It is a very powerful place and also the other cabinet secretaries when they want to do something it puts you in a stronger position to have that relationship with the president , to be so candid and say that is wrong, you cannot do that. I totally reject that. Having that relationship made me a more effective attorney general. My critics, as an excuse to be critical of my service. Host i am curious, it is clear from the book you had a close relationship with the president. What is your relationship like with him today . Do you still talk to him . At the end of the book, the president kept up with your career move than things you have done since government service, what is your relationship like . When it comes to nashville we see each other, i tried to see him. We dont see each other like we used to when he was in dc. I have great affection and respect for george w. Bush the man. He gave me several onceinalifetime opportunities, changed the trajectory of my life. I really feel privileged to have played a part in his administration both in texas and in washington dc and i have the highest regard for him. Host thank you for talking with us about your book and your time in the white house. Guest appreciate it, thank you. Cspan created by americas Cable Television companies and brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible conversations] there is water there too. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon. I had a feeling even if it was 4 00 in the afternoon on a monday, a lot of people would turn out in august. I am bradley graham, coowner of politics and prose with my wife. On behalf of the entire staff, thank you for coming. Two administrative notes, now would be a good time to turn off your cell phone. When we get to the q and a part of the session, we have one microphone stand and if you have a question step up to it, cspan booktv is here, we are also recording as we want to pick up your question on the tape and at the end of the session normally we ask people in the audience to fold up their chairs, but dont do that, leave them where they are and form a line to the right of the table and snake it back out there to the trees. Being very hopeful. We hear once ended up in a doonesbury cartoon. We woke up to find the bookstore mentioned in passing, a book signing by one of the characters. Naturally we were thrilled, relatives and friends from around the country congratulated us on having reached this pinnacle of fame. One hasnt really arrived into one scores at least a reference in doonesbury. By that measure donald trump hasnt just arrived, he has virtually taken up residence in doonesbury dating back to the fall of 1987 when Garry Trudeau started mocking what turned out to be trumps first president ial trial balloon. It wasnt long before, it wasnt long before the unflattering portrait got under trumps thin skin and he tried, as he is want to do, striking back at Garry Trudeau calling doonesbury overrated, most people dont comprehend the strip. For his part, Garry Trudeau couldnt resist. His book didnt ignore trump. It is comedy malpractice. The book titled yuge titles 3 decades of doonesbury featuring trump. Over the past 30 years much about trump hasnt changed but as gary told the Washington Post in a recent interview, what he wants regardless harmless buffoonery is now dangerously symptomatic. A few brief biographical facts. Doonesbury started 46 years ago growing out of another strip he drew at yale in 1975, became the first comic strip artist to win a pulitzer, has been a pulitzer finalist several times since and also won numerous other awards in theater and tv and the most influential editorial cartoonist of his time. Please join me in welcoming Garry Trudeau. [applause] those of you who come here and here most others speak, this is not on. I will speak louder which it is on . All right. Most of you who are regulars are accustomed to hearing authors read from books, that will not be the case. Reading comic strips is hard to do so what i thought i would do instead is read the preface from the book and explain to you how i had this peculiar relationship with mister trump. It was not my idea. It was my wifes idea. We were having dinner a few months ago and she said there was an awful lot on him. There might be enough over the last three decades so we scrambled and my good publisher got the book out very quickly. What i am going to do is review the preface and after that i might be happy to have a conversation to answer your questions. The preface begins on the back, select comments from donald trump, a carefully curated collection of insults he has thrown my way over the years. The one i begin with, a third rate talent trying to get publicity on my back. His message conveyed through the tabloids boil down to this. Get off my cloud, loser. Which is not how satire works. The target having set himself up doesnt get say. Trump had already become the Gold Standard for big who. To ignore him would have been comedy malpractice. In new york that he practically owned the 80s rocketing to the top of the big apples knocking off bigleague rivals like ed hodge and steve rebel. Those in the ridicule industry, the man, the short fingered bulgarian, was a gift beyond