunction with sys book. A lot of people objected to seeing another side of theof the Kennedy White house at the time, yes, but unrequited, unhoped. But i rememberdo we all not . The hope and theand the sense of commitment to the rest of the world and the sense of potential accomplishment that so many people had during the kennedy presidency, the degree to which he attracted talented people to come and serve in the administration. People were profoundly angry when we took a look at the other side of the Kennedy White house. Cspan did you interview john f. Kennedy . Guest mmhmm, only once and only on the road. Cspan how old were you then . Guest never sat down with him. Cspan do you remember . Guest in my 20syeah, in my mid20s. Cspan you picked in this book a photo at the lincoln memorial. Guest right. Cspan . From behind the head of abraham lincoln. Guest right. Cspan why . What was thisis this inparticular picture inparticular reason why you picked it guest those are not cspan lights. They mithey wethey might be today. In all of the pictures in the book, we wanted people to see it in a slightly different way. In all of the pictures in the book, we have tried to get beyond the traditional obvious picture with which were all familiar. And so heres a chance where you can get not just the sense of all these people who were here for the 1963 march on washington, but you get some sense of the relationship of the memorial itself and beyond. And you get a touch there of television lights showing new technology played such an enormous part of the century, conveying this to rest of the country. But you find this with a lot of pictures in the book. We want people to look just slightly beyond the conventional picture. Cspan do you have any sense of what Martin Luther king would think of whats happened since his death in the Civil Rights Movement . Guest yes. I think hed still be struggling. I think he would still think he was deeply involved in a struggle. I think he would be profoundlymaybe not profoundly. I think he would be dissatisfied. I think hei think he wouldhe would be talking in the same way. He would be angered by many of the same things. He wouldnt be having to worry about bull connor in alabama anymore. But i think Martin Luther king jr. Would be dissatisfied. Cspan what hasand then the next photo is thisthe harvard student at the memorial for jfk. What has assassination done to us . And by the way, have there been any assassinations in your lifetime in canada . Guest no. No. No. And ii may surprise you. I take a rather snot a benign view of. unintelligible , but i think if youve come here from somewhere else, as i have, even from someplace asasas much like the United States as canada is, you have a sense of resilience in the country that maybe other people dont have. Aalmost every time somebody describes a tragedy in america for me, whether its a moral tragedy or an assassinationi remember, covering kennedys assassination, at the end of three days breaking down utterly, but never having any doubt whatsoever that the country would dust itself off quite quickly and move on again. So ias you know, the century opthe century opens with assassination. Ive always thought it didnt change america very deeply; that what it is to be an american, what it is to be the republic is so deeply ingrained that while it sets us off in many ways and robs us of potential, the country isis as strong as ever. Cspan now the next photo wewell have up in just a moment is the photoit combines two things richard nixon, watergate and the pows in the vietnam war. And this is the return of the pows forrichard nixon speaking to them. I think its at the state department. Guest iyou know, ive sive said this to many of my friends in the business that watergate is a great blank hole in my life because i wasnt here. I was overseas. And so trying to appreciate the impact that watergate had on the National Life at the time, which, by the way, has had tremendous residue since, is very, very difficult for me. But, ironically, i was sent to the philippines to welcome the pows home from hanoi. And soso i just haveim unabashedly embarrassed by thisi have no feel for how watergate really tied the nation in such knots. Cspan how about vietnam . Guest i did two very early dilettante visits in 1965 and 66very, very short, dilettante visits. And it didnt take more than that to realize that the country didnt have a particular sense of what it ultimately wanted to accomplish in vietnam. And when wewhen we look at worldat america at the end of world war ii, with the sense that america would be the nation to save democracy, and you then look againswitch pan, as we say in television, to look at america in vietnam, not sure how to save democracy, if thats what it was all about. I think you get a really good sense of the dilemma that happens at the end of the century, too, as a result of vietnam. Cspan you dedicate your book to your father, charles jennings, who died. Guest and todd to his father. Cspan toddi mean, your father died inwhat . 