1960 to the present. The change good afternoon. I am in the a and i am here with gail collins. I dont think i have to introduce everyone. She was the columnist for the New York Times, among many illustrious points in her career, and time at the end for questions. I want to start by saying this panel, i titled it, it is called dancing backwards and come from joe russells house, dont know if you remember bill russells house. He was in the nixon administration, and his wife was a policymaker and woman of some fluids. It occurred to me when i was 13 and going to Getting School that dancing school, and what you have to dance backward all their lives. Speaking about Hillary Clinton i knew we would get to Hillary Clinton. Host i want to start with journalism, you started in the early 70s, you have said you did not have to break down the walls, and a few years ahead of you have taken their backss coronation style lands gotten in, started covering the connecticut state house. Had to be mostly men. Guest she was sort of an and peculiar way, she didnt bond in the capital. The fact that she was there, did make a little more conscious. We are allowed to say four letter word which host you are encouraged. Guest several occasions, i had them all. And personal legislators for them. They were interviewed, say fuck a lot and im not sure im allowed to say this and i can thinking this is one of the barriers i am breaking down and feel comfortable. It was never it was also humble, no power point legislative journalists you had to fight against. The old guys were very conservative but nothing we wanted so it didnt matter. Host i want to tell a story about working at the wall street journal. One of my predecessors was covering one of the first women reporters at the journal, she was covering the chemical industry. Imagine how many men there were in the top angelas echelon of the chemical industry, she would be the only woman and a guy would get up and say i have a great joke but i cant tell it because ellen is here. Guest ellen is ruining the joke. Host you are not allowed to say go the fuck ahead. That was a great political education for you. A good way for a political reporter to start is in the state house. And journalism careers, and thinking about it. And journalism said they pretend to know about you but all they know is how can i get a job, you got to pick that you really love. And it is a good chance that by the end you wont get a career at the New York Times and if you spend 5 or 10 years, the career you were imagining, to get yourself in a position where you are forced to write constantly, and maniacally right which when we did the news service, the news service, trish hall, the oped editor of the New York Times, never made money with the news service in other ways. We had 35 papers and they were all expecting every other day updates. We were writing 5, 10, 20 stories at night and they werent Great Stories at all. Just having to write so much all the time broke down the barrier between thinking and writing, thinking about the basics it is easier to make it fancy to enjoy your self which it works out well despite the fact we never made money at all but it was a good plan. Host you were writing on a manual typewriter. Guest we started with a manual typewriter, we were talking about this the other night at dinner. I was there for the transition between manual typewriters and computers and word processors. I really do think the texture of the writing changed when we changed the ways we inputted it and became much less dense, clearer, more crystalline. Less thoughtful, less deep, dont know what it meant when it was different but it was different, the sentences got shorter and punchier as paragraphs got smaller, it changed again, people are writing prose on their cell phones. It is changing the way people read and think about was way off your subject. Host not at all. Lets skip i know you worked at several newspapers, you mentioned them in your early talk but i dont want to go through each of them. What is the general drift in your career . How did you move from the connecticut state house or connecticut news service. You can get all kinds of small gigs, because nobody else is doing it. Faugh so we had a normal suburban and day had antiques stores. Were h they just wanted to cover the antiques. That wasnt substantial but tim was there. And in your times finally asked me for the of regional coverage so i started to write for them. So they asked if i wanted to come down and apply for the job they said we could get this for you. I was excited and the phone rang again it was a strange voice that said you dont know me but i and a copy editor dont do this. What ever you do it is terrible. There will never let you write because they need copyeditors youll be trapped. That is why i am leaving dont do with. So i did not do it laugh laugh laugh then somebody told me there was an opening which is now going bankrupt. So my career goes from one almost bankrupt place to another. Then went to the daily news. I had no idea when they had a Business Task when they hired me that i got to be a columnist at the daily news there you had your first counter nerve with donald trump . He started the same time i started in a way i did realestate story of very rich and powerful old guy his wife was famous later Leona Helmsley only the of Little People pay taxes. [laughter] but had he ever thought about using your wealth expertise to create housing for the up for . He said what the fuck would i want to do that for . El. And gas in the same question and he paused and said and this is why he is president he said, would i would like is to have agencies like jerry lewis as muscular dystrophy that i could cure it would be my disease i was thinking of