Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth With Jeffrey Toobin 20160808

Welcome to cspan2 in depth. The author of seven books and counting. Including the most recent, the kidnapping crimes and the trial of patty hearst. I want to begin where you ended the book. End of the book. You wrote this without her cooperation. I didthat . Guest there were several things that were different. This was the first book that was at the border of journalism and history. All the other books that i wrote i had sort of covered the underlining story in real time and then wrote about it. This is something i was alive in the 1970s but i was a kid. I didnt follow the stuff so it was starting from scratch in terms of my research. In particular theres 150 about the army and its trials that bill harris one of the survivors had and i managed to obtain access to that so i knew i had a great deal of material no one had seen before but obviously to answer your question, i would have liked to have talked to patty. She made clear through intermediaries and then indirectly she wanted no part of this. But i realized i had so much material from her and about her and her own book and testimony and fbi interviews that she had given to the fbi and others i have her perspective and i got to speak to many people who knew her during the period and subsequently i was able toas report around her in a way that i think i was able to get a fair impression of her perspective os the event. Thi this probably explains why you wrote the book you say the kidnapping foretold what would happen in society in a diverse number of fields including eliminating the future, the culture of celebrity, criminal justice and even sports. Guest i sometimes thought of the case when i was writing the book as a trailer for modernity like a coming of attractions that we begin to see him big and small ways. But it was the first of the great modern celebrity criminal event that participated the o. J. Simpson case. The shootout on may 17, 1974 where six of the kidnappers tied was the first live broadcast of the breaking news event that anticipated so much of how wewe cover news and even smaller things like participants in the big news story seeking out book deals during the event. Here you had one of the people who sheltered trying to get the book written and you had the defense attorney trying to write a book while he was the defense attorney. So many things that became commonplace started or becamee visible in the kidnapping. And of course ran off and catherine, their newspapers wer on television and you made a reference, by . Guest one of the important back stories of the kidnapping and the aftermath was the difficult relationship with her mother. In there was nothing particularly, or there was and is, let me just take a sip. Guest by the way, patty hearst is still alive. Guest very much alive, 62yearsold. A homemaker, social life, she has two daughters and raises show dogs which she does a lot of the time but to answer the question as i think this is important like a lot of 19yearolds she was 19 when she was kidnapped and had a contentious relationship with her mother especially in the 70s where people used to talker all the time that the generation gap and patty at the time of her kidnapping was living with her boyfriend which was called living in sin. There was a lot of contention. When patty was kidnapped and there were all these press conferences that her parents held in front of their house in hillsborough, patty said in one of the communiques, get out of that black dress. Thats not helping anyone. It was an interesting signal of how she was bringing her rebellion against her parents into her life with the sla. Part of the reason she joined us because she was alienated from her parents. Not a big deal in the ordinary circumstances a lot of these women are alienated from their mothers but here under these circumstances it turned out toao be significant. Guest as a way to get her released you write it was without American History no one had tried on short notice to feed thousands of people. May the moment even more extraordinary is it took place because of a political kidnapping. This is a piece put in place. Guest just back up a little bit, when patty was kidnapped initially there was no demand. There were these bizarre communiques that unlike most kidnapping state stated and saye us money and we wil will give yu the person that. Eventually it was chaotic and disorganized and he has millions of dollars letbillionsof dollad the poor. That will be the initial ransom demand. It was run out of a big warehouse in the San Francisco they were feeding the poor and it didnt go very smoothly with some of the distributions there were riots and so many people wanted the food and they were seeking it out but hes one of the heroes of the story and wanted to get his daughter back and he had less money than they thought he did but he spent millions to set up the organization that did get out a lot of food. This is a picture after the kidnapping. He doesnt come across as a very strong character. Guest one of the things i learned in doing this story is the only thing that the fbi, the Hearst Family and patricia herself had in common is that none of them could stand him. It was the one point of view anonymity. He was a 23yearold, this isnt a bad person or a bad guy he was a graduate student in philosophy but he was kind of air against and he thought he knew better than anyone how to handle the situation and he succeeded in annoying everybody. And if they were particularly resentful of the fact during the kidnapping itself on the night of february 4, 1974 after he was hit by bill harris, one of the kidnappers he ran off instead of staying to protect patricia. Host we will spend the next three hours with author and lawyer Jeffrey Toobin. Phone lines are open and you can join us on facebook. Com booktv. Send us a message on booktv twitter booktv or you can send an email booktv cspan. Org. On average, how long does it take to write a book . Guest i have a simpleminded system for writing books, which is related to the fact that i am a staff writer at the new yorker command by editor gives me a limited amount of time off. I dont have the bandwidth and capacity to write the new yorker articles and continue my work at the new yorker but my name the writing portion of the bookk after ive done enough reporting to feel like i have enough material, i. E. Write five pagess a day. I pray 1250 words a day and that is i find a significant amountnt but not an overwhelming amount to write. And it accumulates if you keep up at that pace. Thats 100 pages a month, and in find that gets me to an appropriate clanks. Thats just the right thing. If i view the reporting and research if not more important than the writing that is a little harder to measure how long that takes as i said in these other books ive written i was sort of reporting in realtime so that wasnt a separate research period. The old in at least a year would probably somewhat more. Host you have a picture of the house where it took place in San Francisco and you pointed out that its changed significantly from the 70s to where it is now today. Guest this to me was one of the revelations in writing this air i here is how differene 1970s were especially in Northern California from the way that things are today. To give you one statistic in the 1970s, there were a thousand political bombings a year in the United States. Think about what i would be like today. Al most of them did and caused injuries or deaths that this was just a time of tremendous Political Violence and the epicenter was San Francisco and berkeley. There had been the summer of love in 1967 and the Free Speech Movement in berkeley in 1965 but by the 1970s those movements which began with a good deal of idealism had curdled into real anger and resentment and San Francisco was written by terrible crime including the zodiac killers, the zebra killers. I think people forget, everybody remembers the famous detective. He was a San Francisco detective because San Francisco at the time of those movies was aos symbol of all that was horrible and dangerous in the United States. Of course today it is Silicon Valley, hightech prosperity. Then it had a completely i different reputation which was interesting to me as someonene coming up in the story new. Host 202 7488920 for those who live in eastern or thr central time zones and 208201 mountain and pacific time zones. Also our conversation as we view the first sunday of every monthn let me go back to the 1997 interview on in the dateline with Patricia Hearst. Missin host hell are we to view this year of your life after you could have left at any number of points. Its not true that i could have left at any point. Ny i couldnt even think thoughts for myself anymore because i had been so programmed that the fbi was looking and i shouldnt even try to think of that rescue because they were calling inse psychics to find me and thats the kind of thing that i believed. Host what led her to basically stay within . Guest sheen was part off the group. She took the name because the partner and fellow revolutionary was an east german woman. One of the things i try to stay away from him writing this was the jargon associated in the story and brainwashing, stockholm syndrome all of which are journalistic terms. I try to look at the facts of the story and what actuallyy happened. When you see what her life was like during that year between may of 74 in september of 75 when she is arrested, used cds tremendous opportunities for her to leave. Ison oak a she needed to get treated and used a fake name. Er she traveled across the country with his parents and basically begged her to go back to her f family. And my simpleminded view, and i think that its good to look ata things in a simpleminded way is that she didnt go back because she didnt want to go back. She had joined like a lot of young people did in the 70s, they joined with revolutionary groups that they later thought how in the world could i have been involved with those crazy people i have no doubt that she wouldnt do it today like most wouldnt, but then she did. Host and you are very descriptive. Heres somebody that grew up in wealth and privilege and she was in an apartment house that waset dirty. She met with whom she called her comrades and they welcomed her and so it was a differentsay lifestyle to say the least. Guest to call the way they lived a lifestyle, they were desperadoes on the run and they had no money. R do sometimes people ask were they on drugs. The answer is no. The answer in part they had no money to buy a drugs if they were inclined to. They robbed three banks for the simple reason thats where the money was. S. They needed money. Need money. They were living on an enormous of 20pound bag and they bought and ate horse meat and containers of black beans and the cheapest food they could have thats the life she was living for much of this time and it was very toughi host where was she, what was she doing and how did thissi become synonymous with thefrom t situation . Famo guest this is the most famous one. Remember she does get at february 4, 1974. On march 31, said or so weeks later she issued a communique into two weeks later on apri april 15, the robbery that we are looking at now is the bank and the very quiet section of San Francisco. They go in as a group and remember how shocking this was. The bank robbery as scary as it is is usually committed by one or two people. Its basically all six were all eight kidnapped the Liberation Army members that were involvedd in the robbery and they hadic discovered the location and noticed a relatively new innovation Security Camera and as you can see right now, she was told to stand where she knew she would be photographed with the Security Cameras as in fact she was because the bbc didnt grow a theater. They came from the university t Theater Program and they wanted to show off the prized recruits srecruitso thats why they put t that part of the bank so the camera would take her picture. Host inside of the Supreme Court. How are they doing with a . Guest the Supreme Court can clearly function with people. It is not the zion and i dont think most people realize historically the constitutionse does not set a number of justices. And until just after the civil war, the number fluctuated actually because congress can raise or lower the number of justices at any given time. That to state the obvious, there is a reason why there is an odd number of justices on the court because the votes are that is not an effective way for the courts tcourt to operate. This is not ideal but it is certainly it doesnt mean that court isnt functioning but its just indicative of the political dysfunction that we live with thabut no vote has taken place. O host is the chief justice the umpire that he said he wanted to be . Guest chief Justice Roberts is an extremely impressive person and a very good symbol and custodian of the course of the public persona. He is fighting someone who takes very seriously how the court is perceived in the country and does his best and it is a great job to make sure that they are seethe beer scenein the best po. He is also a serious conservative and someone who like the other eight justices was appointed by the president who wanted him to represent a certain ideological perspective on the court and he has donene just that. He now faces a very unusual and extraordinary situation where the chief justice may be in the minority and a great number of cases Going Forward if in fact barack obama or Hillary Clinton wins the appointees representing the majority on the court. One final question do you suspect that the senate will go back on its pledge not to have i hearing if Hillary Clinton is elected and it appears as if she will announce her success in appointment after she becomes president in january next year guest when Mitch Mcconnell says the president should fill the next feat i think he means the next president should fill the seat. By no means is that if Hillary Clinton wins she will have an easy glide path to confirm whoever she appoints. M but i dont see any realany real possibility that the senatepo which is so politically polarized