1973 . Guest 1973. Cspan how much of your success was he able to witness . Guest he came to new york when i was quite a young reporter. He knew me as a foreign correspondent, which i think he quite liked. My father aalmost came to the states permanently at the end of the depression. He was offered a job here with nbc. He was thrown off the train by an immigration man at the border and told to go home again. He got home before everybody else at his goingaway party had sobered up andand became something of an imperialist as a result. But i remember him saying to me, after id been here a long time, thatthat there was so much opportunity in the United States that i should probably not think about coming home. But i thought about going back to canada for many years and trying to pick up where he left off because he had made a very, very distinct contribution to public broadcasting in the country. And thats something in which i still believe. Cspan how much has your Canadian Citizenship had to do withaand maybe its just my observation. I seem to hear those canadian accents coming through the abc overnight show from time to time, some of your anchors. Are you bringingi mean aredo they see you as a friend, and then do they come in . Or do you reach out and recruit . Guest well, wewe have allall ofall three of the major Television Networks have all hired a lot of canadians. Weve hired quite a lot at abc. Canadian broadcasting has a history of preparing a young man or a young woman to be a broadcaster and a journalist, not just one or the other, and its turned out to be a very good proving ground. Cspan they do it differently than they do in the United States . Guest well, theytheres, i think, more emphasis on the journalism than there is in some of the private independentaffiliated stations around the country. Its also true that a lot of people now do so well at local stations around the country theyre happy to stay at local stations and dont want necessarily to come to work at the networks. Its also true that canadians, i think, as a group, all want to go and see the rest of the world on somebody elses money, and that canadian broadcasting news organizations dont have the money to send them as far afield as abc, cbs and nbc have had over the years. And so this is a good place to come andandand use as a springboard to go see the rest of the world. Cspan have you ever seen any resentment on the part of americans that you arent a citizen here . Guest sometimes. Sometimes. It depends. Thethe answer in general is absolutely no. After 30some odd years here, iiiit is inescapable that we are living among the most generous people on the face of the earth, no question about it, who care far less about where you come from than what sort of a contribution you make while youre here. But on occasion, when i do a broadcast and treat a subject with which people quite vehemently disagree, i will get bus money sent to me. We did awe did a program a couple of years ago on the decision to drop the bomb in hiroshima and nagasakion hiroshima and nagasaki. And while we made no value judgment whatsoever about whether the bomb should be dropped or not, some of the more conservative radio commentators picked it up as being that, even before it was on the air. Andand on that occasion, more than any other, i got a lot of mail saying, why dont you go back to canada . but it doesnt happen very much anymore. Cspan you left school when you were 16 . Guest i did, 17, yes. Yes, sevsixsev16, 17. Cspan why did that happen, and would you do it again like that . Guest i think i was bored. I was embarrassed aboutim still embarrassed about it, and god forbid myid beat my son around the ears in the faint hope that hell never be like his father. I think i was just bored. And now that im middleaged, ii love the process of learning more than at any time i ever have in my life. This has been a great experience inin that respect. But i just think i was bored, and i wanted to go and see the world and i was impatient. And that makes me think that i probably didnt have very good teachers, and so ive come to revere a great teacher. Ive come toto relish every single opportunity to learn anything. Its difficult inin our jobs, we anchor types, you know, because were going from pillar to post all the time. You thinki used to think that the anchor job was a job in which you should read books instead of magazines, magazines but i just think i was bored, and i wanted to go and see the world and i was impatient. And that makes me think that i probably didnt have very good teachers, and so ive come to revere a great teacher. Ive come toto relish every single opportunity to learn anything. Its difficult inin our jobs, we anchor types, you know, because were going from pillar to post all the time. You thinki used to think that the anchor job was a job in which you should read books instead of magazines, magazines instead of newspapers, newspapers instead of the wires. But the sad part is theyre flatout jobs all the time. You go in in the morning, youre just flat out through the entire day. And so theres much less reflective time than perhaps the job should have. But every single opportunity to learn, ever since grade nine, once i was past 20, has just been a magic moment. Cspan theres a photo in the book of Ronald Reagannot actually of reagan, the president , but aa poster that hes holding upa womanor a woman is holding up. It just brings up the whole issue of Ronald Reagan. His impact eight years as president . What do you think . Guest will continue to be debated. Iafter the years of doubt which proceeded Ronald Reagan, we callwe call our reagan chapter, if you will, a new morning. And i think thats a pretty easy description. I think theyll go on debating forever whether the end of the cold war is a result of Ronald Reagan or happened on his watch. But there is no question whatsoever in anybodys mind thator there should be no question, in my view, in anybodys mind that Ronald Reagan gave the country, after a very dark period of time, a new sense of feeling good about itself and feeling strong about itself