Good afternoon and welcome to the gators bergh book festival, a resident here and id represent districts 17. Welcome. Cases spurred is a city. Okay so please silence all your devices thank you, and if you are on social media today and we hope you are, please use the hashtag gps, gbf sorry. There will be service, and by submitting a survey youll be entered in a draw to win a 100 dollar visit gift card. So i encourage each one of you to enter into that survey and at the end of this presentation, mr. Surely will be signing books and copies are on sale in this tent and around the grounds here. Make sure you take advantage of having renowned author mr. Shirley here. So this is a free event and but it does help, the book festival if you buy a book. The more books we salute our event, the more publishers will want to send their authors here to speak with us. Pushing basically purchasing a book it basically helps our partners and calm the great independent bookstores that we have here. It supp
The facts are we have to fixette. There is an extra trest yell doing it to us i guess. Someone somewhere has to take responsibility for this. That was ross perot during the second of three president ial debates talking about one of his favorite issues the u. S. Debt. In that election, the texas businessman won 19 of the popular vote. He ran a second president ial campaign in 1996 and tonight he is our focus on the contenders. Gooned good night and thanks for being with us. Were doing this series as a way to look at American History through the lens of president ial candidates who failed in their quest for the white house but have an outside impact on American History. Ss perot is our final of 14 people that were proniling this series. Tonight joining us is Doug Brinkley. He is not politics as usual. He is less interested in money and politics than doing right for our country. I believe this comes out of his Naval Academy background. Looking for p. O. W. s and m. I. A. s during vietnam
Give a warm welcome to the stage. [applause]. I hope you are having as much fun as i am at this festival. [applause]. I think of students in college a few of you were in college a few years ago as the best thing to do is to take the teacher not the course and here i think of things to take these incredible authors and be in a room with them. Whatever theyre talking about. The only problem is there is someone in every room. That you want to be with. I think you heard from them all at one point or another. They have also done some the other interesting things. American shots. He is the cn and historian. He has a little bit of basement studio and envy of john meacham. Whos got that at msnbc. Of course the great tester in 1919. Just a transformative book that is so important. Many of us know him from his basement with morning joe. The assignment is to talk about who is your favorite historical figure. I want to make that a free and fun thing. Maybe later we would get into other elements. W
The white house is still there. I think about the wonderful times we had. And 40 miles a week which is a lot. Thinking about the good times that we had and how thankful i am now to have the superb bipartisan support existed in the seventies. Is there republican in the congress or senate that you enjoyed working with that you became friends with . Howard baker from tennessee was a minority leader and was a great personal friend of mine i got wonderful cooperation from the republican side and a minority leader the house of representatives also a great supporter of mine so during the last couple of years i was in the white house so they took away a lot of very liberal democrats with a moderate and conservative democrats and republicans. What about sam nunn . That is very important. He was a young senator then and was my floor leader on some of the key issues applied to nuclear power. He was very knowledgeable about it and working his way up to be chairman later on of the Defense Committee
Decision of the United States Supreme Court batting segregation in public transportation. My street mate on that Greyhound Bus you must understand in 1961 black people and white people could be seated together. When you get out of washington to travel to virginia to North Carolina, alabama, mississippi, wewere on our way to new orleans. So we didnt have any problems for the most part until we got to rockville. And a little place in charlotte North Carolina, it was a sizable city, a young africanamerican man attempted to get a shoeshine in a socalled white barbershop that was in a socalled white waiting room. He was arrested and taken to jail. The next day the jury dismissed the charges against him but my seatmate and two of us arrived at the Greyhound Bus station in South Carolina and a group of white men met us in the doorway and started beating us and left us lying in a pool of blood and the local officials came up and wanted to know whether we wanted to press charges andwe said no ,