and includes people like ted cruz and tom caught in who will not stand for any sort of vote on the obama nominee and can gum up the works given a very tight timeframe. I just think. They might renominate Merrick Garland and that would be an entirely different situation. But in terms of an obama nomination i dont think thats going to happen. First quickly i would like to thank you for your coverage of both of the conventions. Nk it was outstanding. Sorry to interrupt what they might as well add my voice of praise. My question is was there a precedent for what the associate justice did in speaking out on the political president ial campaign in such a way that became very controversial. Obviously she apologized but i think that in your book, its refreshing to get to know the justices more and i applaud you for that. And i would like to know more about the justices. E i like the fact that she spoke out. Guest the answer is in the modern era there is no precedent for an explicit endorsement or nonendorsement by the Supreme Court justice in the middle of the president ial race. Interestingly during the 40s and 50s, William Douglas was considered as a possible Vice President ial candidate for three truman and others. So why dont i think people can be too shocked that the Supreme Court justices have political opinions. They are very smart and savvy people. N. They live in washington and they were appointed and very aware and interested in the president ial elections. There is a naivete about the nature of the Supreme Court. The court is a deeply ideological body and there is not, the idea that they are separate from politics is i think unduly naive. Thats why Ruth Ginsburg was criticized across the ideological spectrum for the statement. I think that she recognized she had made a mistake. She apologized and moved on and i dont think that we will hear anymore comments about her moving to new zealand if donald trump wins the election. Ob host so not only questions about whether or not he was boru during feet 2008 campaign but then in 2009 senator barack obama taking the oath of office from the justice of the United States, here is how it unfolded i barack obama do solemnly swear that i will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully. That i will execute n faithfully the office of president of the United States. And will to d the best of my ability preserve, protect andit defend the constitution of the United States, so help me god. Congratulations, mr. President. [cheering] host you watch his body language because he had memorized the oath of office. Guest just to refresh, not Everybody Knows that thats watching, i wrote a book, this is a sequel and its called then oath. Beginning in the opening chapter is about why it was botched between the two of them there. I watched it many times but i havent watched it for a number of years. Its startling again just to see how badly. And the real reason was a classic bureaucratic snafu which is that chief Justice Roberts, his assistant sent a copy of the oath with the clause marked off for how he was going to divide it up, send it to the inaugural. Committee but not the office. The document i have a copy of was never forwarded to the transition office. Ow how so, obama didnt know how roberts was going to divide up the words and if you see what happens there is that roberts thinks hes going to say i barack obama do solemnly swear, and obama interrupts him after his name and then roberts gets flustered and the whole thing goes to hell, but its all because neither one of them knew how the other was going to break up the words. The obama white housresting in the book you talk about the number one issue is he legitimately took the oath of office and created a white house debate. Talk a bit about that. Guest there were newspaper stories about the oath. David barron who was a Deputy Assistant attorney general, there was hardly anyone in the office at the point of the conversation with the white House Counsel at the time to say you know, remember, this is aa n president who some people thinkh wasnt even born in the United States, so we have to be born of his legitimacy and h e. Schumer there are no shadows on his legitimacy. So on the morning of the 21st, they have these sort of serious conversations about what should we do about that and in short you know, order they decide lets redo it. And they call the chief justice chambers at the white House Counsel and say they would like to do this. And robert, true to his midwestern graciousness is absolutely i would be happy to do it. Later on that afternoon he comes over to the white house and they reenact the oath, just a bizarre postscript. When obama gets reelected in 2012 on Inauguration Day itin falls on a sunday, and by tradition, the public ceremony is never on a sunday so roberts came to the white house and administered the oath privately and publicly and successfully in front of the capitol barack obama is the only president except Franklin Roosevelt toto take the oath of office. Host thats interesting is thisthe video we had a picture f the white house to chief justice getting the oath of office january 21, 2009 but the white house didnt allow the Reporters Committee allowed a print photographer but no video. The Incoming White House press secretary at the time. This was something that was happening very much on the fly. And he was given short notice and he decided in effect we wili just have still photographers but it was a decision not to have the record of that. There were a handful of witnesses and a pool of reporters that were present and some of them had just pulled their tape recorders out and i had a chance to listen to the audio. There is no video of what happened. Host next is jim joining us from california who ar bar oh Jeffrey Toobin, a writer for the new yorker and a contributor tor cnn. Rk, caller thank you for the wonderful network. He did it in one take i believe the first inaugural. When i was writing the oath, i got into the minutia of history and youre absolutely right he is the only president of the modern era we dont have the tape recordings of how it went which before him but he just recited out right without the chief justice telling him what to say. Another peculiarity of the storl is that the last line that we are so familiar with is associated with george washington. George washington supposedly said after being sworn in after the president. But even that is subject to a little bit of historical debate. The fact that he supposedly said it wasnt disclosed until about 20 or 30 years later into the question arises why doesnt anyone talk about it if thats what he said for another 20 or 30 years. For years . So, there is a lot of mystery about how it evolved the way it did. Host are you still there or did you want to follow up . Guest i wanted to ask about the appointment where i thought he was unfairly treated and i think that is where the politicization of the court camn in and since then, we had what i would call boring appointments not because they dont have the background or the skills but needs to have law professors, Nathaniel Nathanson was one of the last law clerks. Goldberg and stevens came out of my law school but lately i this just harvard and yale. We dont have the scope and the diversity that i believe weli should have on the court with everybody going to the same schools and getting the same education albeit Supreme Court clerks and so on and i wouldik like your comments on that. Guest we usually think about diversity in terms of race and gender and that is important. But theres other kinds of diversity as well. Think about this fact. V. Boa the Supreme Court decided brown v. Board of education in 1954, not one of the chief justices had been a fulltime judge before going on the Supreme Court. Warren was governor of the before andfund,William Douglas f the Security Exchange commission and Robert Jackson had been the attorney general. These were people that wanted a big complicated lives. In the modern era and you are right to been pouring to the 562point the board. Theres been a tendency to move towards only the Appeals Court judges when samuel alito replaced Sandra Day Oconnor all were federal Appeals Court judges and i think the court really does miss some things without people that have retro elective office. Sandra day oconnor was the last two would run for office. Its terrible they dont have that kind of diversity and experience but i do think that the caller is right about to be bored of experience led to the president s to pick people with relatively bland public records that even though people on the outside might know their actual political views, they are seen as safe choices because they cant be pinned down with controversial opinion. Host you write they never left the nixon justice department. Justice oconnor, the senator that you pointed out never stopped being a politician. Being a politici Antonin Scalia remained a the wl professor they once were and john roberts was a litigator whose primary responsibility was to figure out ways to win. Guest thats right and i think that is what illustrates why the diversity is a real value. Sandra day oconnor wanted then court to stay towards the center of american politics because that was the kind of politician and judge she turned out to be. S Antonin Scalia was someone who had a very definite views born in the academy of what theit constitution meant and he spent two plus decades trying to push that agenda. I think these justices are the people they always were. I just wish the talent pool was different and that it wasnt just Appeals Court judges. Host this is from one of the viewers disagreeing with the assessment saying i disagree with him that she joined. She was a victim and he doesnt understand brainwashing. Guest this is an argument i take very seriously. And also as someone who has covered the criminal law as a former prosecutor, im very aware that crime victims are people who need to be treated fairly and with dignity and there is no question that patty hearst was a crime victim, she was kidnapped, she was put in a car trunk and then put in the closet and she had no role or agency or participation in death. There have been rumors over the years but she had a role in staging her own kidnapping and that is nonsense. Re she was a. Q. Were crying victim. However, there comes a point that people do change and you look at what happened fromf 74f february 74 to september of 75 and you look at her behavior. The only conclusion that i can draw is not that she was brainwashed which is a concept that i think is murky at best. What i believe happened is this was a restless and vulnerable woman who was appealed to by people who were treating her by and large well. She fell in love with one of her captors really wolf, i dont think theres any doubt about that. And then she joined in with him and spent the next year on the run. He was one of the People Killed in the big shootout with the Los Angeles Police department in m may. She acknowledges i that her own book she falls in love with him. Yes, she was a crime victim and yes, crime victims definitely deserve our sympathy and respect. But in this circumstance, myjo conclusion is that she joined the sla. Host why and how did she get the pardon . Guest she got the pardon and i think that is significant. She is tried after she is arrested for the first of the three Bank Robberies and keep iu mind this isnt Just One Bank robbery, she did three includinh one where a woman was killed. She was tried for the bank robbery that was the first one that we saw the Surveillance Video from on april 151974 in San Francisco. She made the defense that thepe caller was talking about and people were talking about i was brainwashed and coerced and that they rejected that and she was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. Following the failure, the family organized this tremendous drive for president carter to commute her sentence. Ronald reagan, a close friend os the family joined him on this effort. Per local congressman joined in this effort into something happened. On the eve of decision is really tipped the balance and that was people who were alive in the 70s may remember this, the reverend jim jones who was also on San Francisco committed mass suicide. They all drink. People hear this expression and they dont know where it came from, they drink the koolaidass suicide. And committed mass suicide. In the u that created enormous interest in the United States and the subject of brainwashing how could you get people to do Something Like this, and cartera in the immediate aftermath commuted the sentence and served 22 months. Host and he was told visiting his constituents. Two decades later bill clinton is about to leave office and jimmy and Roslyn Carter urged him strongly on the same day that he issued pardons for the fugitive financier he pardoned patty hearst and my view of the commutatiocommutation and the pe purest example of how wealth and privilege helped patty hearst. Our prisons are full of peopleou who fall in with bad people and make bad decisions and wind up locked up for a very long time. There are lots of people like that. But our system does not have much room for forgiveness for those people. But if she becomes the only person in all of American History to receive a commutation from one presentation and pardon from another. And back to me is the story of wealth and privilege and the relationship with her mom postcommutation. Guest like so many teenagers who find their parents on tolerable and annoying, she not only develops a loving relationship with her mother as i see it she very much becomes her mother like a lot of us become our parents. Host lets go to roger in decatur georgia with Jeffrey Toobin. Caller thank you for cspan. Let me say first i find your work to journalistic. But i would like to get some of your experiences from the Supreme Court. Do you think the justices have a jurisprudence when they come to the court and is this something that is predated by the law thew professors that they write about and then the justices try to follow it or is it something they try to be consistent in the opinions theyve written and they find themselves boxed into a place . Guest the