kiddies and he went through all of the disease is why was there which one would be called for him to have been ever did pick one. [laughter] it is only gotten better but that is when he was going through his marla maplesin stage having an affair with her like it was the end of the world pet the weird part about it is he has an affair with a huge story pdf and he is a Publicity Team but they are encouraging as to write more stories about the affair. They never said dont is in paris saying that was this thing so when he announced i was on vacation they calledno me back from vacation because donald trump was leaving his wife my job was to make fun of donald trump and he would defend him. That is not the best sex i ever at headline but maybe that is why he liked that so much. And now he is president. [laughter] p you do to columns per week give us the day in the life a of the tuesday. Obviously you think about it all week steven catlike college days by then i have an idea of what i will do n digest come in and i talk to people he tried to feel out with the other columnists are writing about c. Wright the same thing and then to coordinate nick is my partner on the page on the others a paper he is great about that. Nferen we thought we would write about the press conference then he said eye of not doing it because there is as big breakthrough of my work with the entire child sex trafficking i will do that. Andi that is the great thing about nicky is perfectly aware that if he goes to the sudan to risk his life in almost gets killed easily berries to weeks to write about children dying he will not get nearly as much traction we know exactly how many clicks we get it then is if he you falls out of bed to talk about donald trone the but he does that anyway and he made a very easy for me. The the matter how many errors a matter how many stupid you have to write a correction a keep that up there forever that lives on in memory so when is important not to of the stupidest correction but cobody believes that. That third paragraph does not make sense. There is a copy adder to make sure you did not libel anybody libel anybody in the grammar is accurate. I sent mine to dance with the husband to read it and tells me what is boring and what to fix, he has a good way of doing it so i dont get too suicidal and then we are done and it is a happy day. Go home and start over again which it is part of life. I used to work with someone who wrote a column every single day. At the post he did it every single day and kept asking us how we could do it twice a week because it seemed so hard to him. He said i feel like there was such a bar. One of my two columns of the week, have to make it great, have to make it fantastic. There will be another one tomorrow. I will be fine. I want to get to hillary through the back door. That is, tell us a little about the book you are working on. It is a history of older women in america and i thought this audience what is an older woman you one of the interesting as i have been going along and back in the 1600s when there were no women anywhere, if were still menstruating that week you were a primary topic, 50yearold women coming off of the book, 27 men coming after them, me, me, me, me, the idea when you got old was a different kind of thing and once there were enough women in the cities where you didnt have an economic point, 24 was really over the hill, you were done, as wrapped up and sitting on a rocking chair or something so it depends where you are. I was talking this week to gary trudeau. I try following different women, have not followed hillary yet and not sure if that will work out or not but joni caucus, do you remember joni caucus from the doonesbury cartoon . She started off as an older woman who ran away from home and joined the crew and applied to law school and she was 38 and she was exactly 38 because the law school sent applications and he had to make up a name because he followed through and she was accepted at berkeley and gave the commencement address and went through her life but when waiting for her applications to come back and find out where she was going shes Walking Around in the cartoon saying nobody is going to want a 38yearold middleaged woman, too old, gary said it is true, cant deny it. She retired in washington, she is still around, worked with Elizabeth Warren for a while and retired in washington. Anyway, we have been talking, i have been thinking about hillary as i have been going how much the fact is an woman hurt her in this campaign . I know the exact answer to that question. The fact that hillary was 68 years old would have been a. The envelope . That has only gotten worse. Do you read your email you has gotten considerably worse . Guest i presume this person wanted to communicate in some way. I get a lot of letters. A good come on to get me to open the letter would be to put liberal pitch on the cover, seemed weird but the stuff that goes with columns at the end of the colonists, there is a team that goes through it and screams it the they dont take negative commentss but they take out all the racist stuff and homophobic stuff, the kind of thing that makes you want to shoot your self when you read things on the web so i miss all of that and i do read a lot of it but i have to tell you, if you think this is not true, we try the colonists to intervene in those discussions what people are writing in and i tried it for a while and came to realize, when people write in about your column they are having a discussion among themselves about whatever topic you brought up and if you get in there, you are interrupted and getting in the way. At the daily news in particular, seems very eager for people to get to you you dont feel a decline in civility . Guest there