Lobbying regulars to go easy on Charles Keating savings and loan, you can blame that unregulated for buckling under political pressure but cant blame reagan for that, thats a commonplace problem. Host ron in arlington, virginia, youre on with steven hayward. Caller great to talk to you today. I think you are exaggerating on the covid 19. The former president was the executive at that time, we should keep that in mind but my question goes to the American First Movement in the 30s and when naziism was spreading through jersey, they issued radios to every citizen and i believe our cable media, fox and msnbc and cnn are entertainment channels. What the impact of the misinformation is why wouldnt we defend the country against all enemies foreign and domestic . Why wouldnt we want to do that . Thank you. I will stay on the line. Guest we do want to do that. The first part of your question, we disagree on who our enemies are. We are all making enemies of the other side to put it in simple terms. I will say this about parallels with the 30s and now, one thing that plays into this is people comment on this a lot, you get to pick the information you like. If you re on the left you watch msnbc, on the right you watch fox. Weve lost the common information channels, when Walter Cronkite was watched by 70 million americans a night. If a news broadcast gets 20 million or 25 million that is a great day for the ratings. So even if you think fox is better ms nbc is better talk radio is bad, they reach a small portion of the population, lots of competing information channels now. I think fox, its toprated show, Tucker Carlson now gets 5 or 6 million on a good night, its not 300 million, not 70 million like a Walter Cronkite got. Host do you watch it . Guest im a news junkie, started watching network news in college, people thought that was weird. In college you ignore the news and i still do, like to see their cover story. My one observation about netflix, it has become a Human Interest story, they always end with a spotlight on a fireman rescued a puppy dog from a tree in akron, ohio, always heartwarming and touching. Not the sort of thing you would see on Walter Cronkite broadcast and that is playing to the audience, it keeps viewers. The today show became tonights news. Host also a book junkie. As we do have very after we asked in depths Favorite Book and what he is reading now. His response to those questions. Among his Favorite Books, johnson, modernimes, cs lewis, the abolition o man, leo strauss, natural rights and history, Winston Churc we talked a lot about, adventures. Aristotle, an applicant. J. R. R. Tolkien, lord of the rings. In terms of what hes currently reading, hungry, a short history, alexander lee, machiavelli, his life and times. Which if any of those do you want to talk about . Couldnt give you 50 bucks is the problem. Could have given different titles from churchill and so forth. I will say most of those, not lord of the rings, dont like fiction, my critics say i do but nevermind. Modern times i like not only because it was a great read but it is a style i try to emulate with reagan books and others. I college and analytical narrative. Is it fair to describe you tell a story and then prompt some analysis of what it means and why it is not just the facts of what happened, nothing wrong with that but churchill did the same thing in his history books, he would spend 2 or 3 pages on what they m and that is a style i tried to emulate, cs lewiss abolition ofs 70 pages long, kind of dense, on the surface is about literature but is really a restatement of the natural law stretching back to the greeks and romans, criticism of what in modern times we would call moral relativism. I dont care for that terms but that is what it is known by, and elegant statement. The lord of the rings i have a joke what early collars referred to libertarians and traditional conservatives and i always say you can tell how someone ended up by finding out what they read as a teenager. Iran became reagan libertarian, if they read lord of the rings they became traditional conservatives. Host you mentioned cs lewis, the chronicles of narnia. Why one and not the other . The lewis and tolkien folks. Guest the tolkien book is more epic, homeric. Lewis did something creative. He worked in serious theological and religious teaching. I am more partial to lewiss space trilogy, he wrote three Science Fiction books, the silent planet and that hideous strength, longest and hardest to get through, stands up next to 1984 as one of the great antiutopian novels of the 20th century. Cs lewis writing a lot about religion, brian lamb not on this program but on this network spoke to one of your heroes, evans, in 1994 and asked him in an interview how much his religious beliefs were in his books in his writings. How much of your religious beliefs, we havent talked about that today, are in your books, in your writing . Guest not much at all. I dont know why, funny you should mention it. Im noodling on a memoir, totally on spec, about my best friend who died a decade ago somewhat mysteriously but all he talked about was our religious faith and politics and other things. Kelly clark, we spent a lot of time talking about all kinds of issues about religious faith and said we will figure it out in the backyard. I have been trying to use this, describing our friendship, true friendship is two people with the same soul, that was us, feel very blessed. Maybe i can finish this story. Maybe i will finish doing this and talk a lot about theology, religion. I never tried Something Like this before. Host why did kelly clark have this conversation . Guest my previous statement in the house of commons, we thought a lot alike about certain things, same questions. Host did you grow up with him . Guest we meant that as we met in college and were inseparable after we met. A lawyer in oregon, we kept in close touch. We used to write in the 80s to each other at the end of the year, long letters, the 810 singlespace pages, we summarized what was important in our lives, the most important things we read and what we were thinking about when we exchanged letters. I cant believe we did that and then later on we dropped it. Anyway, there may be a story here, a place to work out private thoughts. We will see. Host if you wrote that today what would be the most important thing . Guest this is pretty personal. A year ago yesterday i had cancer surgery for minor cancer. I had a note on a kidney quite by excellent by accident. Ever since then i thought dont wait. I took my family on extravagant 2 month vacation to europe i had been putting off forever. Dont wait. That is also, i normally wouldnt start a book manuscript without a contract, i have deleted many things to do which the memoir i just described im not going to work weight on that either. Not just the last several years, things like not getting donald trump any chance of winning and marveling, how you could have predicted this. It is increasing