constitution is a document that doesnt interpret itself. Its subject to many interpretations and its a political document. And anna in her petition of the political document. Its a political act. And the reason justices are picked for the court is president s think they will be able to extend their own political and ideological legacy through their appointments. And they do a pretty good job of it. Thats why we see that democratic appointees voting one way not in all but in most cases. When you look at cases like that the constitution protects a womans right to choose womans abortion, maybe they consider race and our mission. Does the constitution require that every state allow people to get married . Yo they dont answer those questions. You need an ideological approach to the constitution to answer those questions. There are differences and they are largely based on politics. And thats why it matters whether democratic or republican president s make appointments. N t host you can email us and desist from warren who says whatever happened to stephen did you interview him for the buck . Guest he was a graduate in philosophy when he was living with patty hearst. He didnt become a philosopher. He became a Real Estate Broker in Silicon Valley and he has led a very nice life in largely obscured even the way that most people do and hes a nice guy and he remained somewhat bewildered if anyone were t woue bewildered by this crazy experience. He ihes now in his mid60s and married with kids. Lo in the interest of full t disclosure desist from a viewer saying ive read all of your books, can you comment on the video in the Supreme Court. We want to open the process. Guest i used to say that the reason there were no cameras in the Supreme Court could be answered into words and those two words were jon stewart because the justices didnt want to be made fun of. Now hes gone from the today show but i think that the concept is the same and we talk about stockholm syndrome in the context of the case. How about in the case ofkagan, h sotomayor and kagan . They said cameras in the courtroom would be a great idea. Now you ask them and it i donte know, im worried about the effect on the deliberations. Rg it seems the arguments against cameras in the Supreme Court are tenable arguments. There are no witnesses to be intimidated. Its just lawyers are giving. The importance of the subject matter is unquestioned. Its their store. They dont want to open themselves up to too much one thing scrutiny. One thing that will happen is i do believe that justices will eventually allow Live Streaming of the audio of the Supreme Court arguments because they are already our microphones and they released the audio at the end of the week when they have arguments. I think that will be their concession to the modern world and i think they will recognize correctly that takes the heat off them for video. In fairness to the justice, you have to put in cameras and change the lighting. They showed that it would be a change. It would offer no change at all. Host outsiders tend to be surprised by how rarely the justices speak to each other oneonone. They spent a good deal of time together as a group. What has changed . Guest john roberts was a law clerk when rehnquist was an associate justice and i think temperamentally and in terms of the interpersonal dynamic, roberts very much replicated the rehnquist court. He served under the chief justice that was genuinely unpopular among his colleagues in part because his colleagues thought he tried to have too much of a heavy hand in the Court Celebrations and rehnquiso said we are going to disagree. That is inevitable that we are not going to bother each other so he didnt have a lot of patience in general and he tried to move things along. And Court Conferences when they meet with each other to discuss the cases basically theyould go around the table and vote. Thats expanded a little bit under roberts but its basically a similar scenario. T the rehnquist philosophy about the justices good fences make good neighbors. We leave each other alone will get along better. It remains that way. They do interact but this is nine separate law firms. They vote in exchange man knows but thats it. Host nancy you are next from new york. Caller what is in the Liberation Army name, and a person that is 70yearsold wouldnt be able to acknowledgee that they were a different person 50 years ago from the one they are today. So, im kind of mystified and puzzled and wondered if you could comment on that. It just seems bizarre to me as an elderly person myself. Gue guest this is not elderly. In the foreseeable future i dont want to think of it as elderly but its a good point. People try to justify and explain its a lot easier to say you were a victim than to say you actually participated in some very bad acts. There were some very bad acts during that lost here with the remnants including one where the woman was killed. This was a serious crime wave by patty hearst and others which renders the part of all the more incredible. To answer the first question, donald d. Free was the leader. A lot of people today think they were like one of those black revolutionary groups. He was the only africanamerican that were and he collected recruits about him that were mostly middleclass students and dropouts from the students have migrated from indiana. He came up with the word which is sort of a production of people working together. He called himself as people may remember general marshall which was an illustration of this sort of absurd and intuitive concepts that they had about their own importance. Thats why he called them an army and liberators. Y did not le it wasnt a word. They didnt liberate anything or anyone and they were no ra because there were about a dozen of them talks. But that is their version of the name. Host you have a real sense relatively recent photograph. Guest she is best known for raising show dog. She had a victory at the westminster kennel club. One of the Amazing Things about her story is for all of the crisis of these events going to prison, shes glad the life which she was destined. This shows we are who we are. I love booktv, a caller thank you. I love booktv theater as a federal prosecutor, im reading your book with great interest. She was living near the scene of the kids rapping. I lived at 2606 which was an Apartment Building across the street. Thats where you sit in the book inspired by two of the kidnappers. Guest students the rest of the king were not across the street, they were nextdoor standing on thnext doorstanding. One of the incredible things when you think about the kidnapping and the whole saga, they opened up and fired onn these kids who came out onto the porch to see what was going on. Its a miracle that they didnt want people considering how man rounds of ammunition they fired both at the kidnapping and the shoot out in los angeles. Are you still there . Caller yo you noted how radical it was at the time but you failed to mention another famous female resident. Guest and who was that . Ue ie guest Hillary Clinton in the summer of 1971. She came all the way across the country to work for a radicalmaf law firm that represented the revolutionaries from time like the black panthers. Its a truth story. You can look it up on the internet. To i hope you urge people not only to read your book but the days of grace thats an excellent book on the air a. Of rage is host the book the days ofoul rage is about many of the radical movements of the 1970s and it mostly focuses on therg Weather Underground but it also talks about the Liberation Army. Host we have several books to go through. Too close to call and i want to raise one in reference to the in 2000. Host court. The performance in the case vindicated once more the famous observation offered by justice Robert Jackson and said we are not final because we are infallible but we are infallible only because we are final. Let me ask about that point and also what he didnt do that might have changed history. Guest too close to call, i was in florida the whole 30 days except i came to washington foro both of the Supreme Courtbut thn arguments. But that book came out in october of 2001. Remember there was a news event in september so it came out in the immediate aftermath of 9 11 and people didnt want to hear about bush v. Gore so that was a tough sell and im pleased toco say it wasnt a commercial success. Can i have a special fund fondness for just that reason. I have a lot of respect for the Supreme Court. Ththe liberals and conservatives are a lot alike. Nl i disagree with many of the decisions that i understand the way they came out of the way they did. Indefensible decision. It was badly reasoned. It was badly written, it was inappropriately they took the case inappropriately to start with. So i have no i really still have a very critical view of that decision. But that Robert Jackson quote says, we have to stop somewhere. Somebody has to have the last word in american political and legal life, and we have decided to have the Supreme Court do it, for better or worse. And that is why our election ended the way it did in 2000, but that doesnt mean we have to be happy. Host you had four very different people who are central to this. George w. Bush and his approach, al gore, the sitting Vice President , warned christopher, the former secretary of state in the clinton administration, and jim baker, longtime friend, confident day and in the george h. W. Bush administration and they had a different approach. And why the decision came out the way that it did. I dont know if al gore had picked different person now, there might have been a different outcome. And there were heroic effort on the parts of the democrats. Ron klink, who plays the young leader of the Democratic Forces did enormous labor under very difficult circumstances and almost still one. The amount of effort and resources was tremendously out of balance and that was the result of different approaches. Host you quote the Firm Executives at theater at the miami herald did this is from a q a interview with brien lamb. It runs about 90 seconds to cspan remind us what the miami herald concluded about the florida election. I will tell you what we did first abolished after the u. S. Supreme court decided that there would no fullscale recount of the vote in florida, we decided that we should determine for histories date what were the real result. So we did our own recount. We went to every one of the 16 counties in florida and obtained all the ballots and we were able to do that under the really expensive public records law florida, which is really wonderful. So we obtained all the ballots. We went with an Accounting Firm to see them at the time and they did their account deleted our count as terminal in and we went to every single ballot and we had the supervisor of elections hold a valid and recorded how that ballot was voted on whether it could in fact be counted. They were marked in a way they couldnt possibly be counted. There were different standards. How do you judge the socalled hanging chad. So if you have a outlet that was punctured, if the piece of paper were hanging on, did you count that or not count that . So we looked at the vote under various standards that we determined that george bush actually won that election in florida. Cspan if i could add one more point, the miami herald did their own recount could later the National Opinion Research Center at the university of chicago did a different, even more sponsored Consortium Including the New York Times and the Washington Post that reshaped different conclusion. If the whole state had been recounted, gore would have won. Does a tactical mistake by al gore. Guest it was certainly a tactical mistake to only call for four counties of recount here but i think the broader issue is what we know for sure is that the Supreme Courts decision ended the recount. There is no more recount after december no more official recount. I remember it being in tallahassee the recount was ongoing, when the peoples primitive cell phones and cell phones are pretty primitive ms days and people said the Supreme Court has issued a stay to stop counting the ballot. They stopped counting right in the middle. Miami herald recount tells us, the Broader Media recount tells us that we will never know. We will never know who won the election, who would have been designated the winner of the election if the recount had been allowed to proceed. It doesnt matter a unlike Marty Behring said they are. But respectfully, and that is not the last word. The last word i believe with all my heart is we cannot tell who wouldve won because recounts can recreate them. They can only happen in real time and we just dont know who would have won. Host an email from one of our viewers. Where did Jeffrey Toobin go to college and at that time in college significantly affect her future . Guest i went to Harvard College and majored in American History and literature. I wrote my senior thesis about samuel adam and i just want to say since we are in television now that if someone wants to make a musical about samuel adam, i am happy to help. I am really ready to help. You know, in fairness i think hamilton life is a little more suited for a musical. Did not have an impact . I love going to college. I spent most of my time in college at the student newspaper. I was really much more my nature than my academic interests. I like my classes. I was happy to study american has read, but that was when i really cant do journalism bug, even though i did go from there to law school. But i still have a great fondness for histories and early American History and reigning american era was really kind of a return to those college route. Just in one very specific way. My last two books have been about the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court virtually everything about it now is on pdf. It is very easy to manipulate their research material. Studying this event from the 1970, where i had received these 150 boxes of paper, it was really startling and wrinkly quite difficult for me to deal with actual paper again and a research context. I am very anxious to have these 150 boxes out of my life. Host sent us an