>> rose: welcome to the broadcast. we begin this evening with a look at the c.i.a. following the tragedy that happened to c.i.a. operatives in afghanistan. we talk with mark mazzetti of the "new york times," bob baer, former c.i.a. agent, and david ignatius of the "washington post." >> this was the in the minds of the jordanians and the c.i.a. sort of a gold-plated sort. a guy who could get them access to al qaeda in ways they've never seen since 9/11. >> it's going to cause the c.i.a. to pull back, the c.i.a. in afghanistan and iraq is going to second guess every person who knocks on the door. we call these walk ins like this dr. w.a.c. w.a.c.. our intelligence is going to get worse. >> this was a well planned and subtle operation. the notion that al qaeda is so much on the run now that it can't operate, it can't hit us which you were hearing over the last year from some intelligence officials have been clearly shown to be wrong. >> rose: we conclude with jason epstein, well-known editor, well-known writer about food. we'll talk about books and food. >> i would sit on the wood box next to the stove to keep warm and watch my grandmother take pies out of the oven and stews and everything she was making and i felt safe and cozy in that situation. the wind was blowing outside, the snow was piling up outside the house and i don't have to be anywhere but in the kitchen. so it made a profound impression on me which i've never got over. i've always associated with safety, comfort, warmth. >> rose: a look at the future of the c.i.a. and a look back at books and food. next. if you've had a coke in the last 20 years, ( screams ) you've had a hand in giving college scholarships... and support to thousands of our nation's... most promising students. ♪ ( coca-cola 5-note mnemonic ) captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: we begin tonight with an ongoing look at the united states intelligence community. over the weekend c.i.a. director leon panetta publicly defended his agent industry criticism over last month's suicide attack in afghanistan that killed seven of his employees. in an editorial in the "washington post," panetta dismissed claims that agents had practiced poor trade craft. the public defense came days after president obama acknowledged security missteps that led to al qaeda's attempt to bring down a u.s. airliner on christmas day. in addition, the military's highest-ranking intelligence officer in afghanistan released a critical self-assessment last week. major general michael flynn wrote that analysis was unable to understand and answer fundamental questions about the war. joining me now from washington, david ignatius, he's a columnist in for the "washington post." he also covers the intelligence community and writing novels about it. in berkeley, california, bob baer, former c.i.a. officer. in new york, mark mazzetti of the "new york times." he covers national security issues for the newspaper. i'm pleased to have all of them here to talk about this important subject. david, you and i have had many conversations about the c.i.a. and about c.i.a. activities, including fictional coming out of your mind and also what's often based on things that you know from the real life. tell me what we now know about what happened in afghanistan to those c.i.a. agents and what we now know about the al qaeda operative and how he fooled so many people. >> the c.i.a., charlie, is still piecing together the details of this, but at this point, they have a fairly clear picture. this was a classic case of deception, this jordanian, al-balawi, was well known publicly as an islamic radical. after he was arrested by the jordanian intelligence service and was flipped, was turned to become a cooperating double agent, was sent into pakistan and began feeding the jordanians and the c.i.a. very tantalizing material. i'm told that he sent a detailed assessment sdz of our predator missile attacks on al qaeda operatives in the tribal areas in pakistan. he sent photographs of himself with high-level al qaeda operatives thereby establishing his bona fides as a very effective double agent. so on the day that he came to this c.i.a.s may be in khost in eastern afghanistan, there was a large group of americans and one jordanian waiting for him with greatest excitement because it was hoped that this jordanian double agent could take them, could give them information that would allow the targeting of ayman al-zawahiri, the number two official in al qaeda. he arrives in a car, the car is taken to a place the agency says where he was going to be patted down. as he's getting out of the car with three c.i.a. security officers near him, he reaches into his jacket, the c.i.a. officers tell them to stop that and at that point the bomb detonates. the bomb was so powerful, so sophisticateed that c.i.a. people who were there waiting for him 50 feet away, some distance away, were among those killed. the three security officers closest to him were obviously immediately killed. what's disturbing as you look at this, i think, are two things. first, the breakdown in basic trade craft, the basic ways in which the c.i.a. tries to secure itself against the dangers of this kind of double agent who turns out to be a triple agent coming back against you. and secondly what it shows us about the sophistication of al qaeda. this was an incredibly well-planned and subtle operation. the notion that al qaeda is so much on the run now that it can't operate, it can't hit us which you were hearing over the last year from some intelligence officials clearly has been shown to be wrong. >> rose: bob? >> oh, i think it was a serious mistake on the part of the c.i.a. you do bring informants behind the wire but only to bring them through metal detectors first, through a scanner. the c.i.a.'s established procedure over the years, i used to use in the beirut, you walk them through the embassy in one gate and out the other, they're clean. if they've got any metal on them it's picked up and they're patted down by the local employees. the fact that there were 13 people standing around waiting for an informant breaks all the rules. informants are met one on one. i