is a decline in celebrity civility but im not a target. Some of the younger women who are online a lot, ungodly horrible. It is not a problem that has been terrible for me. Host is there a way to put the genie back in the bottle . Are we on a 1way course, one way route . Guest do with the times do, somebody screening this stuff before it goes up and becomes available to the general public, to push civility back. You cannot be saying wildly sexist it is crazy and ruins everything when people are trying to have a discussion and dialogue but that costs money. Host you will cover the inauguration next week. I always wondered, what do you do when you cover and inauguration . Arent you one of the people standing on the street watching . Guest wandering around the parties when i went to the obama one back 2008, did the same thing, wandered around and watched people doing stuff and watched the speech and wandered around some more. I was struck by how much it reminded me of woodstock. It was like all these happy people who had no idea where they were going, just wandering around being happy, glad they are there, they wont get to the event ever but just happy and everything is good will this one be like that . Host i wanted also, you talked about this, i wanted you to talk about it again because i found it so moving and interesting, gail was asked, as were the other people on the panel, about a book you thought made a difference in maybe there perception of politics for the political world or they knew made significant changes the way people thought about political or social terms. I would like you to do that again. I picked uncle toms cabinet. Looking back at history as seen through the eyes of women who went through a period that lasted forever for all of western to the outside order and women did the Domestic Order and women were not supposed to mess in any way with politics. In the 1800s as the media, there was a lot of writing to housewives, they became a good market and there was a lot of extolling of housewives as the heart of the family, conscience of the family, only be the family, not talking about the outside world but the total purchase beloved part of the family and Harriet Beecher stowell in wrinkles ons cabinet figured out a way to speak to women, to say thing the slavery, is about family, letting young girls be ravaged by slave owners. It is about mothers being separated from their children, old people being left alone because their families are not allowed to help them she framed the whole thing in terms of the stuff that women were supposed to be in charge of and that brought women for the first time into the political scene. They went crazy over abolition in the north. They admitted things they auctioned off, they ran around collecting petitions, send them to john quincy adams, the only person who would take them and they drove everybody else nuts and legislators went crazy and she did it. It was her book that made that happen, you can just see this clear hawk there and one writer did it. Host when will we be seeing the memoir . The gail collins memoir . Guest i am getting tired of memoirs. It is not the first thing on my list. Host how about fiction . Guest i tried doing fiction, when im writing about actual real so other people are in charge, i am making a pattern that stuff with older women to interview, nobody who was older is still alive by the 1950s. I did ruth bader ginsburg, talked to her again and looking forward to go along. There are so many older women out there, very exciting i have to say. Host i want to circle around to statehouses where you started and i know it has been a subject of interest to you all your career and i want to ask if you think for those of us who are terrified and anxious and worried about the next 4 years, shall we pay attention, do we do you recommend guest the super passion of mine, i cannot tell you, states are where all the stuff happens, real stuff that affects your life. The entire obamacare thing, because states made different judgments whether to implement it when it first came out. It is all about the states, the states decide what your taxes are, states decide how your schools, everything starts with the states and the state seldom let local governments have enough power, the states are the critical thing. Nobody pays attention, whatever they do they do by themselves and fewer and fewer newspapers and other forms of media are now bothering to subsidize a reporter to sit there and cover this stuff. Many states, four or five people in the press corps and that he did and they are the only people except the lobbyists who are watching what these guys do and it is getting tinier and tinier and tinier and tinier you have a project you would like to do, do something, cover State Government to hire somebody to cover State Government. It is so important which the connecticut state news bureau, i sold it which was ridiculous. The big banner over the desk in the press room, connecticut states bureau. And nobody has used it. Nobody covers i am babbling on but im passionate about the subject. We now can take questions which are there microphones there and there. You have had the privilege of watching the evolution of journalism from the typewriter to the computer to journalists being revered to now dealing with the fake news and tweets of the headlines and i heard a lot of people lately saying i never saw this coming. Could you put on or pull out your prints crystal ball and tell me where you see the future of journalism going based on what we are seeing today . Guest that is a really good question. If we knew where the future of journalism was people would be investing in it. Thing we have been discovering at the times is within the confusion that is the new