email. Otb cspan. Org. What do you do in your free time and what was your favorite ultra right . Guest what do i like to do with my free time . I have i love interesting stories and i love to cover and go places and i have a story coming out in the new yorker which requires spending a lot of time in alabama, which i just love because its very far from my home. I like interesting things in the world. My own life is not terribly interesting or complicated. I am sort of a homebody. I like to play golf with my wife. I like to work in the gym. I like to read folks. Theres nothing especially interesting are colorful about what i do in my daytoday life. But i like to be out in the world into the colorful and interesting things that other people do. Host lets go to gary joining us from miami, florida. Go ahead, please. You are on the air. Caller hi, i would like to ask mr. Toobin something about our current president. I am a former resident of hyde park in chicago. And i was very familiar with reverend wright in the church. My question, the president attended the church for more than 20 years. He says in his book that reverend white was his mentor. He married michelle. He blasted his home. He baptized his children and he knew that reverend white previously had been a month on and had a company, louis farrakhan. Host what is your question . Caller well, my question is, does Jeffrey Toobin believe that the president did not know any of this or does he come to that conclusion that the president was either lying or isnt as smart as he claimed to be. Guest its like 2008 all over again. This was an issue that was exhaustively down in the 2008 election. Barack obama or title game that means that the president endorsed everything Jeremiah Wright ever said. I dont think it means he knew everything that Jeremiah Wright ever said. Barack obama has been president for seven and a half years now and i think theres a lot of basis on which to judge whether hes been a good president or not. Based on what he did as president. What he did or did not think that Jeremiah Wright at this stage seems utterly irrelevant. Host the run of his life, the people versus o. J. Simpson. Guest the book became back into my life dramatically. Host as he sits in a nevada jail, what is going through his mind . Guest boy i got a raw deal. People are unfair to me. I would like to tell you about all the unfairness is one of the things about o. J. As he is a compulsive talker. He undoubtedly has the great deal to say about what has gone on in his life boats recently and in the more distant past. A lot of people sometimes have asked me over the years have made do you think o. J. Has admitted to himself that he killed ron goldman, his exwife, nicole brown since then. I certainly do believe that he did. I think that he doesnt really focus in that question in his routes. I think he feels like the legal system has been unfair to him. Thats a lot of people involved in the criminal Justice System focus on what they think are the young heiresses of the said system, but not the underlying conduct that got them in trouble in the first place. Host what are the underlying questions for those who followed the case . He had celebrity. He had an exwife who was beautiful. He had two children. By all accounts a pretty successful career as a ballplayer, commentator, actor and celebrity. So why . Guest Domestic Violence is a real thing. Guest it is easy to make it complicated argument about the o. J. Simpson case. In many respects it was a complicated stories. But why o. J. Killed nicole, because husbands kill their wives. Because intimate partners kill each other. Because men kill women. That is what happened here. Its not really that complicated. Their im. There is ron goldmans father in front of me. There i am with no gray hair little, or be two years old, looking pretty young. Even then i knew that it was an amazing thing to be in the courtroom at that moment. I knew that this was like being in this film. This is a piece of history that was unfolding. I didnt even know at that redhot moment when the verdict was being announced about the racially polarized reaction up he would soon see, which vaulted the story even more. He say racism has an stored to a petty insults for too long with the police in general and lapd. Thats right. I wrote this book in the immediate aftermath and 20 years later to make a miniseries with that magnificent series and it just shows how a great story is tightly forever becauseorever the of the series came out and did the immediate aftermath of ferguson and eric garner is death in new york that gave rise to the black lives Matter Movement in this story the way that iandt wrote it and import trade was about race in america and how jurors especially sought africanamerican jurors in the relationship between the Los Angeles Police department in it turned out to that o. J. Simpson was the undeserving beneficiary but this year had so much attention on the o. J. Simpson case, it just showed how tightly that story was because of the relationship between the African Americans and police does the verdict surprise you . Yes. It did. But as my wife and others have been rated me many times, if you recall what happened, the jury announced they had reached a verdict of the previous day and then we had to wait until all 11 00 in the morning so i was on television overnight what to siegel happen . I predicted that he would bewoue convicted given how brief the deliberations were and the fact that i sat in the courtroom i was utterly convinced of his guilt i thought the jury would be the same way and i am very much ready to sell was completely wrong. Joining us from redondo fromo beach. Caller our county had the Supreme Court have you read the book the betrayald abot of america based on the novel that was in the nation and so what your thoughts on that . But basically said that and i would love to hear your comments of that. Uest im i am a an admirer as many people may remember one of the prosecutors in the Charles Beyonce case and this was critical of that decision and i take the criticism as much as i disagree to the fig aboutto trees said of how bad it was. Was. I saved under this to defend but i found the book somewhat overstated. Battery count is seed dash judicious reflection. R the republicans were breaking barstools. To spend the whole 36 days in tallahassee. One of the things that you couldnt help but notice is the all the protesters in the street were republican and they were out in front of the Vice President joel manchin saying get out of date jayvees house. Gore didnt want any protesters off the street. S he wanted it orderly process and where the same differences between jim baker the republican that baker understood that this was a bar fight as well as a legal fight and that was one factor in the outcome. I have your cartoonist from yesteryear. I am so tickled to see you both. Wonderfu sees ben is a safety valve for our system of government. Date for your work of the dittoed film series of that is on our web site. And jeffrey it sounds like i have your other books so we have contributed to you but i love the way the right to i do have a couple of comments. But first of all, i think i have to get your patty hearst book because it sounds like what i was teaching criminal justice before restarted card to me i did that with a book about the gideon case. He was o stick forget now iblis the the obverse of the case with patty hearst. That will be fascinating idea of a question for you that you may be interested and i appreciate particularly ofacher of c constitutional law but those explanations of the major case every sheeler every citizen should read that that. Book. That would be great. Thanks for the call. Cry just want to save you can come up with an idea of having more people may be we would get better decisions. Roosevelt tried to packo the court with more than nine now we can even get that. Or even just to get that. That is the first that. Host one of the opening arguments what oliver north did deserves of president of the values that you learn your mothers knee he liedt and cheated. I am pleased to hear you ask that question as people know who oliver north is. But i feel obligated to answer that question to explain the little background because the iran contra scandal is not at the top of peoples minds. Oliver north was a Lieutenant Colonel in the record who was in the Reagan White House said he met with the assistance of his superiors and john s poindexter for those that were fighting the leftwinggovee government in to sell missiles to lehigh iran to free hostages and use some of them monday monday to fund the contras that congress prohibited. One of the headlines this week a. It is remarkable how iran in particular out of all the countries of the world that manages to confuse and there is a uniquely bad relationship between iranon and the United States that needs to occur with a decade after decade. Ecade. There was an independent counsel appointed i was the Junior Member of the team for taking those antiwas convicted in he overturned his conviction and has been how to hand about ever since. The n and i am pleased to seek of the whole saw that all. Good afternoon. Place significant question but you bitches and she is day homemaker and live the life she was born but did she marry her bodyguard orvi her chauffeur . And if so is she still married to him . This is something that i explore in the book. She did marry the of bodyguard right after sheer was released on bail her lawyers had to hire bodyguards for her and offduty San Francisco Police Officer named bernardr shaw they fell in love and they buried in the late 70s then they moved to the east coast it is not the she isbl concerned about her security that we have a happy marriage they have two daughters but unfortunately he died of cancer in 2013 and she is now a widow but not surprisingly he became the head of security and they of her friends that work at esquire or cosmopolitan behalf say he took my a photo identification no whole journalist knows that he took their photograph. Were at the midway point with a lot more to talk about. What is your next project . I dont know. I find the effort so all encompassing frankly the last thing right now to worry about my next book and what that is about i do now happily i will write more books but they tend to come organically and i dont know what that will be about. We will continue our conversation with your calls deity males and it treats tweet tweets here on booktv. Author, columnist, lawyer, Jeffrey Toobin. The book a vast conspirace. He said the following. When president clinton was caught in the most cliche of dilemmas, and menopausal woman from the out this react if not with candor and grace, but with the dishonesty and that are among the touchdown of his career. Host did i write that . That seems a little harsh. Look, bill clinton, lets state the obvious, should not have been involved with Monica Lewinsky. But i saw that the hero of the story to the extent there was one with the american people, which you would not not everyone, but its like we get this. This guy had an affair with a woman. But we dont fire people in this country, especially from the president for doing that. I thought the maturity and the good humor for most americans was really a contrast to the way most politicians and much of the news media viewed the story. This is the now story about very ordinary human flaws that was inflated in todays institutional crisis. When you said euros, among the key players. Guest it was not a great moment for American Public life. Needless to say, i do not defend bill clinton. I do not defend him which he clearly did. Or when you look at his opponent , his back year after year pursuing him on nonsense and its finally fastened on to this. Not only wasted an enormous amount of time on it, but also botched the investigation by not giving her immunity at the beginning and getting this thing over with. You know, bill clinton was very fortunate and if that are series in this ridiculous drama. Host the cover of the book , wagging the finger. What is up with the tide . Disco when i was coming here, i was thinking, is he going to ask me stuff i dont remember . I wrote this stuff a long time ago. One of the gifts that Monica Lewinsky gave to clinton during the relationship is a beautiful azania tide. He wore that tie during his grand jury testimony, which was ultimately televised. There were those who thought that this was a symbol a sign, a signal to Monica Lewinsky but i am still inking a few end quote type to your story defending me. That strikes me as a little farfetched. I devoted an team and none time to trying to locate a copy of the tie and i had a lot of dealings with the people from seeing it. One thing i didnt know it is azania rotates their ties and once they move on to just sort of move on and dont have any. A great souvenir of cobain story i couldnt get. Host from the book a vast a vast conspirace, with regard to health care, she quickly became one of the least popular first ladies her defense of her has been drove her to great heights of popularity. She and her husband tried to capitalize on the good feelings towards her. Guest yeah. It seems like a long time ago. But our sense of who Hillary Clinton as has gone through quite a number of iterations. Of how long shes been a major public figure. She became the first lady in my 293 which is 23 years ago and she was the focus of public shin as the leader of the health care case. But i think, you know, this was an example of how the clintons were fortunate in their adverse very. Basically bill clinton had a very inappropriate relationship with this woman and then lied about it. But it was essentially a private matter for him and his family and his wife. The fact that his opponents try to bring it into a constitutional crisis and she managed to deal with him on a personal private level i think generated a lot of sympay for her. Just trying to think about the pattern of Hillary Clintons career is that she can to be this popular when she is involved in partisan controversy. That was true in health care and it is true now and shes running for president. Bush is likely to win, shes certainly not as popular