have a series of problems with the fact that the base was... there was no linguist case officers that spoke pashtun, dari or arabic. i have a problem with outsourcing our intelligence to jordan. and i could go on and on and on. so you put the michael flynn report that comes a couple days after this in context and we have a real problem in pakistan. we just... you know, intelligence is bad, as the military says. >> rose: so what do you say leon panetta's op-ed piece? >> oh, hes has been lutely had to say that. i'm so pessimistic about the c.i.a. i'm just wondering whether it shouldn't be reorganized. you know, take it down the studs and rebuild it. it is in bad shape. >> rose: what would you do to rebuild it? >> you know, you're going to have to get back to basics. the british taught us intelligence in world war ii and we're going to have to go back to those basic which is ever intelligence service in the world runs by them and we just don't anymore. the service was deprofessionalized over the years and right through the bush years as well, too. >> rose: so it's just gone from one administration to the other. i guess back to... i don't know what point you would suggest it started. >> you know, i'm a bit of an old timer. i hate to say that. but when i was in the c.i.a. we had people that went through the operational training course working in high-threat areas. there was a mentoring system that people went through. but never would we ever consider letting people who had not had training and experience meet an important informant like this. it would never have happened. i think people on the seventh floor should be fired that let this happen. >> rose: david, you wrote the c.i.a. needs better trade craft with its contract and that the c.i.a. and its allies need to lift their game. so you and bob seem to be saying the same thing. >> well, i think bob said it well. i think over the years in part because the c.i.a. has been so battered by public criticism, both parties seem to agree it makes sense to take apart our intelligence services for some reason. but it's had an effect. with one good thing that i learned today that director panetta at the c.i.a. is gathering a high-level group within the agency to look at what went wrong. they're going to look at three things: one, who was this jordanian double or triple agent. what do we know about when he went bad, how this deception worked. second, what do we know about what went wrong at security on the base. bob went through the basics but the agency will do that much more thoroughly and most important, what can the agency learn about trade craft in these war zones in afghanistan, in pakistan, in iraq that will help them going forward. and i think fact that panetta's doing this is one sign of trying to learn some lessons from this. >> rose: i'm going come back to what general flynn said but let me go to this issue. tell me what you know, a, about the man who set off the bomb, the double agent. and, b, the c.i.a. operatives and officials that were killed and the significance of their loss. >> the person who set off the bomb, as david said, is a jordanian doctor who had developed a persona on the web known as one of the sort of top five jihadi web writers, very influential character. worked in some of the palestinian refugee camps in jordan and spent some time in a jordanian prison. it's believed that during the time in a jordanian prison he was... the jordanians thought turned, flipped to work for them. and then set off for afghanistan and pakistan and after some period of time got in contact with the jordanian tell intense service who then started feeding this information to the c.i.a. so this was in the minds of the jordanians and the c.i.a. a sort of gold-plated sort. a guy who could get them access to al qaeda in ways that they'd never seen since 9/11. and as both david and bob said, this was... you know, a guy who could maybe deliver the mother lode. he could get them al-zawahiri and maybe bin laden. so you saw this eagerness to make this happen. the c.i.a. said the number-two official from... their number-two official in afghanistan from kabul to khost... >> rose: okay. talk about who those people were and what they did and how central they were to the present c.i.a. effort against al qaeda. >> it's a mix of people as you would see at any kind of c.i.a. base. you had security guards, some c.i.a. security guards, some... >> rose: private contractors. >> blackwater, now known as z corporation. you had analysts who would be the ones who would sort of get to... get some of the intelligence report analyze them sort of run it through the systems and then send it back to washington. you had a... the base chief, the person in charge out in khost who was a woman in her 40s, a mother of three, a c.i.a. veteran who had been part of the c.i.a.'s bin laden unit before september 11 known as alex station. and was sent to afghanistan last year as part of this sort of surge the c.i.a. has had in afghanistan. to sort of do the type of thing, to find the type of people, that they were hoping to find on december 30 at that meeting. >> rose: it is said that she knew more about al qaeda than anybody else in the c.i.a. or at least was in that... >> she had the sort of institutional knowledge that she'd been studying these names, studying these connections, studying these networks for at least a decade. and so it was an institutional loss to the c.i.a. in the sense of their knowledge about al qaeda. there were some other fairly senior people as well who were lost in the blast. >> rose: bob, pick up on that. what's the c.i.a. lost because of this tragedy? >> it's lost the expertise, there's no doubt about it. let's don't mistake about it, people are heroic serveing in khost, but it's going cause the c.i.a. to pull back, the c.i.a. in afghanistan and iraq is going to second guess every person who knocks on the door, we call these walk-ins, like this dr. al-balawi. they're going to pull back in afghanistan, our intelligence is going to get worse than it is now. you're going to... there's going to be second guessing and the c.i.a. top of this is being investigated for renditions and torture