media, there is a market for stuff you can rely on. After the election, our circulation popped up 100,000. It was stupendous and suddenly people thought i want to keep an eye on this stuff but i want to find a place i can do it, reliable reporting, not going to make stuff up and there will be somebody censoring the letters, calling somebody a liberal bench. That is part of it. I think people worry about that, they ask about it all the time, a future for the New York Times. I think theres a future for that kind of media. Beyond that, how twitter is going to become a debit is this has been going on 20 years now, the last ten, still, nobody found a way to make this pay, providing content does not pay. They believe it will, they invest in it and invest in it more but so far it hasnt happened. When that moment comes that people figure out how to make content pay, they know what it is going to look like but right now if i knew i would buy it, that is what it is. Dont know if you heard that today, congressman priebus discussed moving the White House Press office out of the white house. Obviously that is a concern, the position of the press during this administration. The people i see most vocal about our people like dan rather and bill moyers who, thank god, are not quite retired. I am wondering whether there is any unity among the press to avoid going under and submitting to what i going to be efforts to divide and conquer. We were talking about that the other night. When the cnn reporter was trying to this nobody listen to this guy, i am spartacus which is not in the tradition and jumping up and saying answer that question which that come and partly because of competition. The White House Press corps offices used to be stupendously stupendously important. And wanted to the back offices to talk to people and see what is going very little of that has happened in the last 20 years or so. Washington ai guess it would be more difficult. The problem is that there arent any press conferences anymore. The things you go to are much a but all that needs to be worked out and changed. There has to be pressure in the administration to have regular press conferences. There has to be pressure a [applause] and you have to have a press secretary that goes out there every day answers questions from the press. You have to do these normal things weve always done. Not because any individual is that critical but because it is a team that reinforces the basic belief that this is a critical part of governing being open to the media. They appreciate. You will be covering the inauguration. You also become the womens marks the next day . Yes. Clatskanie discussed the attitudes to taking his feelings to the street. Everybody is gone. I dont know any reported that is not going to cover these womens markets. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. It has been hard for me to get my finger on how to organize this effort is. And where we will end up. The protest in general has always been that once you have a protest and in march you have to wind up somewhere. Left not and then do something or say something. I would like to see that part. It reminds me back in 1970, betty acalled for a womens march. Sort of off the top of her head. In august and am going to go to central park and just walked on the sidewalk for a while. She got to central park and they were all these women there. And she just yelled, take to the streets and they did take to the streets and it was huge. And it just knocks people out. And it made a difference. It changed the sense of empowerment that people had. Even though athere will be marches all over the country. I hear from people everywhere im sure there will be get some down here too. Will there be one here in key west . The one in key west athere will be reporters and there will be people sending pictures. Im really looking forward to this it will be amazing. I will see you then. I think we have time for one more question. Okay. Speaking of the importance of having marches and rallies and up somewhere. From your point view,hat are some of the issues that women and all of us should be working for and organizing around . Is a great question. Right now on my gosh, stuff is going to happen very fast. And it really is important for people to some extent to pick anything and do that. Because otherwise you end up in a fetal position under your bed and he will not do anything. So pick one thing. Planned parenthood will be under attack, abortion rights in general will be under attack. Climate change, Public School education if you are interested in that. Well have the secretary of education for the Public Schools, it is incredible. There are all these issues, after the march apick one. And then really dig into it. Find out what you can do. You will feel more empowered and things will get done. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] we have a 20 minute break and then we will come right back here for robert caro and Brenda Wineapple. The 20 17th key west literary seminar is held annually in florida. Starting out a conversation between biographer robert caro and historian Brenda Wineapple on writing history. Hello this afternoon, hi. Thank you for coming. Good to see you all. I think we need no introduction or at least robert caro who i hope you have read all of his books and as enamored of them as i am. We are here because we are enamored to talk about writing. Not so much the subject matter per se but why writing matters. And we both feel, as im sure you do, that writing matters quite a bit. How it matters, is really a task for the writer to come to terms with. How are you going to get people to read, to turn the page, to be as enthralled wiou
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