as she was when she was secretary of state, which was a large the apolitical position. She is likely to be more popular as a president if she becomes president then she has as a candidate you choose not a great candidate. She is not a great campaigner. But she is actually pretty good at being in office. She was a popular senator in new york. So i think that is one of the patterns that his record of her life. Party structure is organize your research, specially interviews to conduct and how youre able to handle your notebook or obligations in g of Research Assistants . Just go just to answer the last question, i have never been able to hire Research Assistants in the sense that people who go out and do the legwork for me and interviews for me, i dont grudge the writers who do, but that is too much a part of the research itself. I could neither said that work out to others. I have had people who have helped me with topics and im very pleased to say that my neighbor in sherman, connecticut with someone i hired to create an index for the 150 boxes of material i got, which was and is visible to try and figure out how to use all this. That is the kind of thing ive had a Research Assistant for discrete assignments like creating an index of those boxes. After how i structure my work, to meet the reporting is always the most important part. Going out and talking to people and going out and interviewing people, getting the documents were reading the primary source material that came out at the time. Once i start writing, as i mentioned to you earlier, i am very fastidious about my five pages a day quota. I have to get it done every day because that is how i can complete a book in a reasonable amount of time. While im writing, and still reporting. One of the things youve learned in my experience when you sit down to write is you learn about the holes in your research. One reason why i write 1250 word is that it leaves me time everyday to continue my reporting people on the phone, looking at documents. I never stop reporting of the book is dead. Host benjamin joining us from florence, massachusetts gave you a max. Guest good afternoon on the east coast. You mentioned earlier your interest in American History and recently the sub checked over his bitter ginsberg and involvement in political discourse coming out. It is significant and the study of American History you should well know that john jay, the first to bring our justice was in fact twice a candidate for the governorship of new york and ran for the public nomination for the presidency from the Supreme Court as he got the nomination and subsequently was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Court and William Douglas tried to get the democratic nomination for Vice President in the night team 40s. So there is a long consistent history of justices involvement and Political Activities and for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to make a few comments about the Political Campaign strikes me as small potatoes compared to the history of such involvement. The issue has been raised, but i havent seen the suit those who criticize ginsburg acknowledged the historical record and take that into account into her statements. Guest is a factual matter, youre clearly correct. I actually mentioned when this came out. Times have changed. The place of the Supreme Court in modern life is after the justices ill acknowledge the man nominated, when they are confirmed, they tried to be more cut off from day to day political events. I dont bring any great naivete to the subject. I recognize the Supreme Court decisions are often deeply political in their nature. But there is a tradition of many decades standing. It is now the justices should try to stay out of the daytoday electoral politics of the country. That is an appropriate line. I think she recognized that. That is why she apologized and is not doing it again. I agree this is not world war iii. It done impeachment of a crisis, but it was an appropriate comment he made. Guest ive had three emails im not sure what theyre talking about. At the first migration there is so Much Movement that at the psyche took the oath of office from a subway stop. Please comment. When i was writing the oath and that chapter about the history about that when i needed to bring you can see most of the president ial oath were various video. I dont remember people Walking Around during the roosevelt won. I do remember that he recite the oath. Its also worth remembering that a lot of what goes on now is choreographed for television. That includes president ial and not duration, which are in meticulous detail choreographed in 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt took the oath for the first time. There wasnt that kind of Image Management of newsreels even in a rather primitive form. The fact that people were not aware that they run camera perhaps isnt as surprising as all of that. Host from chester, pennsylvania, welcome to cspan2 booktv. Guest mr. Toobin, i love your work. Did you graduate from october . Guest no, but my dad was a proud graduate in philadelphia where she would never fail in the next sentence to say Wilt Chamberlain also graduated from overbrook high school. My dad was a proud philadelphian. Guest my husband did, too. Just a couple statements that if you could tell me whether my statements are correct. I think your question about iran and the relationship with u. S. A. Comes down to two words. Anyway, the next point is i dont understand im confused about Supreme Court because their initials are not political, there is not a partisan or new score. Aside from elana kagan, the last just as i try to. That was circumstantial. If you could check me out. I just dont understand why nine of the best and the brightest cant agree on a fivepage document. Guest thank you for your question. If i might make my cryptic statement. Kermit roosevelt was a cia official in the united state who helped initiate a coup detat in iran in the 1950s, which has led to a lot of internet stories the United States and iran. I dont pretend to be an expert, but that is the reference. You know, as for why the Supreme Court justices can agree, here i have a lot of sympathy. This is a question i often get about the Supreme Court. Why did they have to disagree so much . Why cant that be judges, not politicians. Why cant they just put the politics aside and reached legal decisions . If you look at the issues before the Supreme Court, if you look at affirmative action, abortion, samesex marriage, all the sets of issues, and there are not a political answers to these questions. These are questions that are as much political as legal. You cant expect people to put aside their political views to answer questions because questions themselves are so bound up in politics as much as love. This is why i always say in president ial election that people should matters and that when they are voting in a president ial election, they are voting for the future of the Supreme Court and it will very different if donald trump is president or Hillary Clinton as president , especially because of how well the justices are now. By a gear into the next presidency, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Anthony Kennedy will all be in their 80s. Deities outmuscled as they once were, but the 80s are still buried a family concert you expect they will not just be that Justice Scalia vacancy that exists now, but multiple vacancies over the next four or eight years. Host followers on twitter at booktv and you can like us and join us on facebook at facebook booktv. Margie is joining us from proxima West Virginia appeared overhead, please. Guest hi, a few years ago cspan feature a book called the divide. Im wondering if you read that, mr. Toobin. I am one of these people who struggle with inequality. Since cnn is doing a lot of documentaries, is there anyway you could take a look at the book and see if you can work with cnn to do some kind of a documentary about the inequalities in our court system especially for poor people and people that are minority. Guest i am very familiar with this sort. He mostly writes for Rolling Stone now. You know, i think you dont always have to have a winning candidate to have an influence in the United States. Goldwater lost in 1964 a catastrophic landslide to lyndon johnson. But if you look at the goldwater campaign, you see the root of the reagan camp game. You see the root of the countrys right turn in subsequent years. If anyone is interested in that subject in particular, the book server pearlstein really identify how in the laws of 1964 the future of the Republican Party is really revealed. I say that because the callers question very much is related to the Bernie Sanders campaign. The Bernie Sanders campaign was a real phenomenon of the 2016 can paint. Hes got a lot of votes. He won a lot of states. Hillary clintons position on the issues change they move to the last undoubtedly because of Bernie Sanders starting with her position on the Transpacific Partnership trade agreement. The Democratic Party of 2016 as dramatically more liberal than the words in 1992 when Hillary Clintons husband was very intentionally moving the party to the right. I think the callers concerned about inequality is really shared rabbis people in this country and i think Bernie Sanders camp pain in the enormous success of that really illustrate that. How were whether that will translate into actual action of Hillary Clinton is elected president , i dont know. We live in a very polarized moment as the Democratic Party is more liberal, the Republican Party is more conservative and seems likely will control the house of representatives if not the senate as well. How Hillary Clinton can maneuver between her leftward direction that she has taken in a congress that is unlikely to approve much will be one of the challenges of her presidency if shes elected president. Host i will take you back 32 used in the cbs news archives 1984 and get your reaction. Good evening from cbs news. This is ms. Berry. The president elect, Daniel Ortega has called for a summit with president reagan to reduce tensions. The later said u. S. Pressure was behind the caracas efforts to obtain weapons from soviets. 2000 mourners attended a Memorial Service for baby fae, the finn who made medical history when she received a baboon heart transplant. Police have identified skeletal remains near seattle is another big tub. A number of known but tends to 28 in tampa, florida, robert has been charged with the murder of nine women in that state. Host Jeffrey Toobin, your mother. Just as bad my mom. My mother was one of the pioneering Television Women on television news. She was at abc for many years issued by cbs when she was doing those is raikes. Alas, she died last summer in july of 2015. But you know, it is so interesting to watch her on television because she was so good at it. She had a great voice. She had a terrific presence on television. She looked great. You know, my television career, it is bizarre that i in the same business. I have never been an anchor and i had no ambitions to be an anchor. But she was so good at reading from a teleprompter in presenting the news. It takes someone in the business facing to see just how good she was. And she was a great mom as well. Guest did she consider herself to be a pioneer or she looking for a job . Guest you bet she was a pioneer. In retrospect especially. Job. But be the first woman to anchor to be the first woman to be a Vice President of a network news operation. All of that was very important to her. She was a very serious and committed feminist and she was concerned not just about her own progress, but the progress of all women in all fields. He was a wonderful inspiration as well. Among other reasons as a man who supported feminism very much. Host you wrote a piece in new yorker. Your own career and the dichotomy you use that word in terms of being a lawyer and author, somebody who is on cnn, bridging different platforms. Guest i think of myself as an itinerant constant present provider cocontent provider. Host well go to rick from red center lakes, colorado . Caller it is colorado. Northern colorado. Okay. I have a general constitutional question. Im not a scholar and im not an expert, but i have read the constitution a few times, and as i see it, just as a citizen reading it, what strikes me is that first article, the longest article, the most specific article, is about the legislative branch, and then there are two short articles about the additional that would indicate to me just as couldnt of a sane person that the legislative branch was perceived by the founders as the Central Branch of government. The most important. And when i see that the president currently has 4 Approval Rating but the government has a whatever it is 70 disApproval Rating are strikes me thats not difficult to explain if you can agree that the running of the country is primarily the job of the legislature. They can fire the president , they can make taxes, make war. What is your thought about sort evolution of the three branches of government. Guest if i can just answer you question. You pinpoint something that is so important and this is an observation that i think is not made often enough, and its why its a really good idea for people to actually pick up and read the constitution occasionally, and the to me, every time i read it, my reaction is very much like the callers, which is article 1, describing the legislative powers, is much longer than article 2, and even longer, again, than article 3, which describes the judiciary powers and we live in a system where since marbury vs. Mad desson in 1803 the courts can invalidate anything the two branches do. Think the real turning point came in terms of the balance of power february the executive between the executive branch and the legislative branch came with the nuclear bomb. I think in 1945, once it became clear that the president could essentially end the world with the push of a button, metaphorically, the power in this country had to go in the direction of the executive branch because the fact that we lived with the threat of extinction for 40 years, and still technically do as well Still Nuclear