which all makes it very difficult to be an effective intelligence operation. and so this was a huge loss. >> rose: david... go ahead, david, comment on that but also, david, the jordanians lost, who was also killed by the bomb, someone who was close to the king as i understand it. >> he was a member of the royal family, i think a cousin of the king. he was, in effect, the case officer handling the doctor al-balawi. >> rose: didn't the king meet his body when it came back? >> he did. the king and queen both attended the funeral. it was very unusual. one thing i would just note. i think over the next several months without any announcement, any notice, you're going to see some operations by the jordanians, by their intelligence service to avenge this. they feel embarrassed, they're angry and they're pretty effective in these battlegrounds i hope bob is wrong about the agency pulling back even more. and part of why this happened was that the agency doesn't like to meet sources in these war zones outside the wire. it has people coming into the green zone in baghdad, it has people come into these bases. and the bob is right and that gets even worse, that's a problem. >> maybe, maybe people will look at this and say we do need to lift our game. we need to take this more seriously, we need the country to back it more than the country does now. panetta's people are talking about being more aggressive. certainly in the last week you've seen a very, very aggressive predator strike in the tribal areas against al qaeda and the taliban. i assume that's meant to be read as striking back hard. but if... bob knows that place better than almost anybody. if his diagnosis is that it's going to contract even more, move even more into a shell, that's scary. >> rose: mark, can you add more? >> well, at least publicly and privately the c.i.a. is saying we're not pulling back, it's pedal to the metal, we will see, time will tell what actually happens. but as david just said about the predator strikes. we've seen... since the attack alone, at least i think five predator strikes, which is a... even by the rate of... in the last year or so is a pretty accelerated rate. and so they are going after targets whether it's just for retribution or whether they just all of a sudden got good intelligence, who knows. but this is... i mean, this is c.i.a. war right now. it's one of these things you have to keep... you just keep shining a light on to some extent because the c.i.a. is running a war in pakistan. and they are launching predator strikes at least once a week and it's sort of a fascinating period right now of these sort of paramilitary operations in the c.i.a. >> rose: it was said david... or bob, that this particular doctor was motivated by the death of the taliban leader in pakistan which had been killed by a drone if i remember. go ahead. >> it's a remarkable video in which the jordanian doctor, the suicide bomber, is sitting with the current head of the pakistani taliban and... in which this man speaks of his desire to avenge the death by drone attack of meshud. it has been believed that the predator attacks has been extremely successful in putting these people on the run, taking out key leaders. the obama administration, whatever else you can say about their foreign policy, has been extremely aggressive in using the predators in pakistan. and they thought they were having some affect. obviously even if these people are on the run, they're not so much on the run that they can't plan extremely subtle and damaging operations. but i think that those predator attacks will continue. i saw today in the pakistani perez for the first time a very aggressive defense of the predator attacks written by a pakistani journalist. that amazed me. so if you see more of that, that might be important. >> rose: you think that was reflective of what? a change of mind about the pakistanis? >> the pakistanis are suffering suicide bomb attacks every other day in one of their cities. they are facing a real problem. about they've sent their army into the swat valley in the knot they've sent their army into south was in the west. and they're still getting pounded. ordinary pakistanis are really getting afraid of this threat and they're looking for ways to deal with it. >> david, i think to sad something... you're absolutely right. but what scares me pakistan is we're getting in the middle of a civil war. by a tuul las me sood is not a member of al qaeda, the c.i.a. apparently killed him and what we're seeing here is a blood feud which is going to be taking out on the c.i.a. and our troops in afghanistan. i'm having a really hard time with this administration and the last administration defining what victory in afghanistan is, what will it look like when we're actually winning and if we just expand this war to all the pashtuns and keep on hitting people with predators by the way, the kill radius on is very... you're killing a lot of people that are innocent as well. so we have to worry that we're not facing some sort of conrad's heart of darkness when they sthel jungle. >> rose: bob, let me understand. are you saying they should not have killed meshud. >> he's killed a lot of pakistanis but is that our war? >> he's charged with the responsibility of killing benazir bhutto, right? >> yes, but is that our war, though? that's the question. are we going to night the tribal areas in pakistan? and can we? i don't think we have enough soldiers to, frankly. >> rose: let me just put back on the table what general flynn said which was who i understand to be as close to general mcchrystal so that this is what he said. "eight years into the war in afghanistan, the u.s. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. having focused overwhelming majority of brain power on insurgent groups, the vast intelligence apparatus is unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which u.s. and allied forces operate and the people they seek to persuade. now, he may be saying in his report they're doing too much of what these c.i.a. operatives were doing and not enough of understanding more about the taliban in afghanistan. is that what you read him saying david? >> i think he is saying that, i think that there's a real debate now about missions of the c.i.a. the core mission is to collect foreign intelligence. to have spies who steal secrets. there's an additional role which we call covert action which ranges from paying off political parties, bribing politicians, to the kind of paramilitary covert action that you see with the predator strikes and other operations. and the c.i.a., i think, is being pulled in two different directions. what flynn was saying is that the thing you look to an intelligence agency for, the texture, the feel for a place, the balanced judgment, the linguistic and culture understanding really is not forthcoming here. it's kind of broken down. and what i see when i go to afghanistan and i went a number of times last year is the that the military interestingly is developing those skills that flynn says are looking in our intelligence agency. there's an interesting imbalance now. the military has people who are knowledgeable who increasingly have that feel on their fingertips and i think military is increasingly frustrated that its intelligence partner, the c.i.a., isn't at the same level of sophistication or intensity. >> he's absolutely right. the problem is the c.i.a.'s locked up behind the wire and you've got military patrols going out and they are collecting on-the-ground intelligence which is really putting the c.i.a. in a disadvantage and it's become in a sense a minor player in afghanistan. >> rose: well, one... i mean, one other aspect of this, though which we saw at khost was that was developing this network of bases in eastern and southern afghanistan. they hope will solve this problem, get them to the field to be able to not only be more relevant for the military but be able to develop sources for their ultimate missions which to get top taliban and al qaeda leaders. so places like coast, places like outside of kandahar, the only way they're going to be able to develop these sources is to get out of the embassy in kabul and develop these sort of network of fire bases. now, we saw in khost a tragedy that may or may not have been able to have been averted. however, it is a sign that they are trying at least to get out more. now, they may still be bringing people on to the fire bases but they are actually getting out away from the embassies. now... but it is to your point about general flynn, there is this real tension right now in afghanistan between what the military is doing from a counterinsurgency point of view and the counterterrorism hunting al qaeda, hunting the taliban that primarily is what the c.i.a. has to be doing right now. >> rose: but i've asked that question of general mcchrystal and others. they always say there's no reason they can't do both counterinsurgency and counterterrorism at the same time. right, bob? >> they can do both. but i'd like to go back to what mark said. i mean, i presh qlat the c.i.a. is doing keeping bases out there and having a lot of people out there. but, again, it goes back to the language, how many pashtun speakers are there? and what struck me at khost, i think i know almost everybody there. there were no pashtun speakers or even darrry speakers and in that part of afghanistan if you don't speak the language it's virtually impossible to get to the populace. and the military i've seen internally is complaining that most of their foreign language specialists speak darr i rather than pashtun which... you know, this is same problem the british had in the three wars they fought in afghanistan. they had very few pashtun speakers. >> rose: it sounds like blocking and tackling in football to me. isn't understanding pashtun central to being able to understand what's going on in afghanistan and pakistan? >> it's crucial. it's absolutely crucial. >> rose: should we have been... this is all about al-zawahiri. should we have been able to with the right orders and the right freedom and the right people have been able to find al-zawahiri and bin laden by now bob? >> it's difficult. i was in pakistan last year and i was amazed how just cut off foreigners are, even in peshawar ... person peshawar. it's a very dangerous place, afghanistan. and i would add this that i could myself... i wouldn't do much better than anybody else. if i were assigned to afghanistan. it is a very, very hostile area and anywhere with those three leters-- c.i.a.-- is a target. and there's a good indication that the taliban is getting to the point where they are targeting military linguists as well on our bases. their intelligence is amazing at the grass-roots. so the odds are stacked against us which adds to the rest of the problems. >> rose: david, what's the assessment of the administration in terms of... you know, we've also had this complaint that erupted over the weekend in terms of how fast they were getting the new troops over there. >> well, there's some tension between the white house and the military. the white house feels that the military promised it could get the 30,000 troops by the summer, by july/august and when i was in afghanistan in december i asked general rodriguez, who's the number-two commander of u.s. forces there if he could meet that timetable and he said no, i don't think so. i don't think we'll be able to get the troops, all of them, until november is the first time anybody had actually said what i think a lot of people thought was obvious. so there are those tensions. just going back to what bob was saying a moment ago. i'm struck by how much the agency wanted to believe that this agent could deliver al-zawahiri. >> rose: okay, david that's a very important point and i've got 1:30 left. tell me why, your point, of why that's so important. >> because if you want something that badly, you make mistakes. you're too hungry and you chase it and you make mistakes in chasing it. >> and let's not forget, this is coming five days after an attempted bombing of an airliner over the united states. i mean, this is... they're part of kind of the same story in the sense that the desire to get the top al qaeda leaders comes in part because of the evidence that these guys are still able to operate, they're still able