imagining. We made him a permanent part of our business plan. The earliest strip mocking trumps first president ial trial balloon in fall of 1987, people tell me i should be flattered, trump told newsweek, but as there was nothing flattering about betrayal he soon became confused, then irritated. I was drying him in a way that suggested i was unaware how goodlooking he was. By the end of the week it was game on. Trump had it on and i had a new recurring character who could be counted on to react in real time. I was one lucky baby and remained so for years. I have had plenty of company. Google trump and third rate and you come across the name of most of the countrys first rate comedians, no matter how any wiseguys want a piece of him there was more than enough of the big fellow to follow around. After the first president ial head fake it was the trump princess, the luxury yacht whose owners feared ocean travel kept board off of various casinos. Then came the Extramarital Affairs both real and imagined conducted under klieg lights, followed in rapid succession by the highprofile bankruptcies, his attempt to tear down a Family Restaurant to build a parking lot of limos, his televised spectacle the most sort of which featured him firing celebrities who were already out of work. His creepy sexual fantasies about his own daughter, his failed product lines like you wouldnt believe. Of the best was yet to come. As trump bore down he needed a new neighborhood to ruin so after 30 years of lusting after a certain caravan on 1600 pennsylvania avenue he made good on his threat and actually ran for president. Rested and ready . Not so much was more like orange, hyperactive and breathtakingly unprepared. When a physician declared trump would be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency trump publicly things his doctors father who had been dead since 2010. You cant make this stuff up so why try . Some people feel trump is beyond satire but we professionals know he is satire, free for all to use and enjoy and we are not ungrateful. For our country we can only weep. [applause] the rest of it is just cartoons which i will spare you the reading of but i will be happy to take any of your questions. Thank you. This is like a gift. I have two quick questions, not very deep or well thought out. One is how recent are the cartoons . Are they up to this crazy time . They go up to the end of april, the most recent half. Im not sure i remember. Hold onto those, thank you. I want to thank you for all your great work particularly the trips you did that resonated with me on the importance of Voting Rights and introspection of the danger of a Trump Presidency and litigation on Voting Rights. Comment on future plans to work in this area. You will see in the next couple weeks about Voting Rights. I have a chapter named jimmy crowe. He is ecstatic about developments in the country over the last we for years but they are being rolled back. There have been a number of Court Decisions on the state level. They have been rolling back some of these laws, hopefully enough by november that there would be no significant impact. We cant let that disappear. Do you believe trump will or wont win and what is your reason . I believe he wont win. But i check every half hour. I can feel secure enough. At one point he had 97 chance of losing. I am comfortable there but now it is down to 80. 3. I admire the guy, silver, the genius behind 538 but i would like not to have to check every half hour or so i will look on november 2nd. 538. Com is a website founded by nate silver who started as a sports data analyst and become a premier analyst of polls and aggregates all the polls and uses sophisticated models and algorithms to pull together the odds. He calculates three ways. Of the vote were today, just looking at polls, what the outcome would be in november and the third factor is in history and trendss from previous elections. Today it is almost 81 . The odds of him winning, of hillary winning, i decreased 73 if you factor in history. You have been at this for half a century. Any parallels to trump . Not in the way i used him in the strip. The only character. He is not actually a parody. I lifted him from real life. A natural born tune. I like to compare him to daffy duck, the self regard and language issues constantly stepping on his own feet. I took the labels off, right in the strip. The other characters regard him as a colleague, and there are 12 characters who interact with him. Pretty hard to go through a whole book focused on him. It is the only person in public life i have done that with. I do very little caricature but the hair is irresistible. I go way back to that. I go back to when it was brown. Then it lightens up and then he set it on fire to run for president and a gilded confection we see now. It was hard to stay away from in my profession. I really love your work but i will have to say when i saw the cover of your book i was so turned off because i cannot stand that man. This is a quick one, just assure me i did buy the book, none of my 15 or whatever it was, not one penny will go to donald j trump, billionaire. There will be no reason for that. All the money is going to veterans, and it will go to my children. My