weapons pointed at us i think that led to a tremendous shift of power from the executive from the legislative branch to the executive branch. Its very hard to move it in the other direction. Its particularly hard to move it in the other direction when congress is so dysfunctional, when you have a filibuster system in the senate that requires 60 votes to get anything done. Very little gets done. The fact you have an executive who can actually get things done in and a legislate temperature that either chooses not to or cant is another explanation for why power has shifted that way. Host a tweet from pam saying would you be interested in writing a book on Justice Ginsburg . Guest you know, one of the things i know from my involvement in the Publishing Business is that there are a lot of books in the works about Justice Ginsburg, even as we speak, and there was a wonderful book published called notorious rbg that sort of a paperback original, wonderful book, a friend of mine wrote it last year. Im going to leave rbg to other authors because there are plenty of. The circling around her. Host another tweet saying jeffrey tube bins mom was a pioneer in tv. The things you learn in booktv guest im delighted. Host from cleveland, ohio, neville is next. Go ahead. Caller speaking of my mother. Guest speaking of my mother, native of cleveland, ohio. Caller i observe you on cnn as a legal mind on cnn. But my question has to do with the legal background of congressmen. I believe that more congressmen are lawyers than in any other profession. Can you say whether you think that having congressmen being of legal background is in any way significant for the way the country is run . Guest you know, i dont really think it matters that much. Throughout the history of the Supreme Court, the law school that has sent most justices to the Supreme Court you know which one it is . None. For decades, most of the Supreme Court justices didnt go to law school at all. It was only in the mid20th mid20th century that law school became a common route to being a lawyer. Most lawyers became lawyers by clerking with an old lawyer the way Abraham Lincoln did. So, i dont think the fact that most many members of congress are lawyers has much to do with the problems and the issues. I thing congress reflects where the country is at this point. This is a deeply polarized country and when you combine that with partisan redistributioning threshing fact that most house seats have redistricting, the fact that house seats have been crafted to be overwhelm ily democratic or republican, you see many fewer moderates who are interested in cooperating in the house. That to me is a much more Significant Development in congress than the fact there are lot of lawyers there. Host a couple of your books. Opening arguments you say i spent most of my fan frantic first weeks trying to pretend i was having less fun than i was, playing chicken with the white house, battling ollie north. I was have the time of my life. Guest i was. Was a kid. Now i sound like only an old person can talk about a i guess i was 29 years old 28 or 29 just oust my clerkship, and it was heady stuff. It was cool. It was great. I think actually one of the lessons, though, that i learned in opening arguments i learn in irancontra is i went into that process thinking that we had a mandate to sort of show what a how terrible the Reagan Administration was, and i learned from my colleagues and just from the world, that those sorts of ambitions are unhealthy for prosecutors. To the extent prosecutors have Political Goals and ambitions, thats a bad thing, not a good thing. I think a narrow role for prosecutors who should be concerned with prosecuting actual crime, and only prosecuting actual crime, not trying to change political directions, not trying to effect elections, thats what prosecutors should do. One reason i wrote opening arguments was the story of my understanding that my initial ambitions were flawed, and that its better for prosecutors to have a more limited conception of what they should do. Host so, therefore, what is the connection between thurgoodd marshall, the naacp and special prosecutors . Guest i dont know of. There is one . Host you wrote about how that led to the creation of the special prosecutors guest well, im not sure i see it i mean, the Public Interest lawyers who are filing lawsuits as the Naacp Legal Defense Fund did to end segregation in the United States, that is an explicitly partisan political agenda just as evan wilson and the other lawyers trying to end the bans on samesex marriage in the United States had a political agenda. Thats perfectly appropriate. Our system is designed for people to use the legal system in that way. It is not designed in my opinion, for prosecutors who have the power of government behind them, not independent actors like Public Interest lawyers but government lawyers, to try to use that power to effect political change. Thats a bad idea. Host from the run of his life, as to the central fact in this case its my view that of j. Simpson murder hid is exwife and her friend on june 12. In any rational analysis of the events and evidence leads to that conclusion. Guest thats what i think. And i have not been shy about that conclusion over the past 22 years. I mean, i think o. J. Simpson killed the two people and he got away with and it that is a real stain on the court system. Interestingly, the fx series based on my book did not take an explicit position on the guilt or innocence of o. J. They laid out the evidence and it points in one direction but i think the film makers made a smart decision not to have an explosive conclusion in the accomplice accomplice sit conclusion. It was much more about how the Legal Process worked and how explain how the acquittal came about. Host from too close to call if the recount had proceeded they might not have gone al gores way but the fact remains al gore did not do everything he could to secure this victory so the nation could never know whether a more determined evident might have seed. Said when the votes were counted the results were the same. Gore won. The margins were tiny but under the scenarios from the most liberal to the most conservative, gore emotionalled the victor. Guest right. This is from the recent rerecount from the Media Consortium than the recount by in the the miami herald it is true that the full state recount favored gore under all those scenarios, but i dont pretend ive said this before i dont pretend that we can know with certainty who would have won the election if the Supreme Court had allowed the recount to continue. Thats just my point. That by ending the recount, the bush the Supreme Court guaranteed we will never know. Host from american heiress despite the resident rim of the commune kays the sla was not a vehicle for political change. It was an instrument for getting attention for its own sake. Guest right. One know had gones that one thing that struck me about the sla, the general field marral who was the nominal lead are but the brains of the operation, such as it was, came out of the Indiana University Theater Department and this time in the early 70s was a time of guerrilla theater and Performance Art and basically people making spectacles of themselves for political change, and if you look at the fee theatrical nature of our how the sla operated, whether its kidnapping the heir yes or putting cyanide in their bullets or putting patty hearst in front hoff the cameras during a bank robbery, it was design offed to create a public spectacle. What the sla had no idea about was how to foment actual political change. They saw. Thes as the american counterpart to the revolutionary movements around the world, in uruguay this red brigade in italy. The gang in germany. But even more than those groups, these people were utterly clueless about how to recruit anything more than the tiny band they started with. Host this picture from l. A. , i believe, east 54th street. What are we looking at. Guest that is the may 17, 1974, patty hearst and two of the sla members went off shopping and got into and had to got into a shootout and had to leave. The other six members of the sla were caught in this house that is on the screen now, and this house was the subject of what is still, to this day, the Biggest Police shootout in American History. 5,000 rounds of ammunition. There you see video of it. 5,000 rounds of al mission went into the house. 3,000 rounds of ammunition came out, and all six of the sla members who were inside were killed. The l. A. P. D. Thought that Patricia Hearst was inside the house at the time of the shootout, and so she understood that her life was in danger in a very direct way, which was one reason why, over the next year, she went on the run with the remnants of the sla because she saw that this is the fate that smooth await her if she was couth. Host we take it for granted, we saw the graphic, minicam. Guest this is another example of how the hearst case previews the modern world. Knxt was the cbs affiliate in los angeles. Its now known as kcbs. They had a new technology which was the ability to put a satellite on the a satellite transmitter on the roof of a truck and make a live breaking news event available to their viers, before the invention of the minimum nip cam the only way you could do a live broadcast was to lay cable weeks advance like a Political Convention or world series game, but there they were able to take a minicam to this shootout. The other local affiliates in los angeles said to knxt, we really want your feed. Can we broadcast it as well . They picked it up. Then nationally it was picked um around the country picked up around the country because the minicam had just been invented and that was the first live breaking news event broadcast around the country which now of course we take for granted that we can go live anywhere at any time. Host lets go to jeff in wood bridge, virginia, with Jeffrey Toobin. Caller i noticed during the break that cspan had that one of the most influential people that you have had was robert caro. Do you know how he is doing and he is very meticulous as for as his work and what the progress is on the last book. Guest i havent seen him probably in a year, but a year ago he was plowing ahead. One of the weird things in his the way he has done the book is that if he is going to put everything into this last volume, its going to be a pretty long volume because he has most of the johnson presidency still to go. Hes got virtually all of vietnam ahead of him, and then you have the four years that he lived after he left the white house, and here is a Supreme Court fact. That involves lyndon johnson. Lyndon johnson died january 23, 1973, which was the day that row v. Wade was decided. So wade roe v. Wade was not the lead story. Host share this email from darren in baltimore. Did jeffrey eat or interview the late o. J. Attorney, Johnny Cochran. If so, what was he like . Guest i disagreed with Johnny Cochran about the o. J. Simpson case. I disapproved of some of the tactics he used in the courtroom, but i can say this now that he is gone. I love Johnny Cochran. I thought he was one of the most delightful, intelligent, appealing, charismatic people id ever met. In terms of pure charisma, the three people i would put in a category different from everyone always are open practice oprah winfrey, bill clinton, and Johnny Cochran, the froze lit up the room is something johnny decide wherever he went, and yet he defended o. J. Simpson and, yes in my opinion, o. J. Simpson was guilty as hell, but johnny also defended a lot of people who were not prominent and he dade lot of good in the world, especially when it came to the story of race in los angeles. So, i think its a heartbreaking thing that johnny died so young, and i was a big fan. Host if it does not fit,. Guest you must acquit. You know, he had a charisma and a way with words that was undeniable, and that came through the jury and in this case and every other. This was a good man. Host let go to jim . Tacoma, washington. Caller mr. Toobin, this is a pleasure. I have been reading you for going on 25 years, starting with your first book. And two more books after that and a lot of your new yorker pieces. Guest thank you. Caller i will get patty hearst book. Was living in the bay area at the time and going to college so the memories are vivid. 