to plot attacks. so the heat goes up right after these kind of attacks whether they were successful or not. that's when the pressure ramps up to find the golden source who's going to get the top leaders. >> rose: bob, i'll come to you for a close, we've got 50 seconds. so what is essential to do now? you really think that they've really got to go back and look at this from the top? >> oh, i think they should. i think they should be very honest and see where the c.i.a.'s gone wrong. and it can be fixed. >> rose: and who could do that? >> leon panetta could, this administration could. but we just have to get the politics out of the c.i.a. and focus on intelligence collection. and it is doable. we can train linguists. we can get people with experience in these bases. >> rose: all right. thank you very much. bob baer from san francisco, or berkeley, as he would say. david ignatius from the "washington post" in washington, mark mazzetti who writes about national security for the "new york times" with me in the stud wrote here in new york. we'll be back in a moment. stay with us. >> rose: jason epstein is here. we's well known for his remarkable career in publishing. for 40 years he was the editorial director at random house. he's also cultivate add life long interest in food, writing, and cooking are not that different, he says because recipes are essentially stories. over the years, he has ed ted and published literary and culinary giants. here's a look at some of them. >> i think there's a moment of transcend dense that enable you to get into a novel because we all are filled with experiences in our life but they don't coalesce. at any given moment you can almost feel something physical in yourself, something stirring, almost like the beginning of a spring on a winter day and you say yes, i think i'm getting ready for a novel. and you may not know what the novel is going to be. it takes a turn or two as you get into it. >> if you make these right decisions about buying food from people who are taking care of the land and people who share your values that you're changed in the process. you sort of build a little community, you end up sitting with your family and friends at the table. >> rose: vard values and all. >> your life is changed. >> it's always an act of discovery. when i write, i'm finding things out just as the reader does at any given point. the process is the... the feeling you have is discovering things, not feel pogue saysive, not of inventing or calculate organize anything but of discovering things. >> i think what's going on in my pots and pans and what's going on on the table and what's going on in... i'm getting involved with every detail of the operation because i love every detail of that operation. and i think i'm driven to prove beside a chef big a great restaurant tour also. >> there was a young man at the bar named joe. a yuck fellow that came in to fix my speakers. i'm watching hip at the bar. he'd had dinner and he's looking around, looking around and i know he's thinking and i'm saying what's going nonhis mind and i go sit next to joe and i say "joey, how's it going?" he says "good, frank." he said "you know what the difference is between this and every other restaurant?" i looked at him, i said "tell me joey." he said "when you leave other restaurants you leave full." he said "when you leave here, you leave fulfilled." >> you write certain books for the people. >> exactly. >> because you know they don't know anything or they don't know what you think they ought to know because the schools won't teach it. why do you think i bother to spend my life telling the story of the united states. >> rose: so washington, d.c. would be one of those books? >> yeah, for its time and place. creation was for those who know nothing about the fifth century whenever idea that we have came along. and there was our no our lord, i may say, at work at that time. >> rose: (laughs) his new memoir "eating" looks back at his life through the prism of food. i'm pleased to have jason epstein back at this table. welcome. do you miss the publishing business and the role that you played? >> no, i'm happy to be out of the business because the business is going through great anguish now, agony. and it's going to be reconstitutes. and that's going to be at the expense of the existing industry i'm not quite out of it, because i've developed a business based on a machine, like an a.t.m., that receives a digital file from anywhere and prints it as a quality paper back book in a matter of minutes. and we are... i can't be specific, but we're at this point about to announce a partnership with a major printing company to market and service it throughout the world and we have another arrangement with an important publishing group in china and i think that will be one of the ways in which the book business will survive in the future. >> rose: what's the threat to the book business? >> well, it's not as simple as many people think. it's... digitization is going to change everything. it's going to change the whole nature of the book business. digitization you don't need inventory anymore, you don't need warehouses anymore, you don't need sales forces anymore. you sell your books directly from the digital file through that web site to tend user. that's how it's going to be in the future. a radically decentralized marketplace. in theory it will soon be possible to download the entire contents of the beijing library right at this table. one click of the mouse, one keyboard. that doesn't give publishers much to do. the functions that have defined them over years are now redundant. what isn't redun dant, of course, are the ed towards who are a filter who decide what should and shouldn't be published and prepare it for publication. there's another problem which is systemic, it's not... it's even more decisive than the structural... than the knew technology that i just described and that is that when i first entered the business it was all about back list, that's what kept us together. books you publish once and sell year after year after year after all the risk and expenses are out of them. they were like annuities. that's what