real question, he writes this himself, spent the last two weeks focusing on getting the africanamerican vote and saying hillary is a bigot and all she cares about, and when we have a prominent africanamerican Family Member murdered in chicago he writes on twitter she got murdered, it writes itself. How do you keep it fresh when he is doing these things himself . That particular tweet, some are outrageous in different ways and more fun to poke fun of, that one was tragic and he lives and empathy free life. He doesnt seem to have much humanity. So it has to be explained to him why that wasnt the way to go in response to this terrible murder. The tweets get pulled down and new ones go up so the people around him, Family Members, said that was a little cold. That is probably doesnt immediately give me an idea just because of the sad nature of it. I appreciate your work. David plus called him a psychopath, i would like to hear quickly, which side you weigh in on . What the book shows, what i hope it shows is the underlying personality disorder has been remarkably stable over 30 years. What i originally thought of as a colorful harmless behavior turns out to be a cluster of symptoms, more like a symphony of symptoms with high notes of mania and low notes of aggression and all of them troubling. I am not a psychiatrist but i am a cartoonist. I can say those things, i do think the election could will be seen as a referendum on mental health. I have a question but i want to start with a compliment too. We are contemporaries, in 20 years younger than me, we are the same age. I think that is because you are a cartoonist and i am a sociologist. That is one complement. Mostly every day but recently every week it has been my pleasure to be entertained by you for all these years. [applause] for most people, you have to put entertainment first, it didnt occur to me until a couple years into the work that i had this extraordinary opportunity whether i had the tools to do that they were pretty rudimentary. I was not a primetime player. I think i wasnt there and i was marketed by two smart guys who started my syndicate and that was the first feature. As the insider to the counterculture i was 21. The idea was he is pathetic because he is 21. He knows what is going on in colleges. There are dispatches in the front. It is a novelty for the first five years or so but people were unaccustomed to seeing those issues raised, editors gave me a hard time in the beginning. It went about 20 years and continues to on occasion. I have nothing but respect for editors and what they do. Always defended them, never called it censorship because i dont believe that is what it was, each editor has responsibility to decide what goes in the paper on any given day, they have the feel of their particular community. I cant pretend i do. So i always try to back them up, particularly in those early years when i was trying to figure anything out. I was new to everything. Which was one of the reasons i stood back from being a public figure to the degree anyone wanted me to be. I stopped doing interviews because anytime i get out of the paper they would want me to defend the work order. If you have that many clients and you owe them something it gets to be an enormous distraction. I thought it would be better to focus on the worst so i didnt do any interviews for many years. One benefit of that was the mystique i dont feel responsible for, just, he is this mysterious figure who does this thing and we dont know anything about him. That may have given me a longer halflife as an artist. They didnt have to put up with me on the tonight show. Walt kelly, during similar times in the mccarthy era, the secrets of nothing called them the bunny rabbits. The editors had them in their pockets. They were allowed to use them when they wanted and we didnt do that. Either run it or dont. Often there would be local reasons they couldnt run it. When i wrote about gerri brown his associations with the mob when he was governor in the 70s it was knocked out of i think every california paper plus reno plus las vegas and many other places in the country. They were responding to regional pressures. Trump accepted the important issues of immigration, trump is more liberal on almost every position than the other republican candidates were. The difference is in style and rhetoric. I hope after his hopefully failed candidacy i wonder if you agree, these other republicans, the senator from mississippi who loved Strom Thurmond and said you were right in 1948, these were serious republican positions that are worse than trumps. I wonder if you have comments on that. Trump isnt going away. He has all the pieces in place should he want to create a media empire after he leaves but i do think he is not replicable in any way. There will be people who might take some of those positions but it is all what he can do when he stands in front of a crowd which is why he is so insecure when he is not in front of a crowd. He bragged to a crowd i dont have to talk to two people when i can have 12,000. Talking to two people in 5 listening. Not to my knowledge sat down at a kitchen table, he has not sat down, not done anything candidates do. Everyone has forgotten about Hillary