20 years later i found myself living in brentwood across from nicole when the killings occurred so i watch the trial avidly. Within a couple of week is read a piece of yours in the the new yorker saying the defense was going to target a cop named mark furman. And sure enough, thats how the case unfolded, and when they came up with those tapes, i thought, my word, that just kind of blows him out of the water completely. When the case was over, i thought, if theres any one person you could attribute the loss would be mark fuhrman. How he has been rehabilitated, fellow who you might at best describe as a racist perjury cop is now an author, shows up on television. I just dont understand how people can think that trial was wrongly decided are embracing this clown who did more to sabotage it than anybody. Guest well, i think you make an interesting point, and i think it is worth remembering where he is now, a prominent analyst. Its fox. Fox news. It is a conservative news jutlet. He is a outlet. He is a figure who has become a prominent defender of police against black lives matter accusations. He is a prominent someone who is part of the backlash against the movement that Johnny Cochran reflected. So, he has become a conservative hero of sorts, not because he lied i think people sort of gloss over that but because he is seen as someone who was the adversary of the people who were playing the race card during the o. J. Simpson case. I think his political place in American Life as reflected in this role at fox, is what is worth remembering about fuhrman now. Host american heiress you say rarely is the my question to you if you could have asked her one question yao sid she did not cooperate with the book but a lot of the material you could go to through what would you have asked her. Guest well, i dont have the arrogance to think one question could turn the tables on i talk about one incident in particular, actually. I would ask her to explain one thing in particular, because i think it is emblematic of how much she did in fact switch sides to join the sla and that was on may 16, 1974. They had just robbed the bank in San Francisco and they all moved to los angeles, the nine of them. They were going stir crazy in the little house, and three of them decided to good to shopping. Patricia and bill and emily harris. Bill harris goes into mels Sporting Goods and decided to shoplift. The clerk was an aspiring Police Officer and he knew that the crime of shoplifting did not actually take place until the person left the store. So he waited until bill left the store and then he tackled him on the street. Patricia hearst is across the street in a van, by herself, with the key in the ignition. What does she do . Does she walk away . Does she drive away . Does she ask for help . No. She sees bill harris being tackled so she picks up a machine gun and fires across the street, amazingly not hitting anyone but trying to free bill. She does that, thinks it over, then gets another gun, and shoots up the street some more. Again, miraculously not hurting anyone, but successfully freeing bill from the clutches of his pursuer and bill and emily harris get in the car and the three of them head off. So when people say, oh, patricia was forced to do everything, oh, patricia was coerce evidence, was a victim forever, think about the incident in mels Sporting Goods and i would want her to explain how her behavior at mels, shooting up the street in order to free her comrade, bill harris how is that consistent with someone who is not actually a member of the sla . Host amerigo is next from las vegas. Caller hi, mr. Toobin. Back to Monica Lewinski and president clinton. President clinton did not ask monica to lie in her deposition. He asked her to lie in a different position. Thank you. Host well let it go at that. Dont forget. Guest dont forget to tippure waitress. Host ronald, randall, washington go ahead, please. Caller yes, jeffrey, as i im a interested in psychology and psychiatry and i recently read that there is a syndrome now about people like patty hearst and i might answer your reasons for why she was the way she was during that Sporting Goods example that you gave. Host are you talking about the stockholm guest stock hole syndrome. Caller yes. Guest let me tell you something about stockholm syndrome. The reason its called stockholm syndrome is there was a robbery of a back in stockholm, sweden in november of 1973. So it was just a few months before patricia was kidnapped and it had not really seeped into Popular Culture yet, and during her trial, it was actually not mentioned. Its only subsequently as its become famous that stockholm syndrome has been associated with her case, the idea is that people who are held captive can come to identify with their captors and support their captors even though they are technically prisoners. Its important to remember about stockholm syndrome and brainwashing. These are journalistic terms. They are not medical terms. And i try to stay away from that sort of jargon in the book and concentrate instead on the actual facts of what went on. At patricias trial there were three psychiatrists who testified for the prosecution, three psychiatrists who testified for the defense and they disagreed. I think with all due respect to psychiatry, its an imperfect science, and i think it is a more helpful way to view the hearst case and what i try to do in american heiress, is to view it through the facts of the case rather than through what i regard mostly as psycho basketball. Host january 29, 199, a picture of patty hearst with a tshirt, pardon me, of she her sentence was commuted and you make a point that reagan played a part. Guest by the time of the pardon it was quite clear that Ronald Reagan was likely to be jimmy carters opponent in the 1980 election. The reagan Ronald Reagan was a friend of the Hearst Family. He had appointed katherine hearst, patricias measure to be on the board of region inside california, a big supporter of governor reagans, and the fact that reagan and john wayne, the very conservative actor, supported the pardon, gave jimmy carter political cover to issue the commutation he did because he knew his main opponent would not criticize him, and carter, who was a religious man and someone who believes in the concept of redemption, was interested in this case and was sympathetic to patricia, and but also carter knew that by granting the pardon, the commutation, he was not exposing himself to criticism from reagan because reagan supported it as well. Host i asked you this not because its out network but in researching the justice you traveled to West Lafayette, indiana. Guest i did. It was great. Host what what did you find and what did you learn. Let me just sort of back up. Ill tell you, when i started working on the nine, one thing i was worried about how am i going to get enough information about what the justices are like behind the scenes . I knew i could talk to some of them but not all of them. And the richness of the story was going to be about what went on behind the scenes, not what went on in public. And i always remember something that my editor said to me. He says youll be amazed at how much is out there in plain view. On any subject, but the Supreme Court in particular. So i started with this book came out in 2007. So im talking about the mid2000s when i was reporting and it i started using the internet, which was of course not as ubiquitous as it is now, and i saw that the justices had appeared on cspan with some regularity. So this was the days before cspan had put all it archives on the web. Just the web didnt work that way in those days. But i called and your colleagues told me that if i went to West Lafayette, indiana, where the cspan archives were, could look at the justices appearance to my hearts content. Why West Lafayette, indiana . Your former your founder and leader, brian lamb, was a proud graduate of Purdue University which is in West Lafayette. That led to the archives being there. So i went to the archives and i remember i dont know if this is still the case but they had this sort of cool automated system, forgiving dvds, a machine that pulled them off the like a kind of storage system and i remember kind of host its still there. Guest is that right . And i got dvds that were incredibly useful because the justices theyre human beings. When they talk off the cuff, they sometimes say things that, on reflect, is a little more reflection, is it a little more candid than they might expect and it was going to West Lafayette was a gold mine. By the time i got write the oath cspan put almost all the archives online so i was denied the great pleasure of going back to West Lafayette, and but i still used cspan archives a lot. Host youre welcome anytime. Lets go to susan in cambridge, massachusetts. Caller hi. In responding to the many viewers who have called in saying, well, why is the Supreme Court decisions why isnt it just what is right and wrong and why are theyre always split has done an admirable job in explaining that politics is necessarily a part of this. But i think youve gone too far in that my law professor, my mentor in law school, robert cutler, told me many, many years ago, that a lot of american law could be explained by the principles of the railroad always wins. For many years of our existence. But thats not the interesting question. And it doesnt make it law. What distinguishes law from politics is that they have to give reasons why they railroad wins. Once you give reasons to either you stand by those reason in later decisions and that means occasionally the railroad doesnt win, or the republicans have to vote liberal, or the liberals have to vote with the republicans or law loses all legitimacy, and i think what is wrong with burn v. Gorees that most wrongs that the court said, forget what our reasoning is, we dont care. You can never use this again. This is just we want to decide it. Guest if i can stop you there. I think youve pin pointed a lot of important points itch dont want to overstate my view that everything that the Supreme Court does is just purely political. Remember, that about half of their decisions every year are unanimous, twothirds are close to unanimous, there is lot of what they do is just being a legal technician, and you are right, too, that the obligation to write down the ropes for the reasons for what they do does suggest that they have to maintain at least some ideological and intellectual integrity in what they do, and you are right further that bush v. Gore is such a disastrous example of the Supreme Court in action, in part because the conservatives who were in the majority, betrayed their usual principle, equal protection should be narrowly construed. States should be allowed to maintain their own procedures for running elections. And most notoriously of all it has that sentence which says this case is not a precedent for further citation, which, again, undermines the idea that the justices are acting in a consistent way, but if i can just go back to where i started from, the famous Robert Jackson quote, they are not final because they are infallible, theyre infallible because they are final, that ways the last word, and that what we got, but theyre certainly not immune for criticism for it. Ive given. The plenty. Host who would be your mt. Rushmore of Supreme Court justices . Two conservatives, two liberals . Guest okay. Certainly i would put Robert Jackson among the conservatives. Robert jackson is the period he was on the court, the 40s and 50s it was not as politically polear rises as today but he was on the conservative side. Robert jackson was the best writer ever to appear ever to serve on the Supreme Court and if one wants to see a great piece of american writing that should look up his opinion in barnett vs. West Virginia School board which is about whether children should be required to salute the flag. Its a brilliant piece of writing. He is one conservative. Another conservative, i think, john marshal harland, the younger, who served on the court in the 1950s, and eisenhower appointee, an oldfashioned kind of east coast moderate republican. Another conservative who i admire a great deal. In terms of the liberals, leaving off the justices who are on the court now, you have to pick William Brennan because he was the architect of so many of the liberal decisions of the 60s, and the other is earl warren because even though he was not a great legal scholar, he was someone who had tremendous political sense and understood that in the middle of the cold war, when we were trying to create an alternative model to the soviet union, we could not have segregation in this country anymore. So, whether it was brown v. Board of education, which he wrote, or all the subsequent integration cases, i think warrens political sense as much as his legal, made him an epic figure. Host this is from tom hines in las vegas saying. Under the constitution, could the senate refuse to consent any Supreme Court nominee by a potential eight years of president Hillary Clinton . Guest absolutely. Absolutely. The constitution does not impose any sort of time limit on the requirement the only thing the constitution says is that the power to appoint is with the president , with the advice and consent of the senate. But it does not set a time limit. It does not say that the senate has to consent. They can keep voting down her opponents, they cannot hold hearings. This is, again, one of the many areas where law leads yields to politics, and the only remedy for this sort of recalcitrance on the part of senators comes on election day where voters can say, if youre not going to consider Supreme Court appointments ill vote you out of office but thats the only remedy. President obama or if there is a president clinton, cant go to court and force the senate act. This is a political act which while be revolved by political means. Host bruce in delware. Our next caller. Caller yes. I have a couple of questions about president ial pardons. The constitution gives the president virtually Unlimited Power to grant pardons except in the case of impeachment, impeachment cases. Now, there have been some peremptory pardons, probably the most famous, of course, is fords pardoning of nixon. Before he had actually been indicted or committed any crime, and then we have another example of a group pardon of the draft dodgers by carter. Guest correct. Caller two questions. What prevents the president from pardoning a illegal illenned if he wants to pardon one, pardon five million . One would seem to think he would have the authority to do this according to the constitution. Guest i think youre probably right, although id have to think that through. He could certainly pardon them from any criminal prosecution. Im not sure he could pardon them from deportation. Im not sure if the pardon power extends to the power his control over immigration. One of the issues in the Supreme Court case that where the court deadlocked 44 at the end of the last term was the president saying, i can set my enforcement priorities. I dont its quite clear, i think everyone acknowledges, that the federal governments doesnt have the resources to deport all 11 Million People who are in this country illegally. So the president is saying, i can establish priorities that give some people the security that i will not deport them. That position was not vindicated in the fifth circuit, and the Supreme Court divided 44, so the fifth circuit is the law at least of that circuit. Could the president pathway all pardon all five million . He could certainly pardon as many as he wants of actual crime. I am less certain whether he could pardon the pardon power extended to the issue of deportation. Just so were clear, the one is suggesting he is going to do that but its an interesting question of whether he could or no. Host we have been going three hours. Guest im ready, man. Host let me go back to the point of american heiress. Despite all the discontent, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of robert f. Kent and Martin Luther king and president