kept the publishing company together. it's what paid the bills and created the continuity. without it, publishers could not survive. by the mid-80s back lists began to deteriorate rapidly. i used to watch that happen the way one today might watch a glacier melting never to be replaced. it was an alarming process. it was the result of a demographic shift, i believe, from the cities to the suburbs. the great city bookstores that used to be able to stock 80, 90, 100,000 back list titles were disappearing and being replaced by the shopping malls with their little chain stores not much bigger than a bodega, walden and dalton. and they couldn't carry much inventory so there was no place for a publisher to sell their back list and the back list began disappearing. there was also a revision in the tax law that encouraged that even further which i won't go into. but by the late 1980s, the publishers were now depending upon best-sellers to keep going. and it's a very risky gambling business. in the old days when i was first in the business, best-selling authors like... all authors were loyal to the publisher they had been with for years. but when the publishers found themselves december pending no longer upon back lists but now upon potential best-sellers they had to acquire those at auction and the authors would let their agents sell them the highest bidder. and often that highest bidder was forced to pay more for the right to publish that books than it was ever going to earn back. and sometimes it didn't earn anything back. so that was the problem for publishers. so depending upon back listing they're now depending upon the gambling game with front lists with authors appearing on the best-seller list. so that problem combined with the effective digitization has set the... has created chaos in the industry right now and it will... it can't be fixed. >> rose: what it will look like in five years? >> i think the future publishing company will consist of a handful of like-minded ed towards. they needn't be in one room or even in one city. they'll tend to be specialized. they'll publish books that they... on a subject they know a lot about, whatever it happens to be. and they will post their own web sites of related interest. >> rose: and how will they generate income? >> by selling those books. the same way the publishers do now. and more income because they won't have to spend... >> rose: they won't have cost. >> shipping and warehousing and returns and all that stuff. they will be more for the author more for the publisher and less cost to the consumer. some of those books will be read on devices like kindle, but there are some books that one wants to keep. the and those will be printed on demand by a machine like the one... >> rose: the espresso. >> yeah. >> rose: what are we losing? >> i don't think we're losing anything. i think we... we're not losing what publishing has always been about-- story telling. people do... that's instinctive with us, we can't stop doing it. we're doing it right now. that will continue. except the way it's distributed will be different. we will be losing... people will be losing their jobs, i'm sorry to say... >> rose: at the big publishing companies? >> these big publishing houses. which is rough and i... people who run these companies are facing that problem and they don't... they're very unhappy about it. but they have become redundant, that's undeniable. >> rose: what do you think of google's book project? >> well, i...... >> rose: which is essentially to digitize everything they can get their hands on. >> i think it's potentially great. they got off on the wrong foot. they... four years ago larry page came to see me and described this to me. >> rose: one of the two founders of google. >> and he didn't know much about books. he's an engineer, he thinks of books as manuals of containing information that you can look things up in them. that's not what books are for. what would you look up in "moby dick" or "emma" or "war and peace." >> rose: life lessons. >> >> but the book itself is the information. i also said if you're going to digitize books in copyright, you have to be careful because they belong to people. you have to get the right to do that and he didn't quite grasp what i was saying at that point. i also said "you're going to need a bibliography, you can't just walk into a library and start digitizing everything without knowing what it is." for example, there were seven editions of "leaves of grass" in whitman's lifetime. each was a separate book, including many of the same poems. i said "which one are you going to get? someone has to know how the do that or you'll make a mess." well, he didn't have a bibliography and he didn't consult the right lawyers and he had a bit of a problem but it will straighten out. it would have been wonderful if when he had broached this-- as i think he did-- to the library of congress they said "yes, we'll do it together. you put up the money and the technology and we'll do the bib bibliography." it didn't happen that way. if it did it would be in a good situation. it will take a while to get the thing back together. >> rose: what situation are we in right now? they're digitizing like crazy and they don't know what to do with it? >> they've digitized about eight or ten million titles so far. they're aware of the bibly owe graphical problem and they'll deal it with. >> rose: and what about the copyright problem? >> the copyright problem is a mess because the american association of publishers and the author's guild sued google for having digitized and appropriated to itself books that people own. many books out of print but they're still copyright. those are called orphan books, in some cases. no one knows who owns them but they're still technically in copyright. under the recent copyright law, a book stays in copyright for 75 years from the author's death which, by the way, is much, much too long but it was a law passed at the time of disney. it is the mickey mouse law and it really has withheld a great many books from the public that the public should have. it's very hard to find out who owns them and make them available. anyway, the guild and