Clintons listening tour, she listened all over our state, cant imagine what that meant to people in upstate new york. He has no interest in that piece of it. 12,000 people in the aggregate, they are all cheering him and repeating his 1liners but the thing about trumps fans that mystifies me, the ones who love him dont comprehend that he doesnt love them back. He has no interest in their problems. He just happened to design or landed on positions that matter deeply to them. It is not reciprocated. He walks off the stage, back on the jet and back in the penthouse. You got it. What exactly inspired you to start writing cartoons . The question is what inspired me to start writing cartoons. There was an individual who inspired me, a Football Player in my college, he was very talented on the field. He was extraordinary, had a lot of charisma and everybody loved him. His team never lost games year after year. I thought maybe i will write his coattails, an interesting story. He was a modest, selfeffacing man who had a career in professional football and his teammates respected him enormously. I decided to flip that on its head and have him be an egotistical authoritarian quarterback who everybody in the huddle pushes back against with the idea. I never drew the joint but it was a sports trick and it was a one off. He was going to graduate and that was the end of it. I had been doing it for three weeks when a syndicate, a new Syndicate Head in my College Newspaper offered me my current job. This is a story my kids hate. It doesnt involve dues, doesnt involve any preparation or obvious skill set. It just happens. You have to prepare your self, place yourself in the way of good fortune and there are things, there are things that got me to that place. Nonetheless it is mostly an accident that i am here, you are here. A note to donald trump saying people do not really like you. [laughter] i think you have performed your civic duty. [applause] i am wondering after you stepped away from the strip did you always know if this event happened there was no way you could let it go . I havent totally stepped away. A couple years ago i got involved in television and had done things in the past but not what they call the show runner who has to deal with everything. I called my boss. I have a boss. And said i really like what i am doing, this show. How do you feel if we split the difference, i do the sundays so i can work in this other field. I had been harnessed for so many years, how could he say no. Two years ago i stepped away from the daily strips. I still do lee, we call them classics now, they are reruns. I added them carefully to remove as many really dated cultural references but they are strips from the 80s running now except for the sundays which i am still doing and that i can fit into my life. Anything else might bring you to a more active role other than daffy duck running for president . It is more what is going on in my life though i am so happy i am doing it at this particular time. [applause] i was wondering, in all the decades you have been making fun of trump has he ever tried to contact you, phone you . He just communicated through the tabloids that made his displeasure known. I never met him. I have seen him in the field, at the New Hampshire primary last january in the newsroom when it came out after the debate, he stopped in front of me and turned around and so i was four or five feet from the back of his head. I could not take my eyes off of it. It was the most remarkable thing i had ever seen. It was like a panel of gossamer had been lacquered down with a kind of golden slurry. And the camera doesnt do it justice so if you ever get a chance to see the back, the front is fun to draw because i dont know how many other cartoons do it the same way but there is a single line you can draw that starts at the temple and it heads back and zooms forward under the ledge and heads back west over the head and down into the collar and that is where i start with that line. You can see it here. It starts here. It is fun to draw. You are definitely 1ofakind. Thoroughly miffed if you ever do decide to retire. I was wondering to any of your kids share your political bites for insight . If anything they are a little to the left of their father especially my daughter who was a Country Singer for a while and now she is a corporate wire. She just had a baby last winter. And was home with msnbc for months. It is like trump was installed like a big airhorn and that is all she can think about or talk about right now. None of them are interested in satire or my world. Thank you very much. I dont know if you know but i was watching Rachel Maddow a couple weeks ago and she was excited about this clip on the floor of the convention in 88. In the beginning of your forward, i am told i am supposed to be flattered but he was baffled about how he was supposed to think about it because he was being in the center of the conversation but he didnt really know how it was flattering. A fascinating clip, a clip of Chris Wallace on the floor of the 88 convention which is in new orleans, republican convention, which i was at. He asked this question and got thrown back to tom brokaw, i just talked to Garry Trudeau, he had an