kennedy, you make the point that the sixs were the sense of the possibility that blacks and whites could live in harmony, all of that dashed in the 1970s in part because of vietnam and the resignation of Richard Nixon. Guest one of the real revelations to me in working on american heiress. The distinction between the sixss and 0ss the 60s and 70s i thought the 60s was a time of tumult and things child out in the 70s. Its true there was terrible tumult in the 60s, assassinations, rites after king king can gos assassination. The watt riots. Detroit. The l. A. Riots. The wattsright in 1965. But it is true, few, in the 60s there was a tremendous sense that the reason people were so agitated is that they expected better of america, and they wanted and believed america could be a better place. What happened in the 70s was this real souring, that you had the summer of love in 1967 in San Francisco. You had the Free Speech Movement in 1965 in berkeley, both of which were characterized bay significant degree of idealism. By the 70s it had all curdled, and when Richard Nixon ended the draft, in the early 70s, that really took out a large part of the middle class kids from the counterculture and protest. They sort of realized they were no longer at risk and went about their lives. And the people who remained were the really hard core, and they were angry and they were violent, and i keep coming back to this statistic that to me is just so astonishes which is in the early and mid1970s there were a thousand political bombings a year in the United States. Try to imagine what it would be like to live in a country with a thousand bombings a year, with our Current Media culture. This was an angry, depressed place. The economy was in lousy shape. You had the energy crisis. You had watergate destroying faith in political institutions. It was just a dark time, and that the hearst kidnapping was both a reflection and a symptom of just how bad things were in america. Host one quick question about the Hearst Family. Do you have a sense what they were worth at its peak and today . Guest what is interesting is that William Randolph hearst, the patriarch who died before patricia was born, knew that his four sons were basically drunken neerdowells, and he did not want his sons to control the business, so he set up a trust that so that outsiders would always control nine of the 13 seats on the hearst trust. So, the Hearst Family have a lot they had a lot of access they had interests in these trusts but they didnt have a lot of access to cash or control of the trust, and in fact, randy hearst had to come up with 2 million and it was very difficult for him. Even though he had access to he theoretically had access to more than that, but he didnt really. Now, in terms of today, theres one key fact about the Hearst Corporation. Its still privately held so we never know exactly how much money the hearsts have but in the late 1970s the professional managers the Hearst Corporation made a decision to invest in 20 of something called the entertainment ask sports programming network. The initials . Host espn. Guest the Hearst Corporation still owns 20 of espn and that has been an incredible cash cow. So even though the hearsts are still sort of a Newspaper Company and sort of a magazine company, both of the businesses that have not thrived in recent decades, the fact that they own a big piece of espn has meant that the company is skill flourishing. Host from tennessee, dennis is next. Go ahead, please. Caller hi. Im a big admirer, sir, and its an honor to talk to you. Guest thank you. Caller three quick questions and then ill hang up and listen. Is secretary clinton is elected do you think she would submit Merrick Garland as the nominee, pick someone else do. Host one at a time. Guest thats a really interesting question and the short answer is i, i dont know. Let me tell you about the political calculations i think are involved. Lets assume, as i think correctly, that the garland nomination will expire at the end without action from the senate come january 20th of next year. Hillary clinton can say to Mitch Mcconnell, you have a choice. You can give me a quick vote on Merrick Garland and get this 63yearold moderate confirmed or i will nominate a 45yearold liberal and we can fight that one out. Now, Hillary Clinton will face a lot of pressure from her more liberal supporters not to nominate garland, but she has a problem, took because if she nominates a real liberal, the First Six Months of her tenure are swept up in this one issue, and she cant get immigration through reform through the senate, cant get Infrastructure Spending so she will have an interest of getting getting gett vacancy off the table. So i think theres a reasonably good possibility she will renominate Merrick Garland if the hoe hopes and expectations and perhaps an actual deal with the senate that the republicans will figure thats lake this 63yearold moderate as opposed to someone who might serve longer. Host dennis, your followup question . Are you still there . Caller yes. Host go ahead. Caller okay. Do you believe in term limits for our Supreme Court justices . Guest absolutely. I think it would be a big imfront. Term limits and or mandatory retirement, and i say that with full confidence that it will absolutely never happen. Because of amending the constitution is very difficult, and theres just no constituency for it but i think the situation is out of whack. We dont believe in 30year tenures for president s. We shouldnt have it for Supreme Court justices. It places the age of the justices so much in as factor. Steven breyer gets asked the question and he said Something Interesting which i also agray with. Says i dont have a problem with term limit odd are mandatory retirement but you have to set up a sim where being a Supreme Court justice is your last job. Youve adopt wont justices angling for Something Else and thats a good point. Think term limits are good idea. It aint going to happen. Host we welcome our listeners on cspan radio, again, follow us on twitter book tv. In depth with a authors, this month, Jeffrey Toobin who has written seven books and counting. Tweets having fun with the mt. Rushmore question. This from a viewer in philadelphia. Would you include john marshal . Guest i certainly would. I guess i didnt include him because, a. , i forgot, and, b. , i dont know if he you asked me for two liberals and two conservatives itch dope know where you count John Marshall in that pantheon . A liberal or conservative . The world was so different in the early 19th century. The man who created judicial review in marbury vs. Madison who helped define the powers of the federal government in mccull lock v. Maryland, its hard to place him in our current political divisions. Host we have a call fromsen San Francisco, youre next. Caller hi, jeffrey, thank you for all your good work which i enjoy. The one time i was unhappy was your article about one of my favorite people, Martha Stewart when i thought you were kind of harsh. There is anything you can say now to make me less unhappy . Guest well, look. Host what did you say . Guest i said she was guilty as hell of lying about her Insider Trading situation. The crazy thing about Martha Stewarts whole scenario was that if from day one she had simply said, you know, i made a mistake, i was thinking about a lot of different things, sold my stock after hearing this news from my friend, this whole saga would have been just a minor footnote. Martha stewart is an extraordinarily entrepreneur. She crated this not just a business but an industry, and she is just an enormously talented and forceful person. Unfortunately, that forceful personality led her to deny the completely obvious fact she engaged in Insider Trading and she wound up getting in so much more trouble than she should have. If she just said, yeah issue did it, let me pay a fine, none of us would even remember it here today but frankly, out of arrogance, she stuck with this ridiculous story, and wound up in worst trouble. That doesnt diminish the fact that Martha Stewart is an enormous force of nature and one of the great entrepreneurs of the era. You graduate prod hillary virginia Law Enforcement al been at new rock guest never an intern. Host you checked for u. S. Court of appeals judge. Guest i did. J. Edward almost bard, an eisenhower appointee. Host you worked for independent council lawrence walsh. You started out at staff writer for the the new yorker, worked at abc, and now at cnn. Guest you left out a very important part. I was an assistant u. S. Attorney in brooklyn, which was a very happy and proud part of my career. Host which taught you what about the law . Guest oh, so much. Its just wall about home and how they react, and that you can read all the appellate decisions you want, but until you look jurors in the eye and try to persuade them that something happened or didnt happen, you dont really understand how the law works. And what i love about being a trial lawyer and i had 11 trials in three years which i felt so lucky to have that you got to speak in english. They dont want to hear moreovers and wherevers. You have to speak to jurors in normal english. Host to them north at them. Guest to them and not at them and not and its just a great education in real life, and also just i really appreciated the spectacle of what goes on in an american courtroom. This is why i think i was really much more destined for journalism than for law because what i really liked about being an assistant u. S. Tomorrow was something a lot of my colleagues liked to avoid which was arraignment duty. Arraignment duty was when you got people when the were first arrested and learned who they were, and where they came from, and what their backgrounds were when they trying to get out on bail so they would tell you their story. It was just so amazing. The people who would swallow condoms full of cocaine or heroin and try to smuggle it into kennedy airport, which is part of our jurisdiction. The people who got arrested for food stamp fraud. The people the frauds in various communities. Ponzi schemes. I just loved the spectacle of it all. So many hoff my colleagues were like im going to do justice and i want to get the bad guys, and i wanted to get the bad guys, finishing but i like the skeen. Host you sound lie perry mason. Guest i wasnt someone who was like like wanted to win obviously i wanted to win but perry mason was all about, like, the last second victory in a courtroom and i was like, check this out. This is crazy. Love this. And that is a different attitude than a lot of other prosecutors. Host ivan from texas, go ahead, please. Caller calling about i love america, man. This is one flag country and i see other flags flying in america, and its not right, and im border but saw the people coming in but make them legal and pay their taxes and stuff, because theyre taking from our healthcare, theyre sending money back through walmart to mexico, and it makes our dollar weeker and its okay as long as youre a legal american and speak american, this is one country and god bless all of us. We have to stand up. We lost ore morels and when a policeman arrests you, you supposed to stand there, not run off and fight the man. Thats what we have so many problems, and one guy in irving, texas, spins a clock to they thought it was a bomb. Now theyre going to try to serve irving. Irving cant afford to be sued. They can barely understood the police department. Host ivan can thank you for the call you. Can hear the issues of the campaign. Guest absolutely. And i think we are going to spend a long time in this country thinking about how donald trump became a major party nominee. Remember, it is worth noting that the only president elected in modern American History who was not an elected official was Dwight Eisenhower who did a little thing called run world war ii in europe. He somewhats not a public official but he sure was a public servant. How we got to someone like donald trump with no record at all of public service, to be a major party nominee, is a really interesting, complex story i dont pretend to understand but i think this callers unhappiness about immigration, not just as immigration per se as a problem in and of itself but as a symbol, metaphor for disorder in the whole country, and for the law of what america used to be. I dont think you can understate the importance of Donald Trumps slogan. Make America Great again. Like to go back to a time, never specified exactly when america was better than it is now. A different, calmer, more orderly place. Thats a real concern of a lot of people, and i dont think its enough people to get him elected president but its a lot of people, and their concerns have to be heard, too. Host final question. Why do you enjoy writing. Guest oh, why die i like telling stories. I like telling i like i recognize that people have a lot on their plates in their lives. Theyre distracted. Theyve got their phones, and if i can tell them a story that gets them to sit down and read for an hour, for several nights in a row, and say, this is unbelievable, this is amazing, the way i do when im a reader. When i write what i want to read. And i love to read. And i love a good story. Especially a nonfiction story. And i view it as a challenge but also a tremendous privilege to be paid to tell Great Stories that are also true. I dont have the imagination to make them up. But im pretty got at finding the things that actually did happen. Host your first book in 1992, opening arguments, Young Lawyers first taste, u. S. V. Oliver north and then the run of his life, the people v. O. J. Simpson in 1996. A vast conspiracy, the real story of the sex scandal that nearly brought down the president. Came out in october of 2000. Too close to call, 36 day battle to decide the 2000 election which came out in 2001. The nine, inside the secret world honor Supreme Court from 2007, the oath, the obama white house, and the Supreme Court, from 2012, and your latest book, american heiress, he wild saga of the kidnapping, crimes and trials of patty hereto. Jeffrey toobin few for pending three hours on cspan. Guest what a treat. Thank you for the terrific callers and emails. Host come back anytime