socratic ignorance, the more things i thought i knew that i dont know. The older i get the less i know. I accumulate stuff and read more things. Its confusing to sort out the world, dont wait. Host ten minutes left in this conversation. North carolina, thanks for waiting. Caller a wonderful conversation. Im familiar with in depth steven hayward. A big fan of his free whiskey our, happy hour podcast and listening to him talk about his books and reagan. Im not friends with him but i feel like i could be a friend with him. What prompted my call was the call from michelle, i want to get and coped in steven haywards thought about nixon. I know we havent talked about nixon but a gentleman named Jeff Sheppard who served under nixon his entire presidency and makes the case that nixon was driven out of office as part of a plot by a series of people who took advantage of a situation that happened with plumbers and breakins that nixon had no idea what was going on and spun it up to the place where nixon couldnt defend himself and there was no republican to defend him and he resigned and if the facts came out in totality there were criminal acts but it wasnt nixon who was the criminal in that situation. I will get off the area and enjoy the last few minutes of this program. Host Jeff Sheppard was a young lawyer in the white house. I did a 2part podcast a few months ago. On cspan washington journal on the anniversary. Guest there is a lot to that. I wonder if watergate would have happened differently if we had todays media environment, fox news would have been defending him, twitter would have been alive with the from of the cycle might have gone quicker, nixon might have been gone in 6 month or he might have survived. A lot of revisionist histories written about watergate will come to different conclusions about it. Host out of new york, good morning. Caller how are you doing today . It is great to hear about the have ari even though you cant see it but happy to hear things have gone well with that. What hasnt been talked about when it comes to the reagan presidency, is the chief of staff, and iran contra when it looked like a reagan was in big trouble especially with questions about his mental capacity. Layout how consequential that was at the end of the Reagan Administration but i will hang up and listen to the answer. Guest interesting question. A complete answer would take a while because the chief of staff cycle in reagans presidency is interesting. One reason reagan chose howard baker who retired from the senate, a weird figure, on the watergate hearings, reagan wanted somebody with good relations, well respected, pillar of washington to right the ship. John reagan was at terrible chief of staff, good treasury secretary but terrible chief of staff. That was the main reason. I am not sure if there is an undertone of was baker a Bad Influence . Like james baker. I think that is not true. Reagan was very much his own man always. The widespread view, he told his friends he was staff driven, almost entirely wrong. Host how do we know that . Guest documents that have come out, certain kinds of meetings, you know, you triangulate a lot of source material and realize i could give a lot of examples. S. Maybe the most famous was the famous star wars speech of late march. Just about everybody was against it, some strongly so and they went ahead and did it anyway with maybe only two people on his staff that thought it was a good idea. John tremor with just about three minutes left in our program a big question on reagan but one that you come back to a couple times in a couple different of your books including greatness, including the age of reagan. You write reagan was more successful in rolling back the soviet empire than he was i rolling back the domestic government empire chiefly because the latter is the harder problem. Guest yes. Host explained that. Another big question. Guest funny thing is that conclusion of the second volume got some criticism from reagan enthusiast when it came out. And now im sitting back with ironic satisfaction that a lot of conservatives say reagan totally irrelevant today. You hear this a lot from pretty smart people, people and know and like, usually younger. The point was this connects to the big problem that i will mention of the administrative state, the erosion of the constitutional separation of powers, the entrenchment of a permanent government or permanent bureaucracy. Reagan battled that sum. The lesson of all the years which they learn while they were there is this this is to ht were thought to reform a bureaucracy and get control of it. Nixon tried and as part of the watergate story. So now things have marched on for a while and you look back in hindsight and can say reagan maybe couldve been bolder, maybe couldve attack harder. Some of his own people said that in hindsight but it turns out our own homegrown problems are tougher than dealing with a decrepit soviet union. Host in a final 30 seconds we started with a question about the perfect conservative. Was Ronald Reagan a perfect conservative . Guest pretty close as a politician. I thought about the perfect conservative as subtitle because he was so ecumenical in his views. Host that current book that just came out, m. Stanton evans conservative wit, apostle of freedom. Weve been talking with steven hayward, the author of eight books, among them the age of reagan, the fall of the old liberal order 19641980. The age of reagan the conservative counterrevolution, 19801989. Patriotism is not enough, and then most recently that stan evans book. Want to appreciate your time spending it with us for the past two hours. Thank you so much. Guest thank you. This is been a real privilege. Cspan now is a free mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of whats happening in washington live and ondemand. Keep up with the days because he fits with live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the u. S. Congress, white house events, the courts, campaigns and more from the world of politics all at your fingertips. You can also stay current with the latest episodes of washington journal and find scheduling information for cspans tv networks and cspan radio plus a variety of compelling podcast. Cspan that is available at the apple store and google play. Download it for free today. Cspan now, or for washington anytime anywhere. Middle and High School Students its your time to shine. You were invited to pursue spate in this years cspans studentcam documentary competition. Picture yourself as a newly elected member of congress. Ask dishes competitors what is your top priority and why . Make a five to six minute video that shows the importance of your issue from opposing a supporting perspective. Dont be afraid to take risk with your documentary. Be bold. Amongst the 100,000 in cash prizes is a 5000 grand prize. Deosust grand prize. Videos must be submitted by january 20, 2023. Visit our
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