encounter with jim busch and this was the time he was putting his manhood in blind trust. I was not over with the bush family. Be kind, and i saw this clip on rachel, my memory is awful, is that what i told you . What i remember him saying, 63, 64, he said Garry Trudeau, walk softly. Come on. That was like go. An interesting convention, i havent seen that in 25 years. One of the comments i wanted to make, trump is going to have this bizarre presence in washington dc on pennsylvania avenue no matter what transpires. I dont know if you are aware that there is a big issue about lawsuits trying to determine that it appears the city of washington dc the department of interior and Parks Department has given us from Department Control over the part of the hotel as the plaza that has been franklin avenue statue which is a Natural National park area. Control, they traffic. Thank you for that. Wherever way this goes. Lets take one more and get to the book signing. Two questions and when is the next season of our for house do . We dont think it would be one. And in the writers room, we are planning for it, and changed our minds. You wont get me to say anything bad about amazon because i had this opportunity to do two seasons. They are a black box. Ask anyone it is impossible. They are all very polite. We have a bit of a blow earlier this year. What do you think will happen to the Republican Party . When or lose, whatever happens, i dont know what direction, will they become more like trump or distance themselves . What is remarkable, not just once group or two splinter groups, their message is being normally, their spokespeople are on radio and on television and how will they get rid of that . I dont know how they put themselves back together. There trump exists, they will do it without the benefit of his presence but a lot will depend on how the races shake out. Thank you. [applause] thank you so much, Garry Trudeau. We have books in the back. [inaudible conversations] or smack booktv records hundreds of other programs throughout the country all year long and here are the events we are covering this week. On monday we are in new york city with two author talks at the corner bookstore in manhattan, we will discuss the similarity between president s john f. Kennedy and ronald reagan. That is a look at some of the author programs booktv is covering, many of these are open to the public, look for them to air in the near future on booktv on cspan2. Following the great triumph of us and british codebreaking in world war ii it became apparent that codebreaking and signaled intelligence would be a crucial source in the emerging cold war struggle against the soviet union. The paranoia, internal security measures, sealed orders and extreme secrecy of soviet society make congressional espionage extremely difficult if not impossible. Even the most basic facts about the soviet governments organization, the countrys economy and the military were considered state secrets under stalins regime. In the early years of the cold war the cia kept optimistically dropping agents behind the iron curtain and it would later be learned that virtually 100 of them were immediately captured, shot or played back as double agent against the west. The only thing you are proving by parachuting agents into soviet controlled territory, one Us Army Official said, the law of gravity. The soviet development of their atomic bomb in 1949 gave even greater urgency to signal intelligence. As signals were almost the only plausible source that could detect military preparations within the soviet union that might signal an imminent soviet nuclear attack, the huge challenge the us codebreakers faced in exploiting this vital source was in november 1948 the soviets instituted a sweeping coordinated change in their military code systems and it was such an Unprecedented Development that washington and london briefly feared this was an indication the soviets were about to launch the literary attacks on the west. The new soviet code systems proved more challenging than anything the us and british codebreakers had faced before and most highlevel soviet codes would remain unbroken until 1979 when supercomputers and advanced Mathematical Research produced what one in as a paper referred to as the height of american critical logic success in the cold war around the time of the soviet invasion of afghanistan. Throughout the cold war, roughly 5 year intervals, nsa brought outside panels, leading mathematical or scientific experts to reduce the state of the russian problem and possible solutions and these evaluations are nothing but a tale of woe and pessimism. In 1958 a panel headed by the Vice President concluded, quote, no National Strategy should be based on the hope or expectation that we will be able to read, the rest of the sentence was redacted but it was pretty obvious it was referring to highlevel soviet encrypted traffic. At one point in the mid1950s the nsa had nonce stop Computers Running five years searching through 1 million intercepted soviet messages that had been in cipher with a machine called albatross trying to find any flaw that could be exploited in the project endeded in failure. Incidentally whatever nsas successes or failures in