the authors and the publishers' association have agreed with google to a solution too complicated to go into but a solution. and that's now before the court to decide whether that can be done legally, whether the agreement will hold up. and the court hasn't yet ruled on it. my hunch is that they will rule in google's favor and in favor of the deal. with some restrictions. >> rose: in terms of reading books, do you have a kind? do you have a reader from sony? >> no, i don't... i have to read. i'm very old-fashioned about this. it has to be a book. >> rose: because that was the great thing they were worried about. could you make it feel at all... how could you mostly make it feel like an experience of a book, so the type looked like the size of a book. >> well, make it a book, i would say, like the one you've got there your hand. >> but it's also something if you're traveling being able to take ten books... >> but where r you going to travel that you need ten books? to the south pole for months? >> rose: (laughs) well, yes. >> i just came back from a trip to st. lucia... >> rose: right you were on a boat. >> i was on a friend's boat and i had with me a 600 page history of africa which was perfect for that six days. >> rose: perfect size. >> perfect size. the day we left the boat i was on the last chapter. >> rose: did you leave the book on the boat? >> no, i brought it home with me. it's a very good book. >> rose: what did you learn most about africa >> well, it begins with the formation of the earth, of the universe and focuses down, down, down until you finally get to this continent that split off from the whole body of continents. and how the human species evolved from that... on that very fertile place. all kinds of things could grow there. >> rose: i'm going to clang the subject. one of the great experiences i have that... i'm saying this without... is that this man loves to cook and loves to talk. those two two things go together especially product of cooking. and i remember maybe ten to 12 years ago coming to your house, your apartment for lunch and you prepared lunch and we sat in the kitchen and talked. >> of course. >> rose: do you remember that? >> yes. >> rose: good, this book is called "eating." your love of food, was it any different from anybody else's? >> well, i know a lot of friends who cook but they're mostly professional people. most people like yourself really don't do much cooking. >> rose: exactly. >> i know when i... i know when it must have begun. my grandmother lived in a big windy farmhouse on a hill in the city in the wintertime it was freezing in that place. there was a wheezey old furnace that didn't do much good so we all sat in the kitchen where there was a big black coal stove. wood stove, actually. and i would sit on the wood box next to the stove to keep warm and watch my grandmother take pies out of the obvious and stews and everything she was making and i felt very safe and koz sni that situation. the wind is blowing outside, the snow is piling up outside the house. and i don't have to be anywhere but in the kitchen. so it made a profound impression on me which i've never got over. i've always associated it with safety, comfort, warmth, love. >> rose: you cook more than judy? >> judy tried to cook. when she lived in washington she used to give dinner parties herself and she made a bowl of mushroom soup for me and she thought it was a great recipe and i said "it's okay" and she never cooked again. >> rose: i'm not proud of this question so forgive me. what's the best meal you've ever had? >> oh, my goodness. i'm trying to think. maybe the first time i had... the first meal i add in chez bernice was pretty good. >> rose: alice waters who says "what a storyteller. he brings food into the cultural experience in a beautiful way." >> i can't think... i mean, there have been so many great... >> rose: well, the great thing about her is she uses... the ingredients she uses is it not >> >> local. she starteden that whole thing, insisting on the best local stuff. she's a genius. >> rose: but this book is a memoir of your love affair with food. >> well, it's a memoir, yeah. it's about cooking. a little bit about publishing. >> rose: (laughs) >> other than the fact that they're both story telling, they both from a story telling experience, cooking, story telling. >> yeah. >> rose: books are story telling. that's what they share? >> they're narratives. >> rose: this comes from yates "gratitude to the unknown instructors. what they undertook do they brought to pass, all things hang like a drop of dew upon a glade of grass." >> and that describes our entire civilization. that's what he was saying there. he said a lot in those four lines. >> rose: "what they undertook to do they brought to pass, all things hang like a drop of dew pop a blade of grass." >> civilization took a lot to do by a lot of people and it's fragile. to say that in four lines is very good. >> rose: you say you prefer plain cooking. >> well, i'm not a genius like this. i'm not anything like daniel and i'm not running a restaurant that has to please people. >> rose: why haven't you run a rest sflaunt >> i wanted to once. and i wished to work in them when i was a kid. but i got involved in the book business instead. there was a moment when i was in the publishing business, i worked at doubleday that i thought i would start a rest wraunt a friend but he got cold feet and left. so i decided not to bother with it. but it would have been a good restaurant. >> rose: the state of the novel today. >> i think it's pretty good. >> rose: i mean, doctor roe was right there in your collection. >> yeah. i mean, we never know when we're in the midst of who's dick kens and who's jane austen and so on. it takes a while for that to even out. look at mel sflil his own lifetime. he was scorned by critics and look at him now. i think we're doing about as well as ever. i'm reading a wonder. book of short stories by a young pakistani-american whose book was listed for the national book award. it's a name i can't pronounce. his first name is danielle and his last name is beyond me. this guy came out of know where and he's like chekhov. i mean, those stories are absolutely brilliant. take your breath away-- at least mine. he's going to be a great writer if he isn't already. and he can... he could have been a great writer in any century. that's real talent. >> rose: as a great editor, how do you evaluate your own writing? >> my own? >> rose: uh-huh. >> i'm very modest about it. i can do it but you'll learn this after a while. i decided without giving it much thought when i was young i do not want to be a writer. i didn't want to take the risk. i didn't trust myself that way. and doctorow had been a publisher and desighed he could write and i thought that was taking a tremendous risk. here he's giving up his salary. >> rose: toni morrison had been an editor. >> toni morrison used to work for us at random house. >> rose: she was... she worked in the... i don't know whether she was an editor but she worked in publishing. >> that's how she came to us. she was working for a small textbook publisher in syracuse and we bought that company and the company itself amounted to nothing, we shouldn't have bought it but we got her with it. >> rose: she sold a lot of books. >> that more than made up for that silly purchase. bernstein who was the president of the random house made a deal that i think was unfair. he said that toni should be an editor at random house but be published at knopf. >> rose: you would have preferred she would have been an editor at knopf. >> i would have preferred she be an employee, an editor and a writer. as it is we're dear friends and she lives upstairs from me in our building downtown. >> rose: what do you look for in a book? >> the first paragraph. >> rose: really? >> if that gets me i'm... >> rose: you here that? >> i don't stop. the first paragraph is great, the rest will be. >> rose: but at some point you give up. in other words, if you're ten pages into it and nothing speaks to you it's... >> that's it. >> rose: throw it away. >> rose: but f you're in the business as long as i've been you can tell by the first sentence. >> rose: really. >> i can tell a movie by... >> rose: i can certainly tell a movie. >> if it's no good, i'm gone. >> rose: what's the best first sentence you ever read? >> maybe "lolita." we used to visit edmund willis, the great critic living in wellfleet on cape cod in those days but thanksgiving, barbara and i, my first wife, at the end of one of these thanksgiving weekends he called me into his study and he said he took two black binders off his shelf and said "here's a novel by my friend nabakov but he doesn't want anyone to know who wrote it i think it's repulsive but maybe you'll feel differently." >> rose: (laughs) that's great. >> and whatever that first sentence was i said "wow, what's the matter with edmund?" and doubleday didn't want to publish it for the usual foolish reasons but it was very impressive. >> rose: what gave you the most pride as an editor? >> oh, a lot. a lot. i don't think... i can't single anything out. i mean, i... i wasn't just an editor, i started a lot of businesses, too. >> rose: oh, i know. >> i had that sideline. when i went to work at random house, bennett, a wonderful fellow, by the way... >> rose: what made him wonderful? we mostly know him from television. >> rose: >> well, he was ha real publisher and i think real publishers are wonderful people. he really knew what he was doing and he created a wonderful publishing company. i mean, he was a spoiled baby, too, among other things and an egomaniac and all that. >> rose: (laughs) >> has to do his jokes all the time and only one in ten was memorable. but he said "why don't you come to work here as an editor?" and i said "i don't want. to i want to start my own business." he said "you can do that too. stay here as an editor, don't have any other obligations and you can start your own businesses. and we may even go in with you." so that was a deal... >> rose: and what businesses did you want to start? >> well, i helped to start the new york review report. >> rose: but that was because of a crisis. >> well, thank god. >> rose: yeah, exactly. >> there was a newspaper strike. >> rose: you and your wife and robert lowell. >> and his wife. the great poet. and we were having diber in our apartment which was one of those big duplex apartments on 67th street, no furniture, we just moved in, we had no furniture and we're sitting at the table and i was making a duck with olives, i describe in the this book and elizabeth said "thank god for the strike. the "new york times" book review isn't here anymore." she'd just written a very negative piece about in the harper's magazine and i was relieved about it, too, it was a very vulgar thing in those days. we couldn't just say that but the strike gave us a chance to do our own. it was like a judy garland movie. we'll make our own dance. so that's how we agreed to start the new york review. so that was one thing. >> rose: and it still lives. >> it still lives and it's still ed ted by that genius bob silvers. edited. the library of america and now i'm doing this thing with that book machine. the always with respect to... everything i've done has been developed and preserved back list. >> rose: here's what surprises me. how many books have you sflaed >> only three or four, ii/k thi. >> rose: why only three or four? >> because if you're in the publishing business as i was, you have to submerge your own ego to the work of other people, you don't want anything interfere with that. you v to forget that you have interests of your own and do everything for the writer. so it's only after i left the business that i was able to write it all. and this thing grew out... this little book here grew out of articles i wrote for the "times" magazine. >> rose: "eating, a memoir" jason epstein. is it always good to be able to talk about somebody's passion. if you can tap into the passion of someone-- whether it's food or books or theater or some other aspect of what makes them get up everyday-- it's a great story. >> oh, yeah. yeah. always. >> rose: and this is a great story. thank you. >> thank you. hips... and support to thousands of our nation's... most promising students. ♪ ( coca-cola 5-note mnemonic )