reliable punishments x. if that's why we work so hard to expose that. >> our look at nonfiction books that have been adapted into films continues with margot lee shetterly's "hidden figures." 9 the book follows four african-american women who were integral in devising aeronautic calculations that proto pelled the united states in the space -- propelled the united states in the space race. the movie adaptation was released in 2016 and every ised oscar nominations. here's the author, margo lee shedder -- margot lee shetterly, in hampton. >> physics, of course, meant math, and math meant mathematicians. and since the middle of the last decade, mathematicians had meant women. langley's first female computing pool started in 35 had caused -- 199 35 had caused uproar among the men at the laboratory. how could a female mind process something to rigorous and precise as math? [laughter] the very idea with, investing $500 on a calculating machine show it could be used by a girl. [laughter] but the girls had been good. very good. better at computing, in fact, than many of the engineers, the men themselves grudgingly admitted. with only a handful of girls winning the title mathematician a positional designation that put them on equal footing with entry-level male employees, the fact that they were designated as lower case subprofessionals provided a boost to the laboratory's bottom line. but in 1943 the girls were harder to come by. virginia tucker, langley's head computer, ran laps up and down the east coast searching for coeds with even a modicum of analytical or mechanical skills. hoping for matriculating college students to fill the hundreds of open positions for computers, scientific aides, model makers, laboratory assistants and, yes, even mathematicians. she conscripted what seemed like entires classes of math graduates from her north carolina alma mater, the college for women x she hunted at virginia schools like sweet briar and lynchburg and the state teachers college in farmville. mel slip butler leaned on the civil service commission expect war manpower commission as hard as he could so the laboratory might get top priority on the limited pool of qualified applicants. he penned ads for the local newspapers, the daily e press. reduce your household duties. women who are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do jobs previously filled by men if should call the langley memorial aeronautical laboratory, read one notice. fervent pleas from the personnel department were published in the employee newsletter, air team. are there members of your family or others you know who would like to pray a part -- play a part in gaining supremacy of the air? either sex who would like to do important work towards winning and shortening the war? with men being absorbed into the military services, with women already in demand by eager employers, the labor market was as exhausted as the war workers themselves. a bright spot presented itself in the form of another man's problem. a. philip randolph, the head of the largest black labor union in the country, demanded that roosevelt open lucrative war troughs to negro applicants. threatening in the summer of 1941 to bring 100,000 negroes to the nation's capital in protest if the president rebuffed his demand can. who the hell is this guy ran calf -- randolph, said the president's aide. roosevelt blinked. a tall, courtly black man with shakespearean diction and the stare of an eagle, a. philip randolph, close friend of eleanor roosevelt, headed the 35,000-strong brotherhood of carporters. the porters waited on passengers, daily enduring prejudice and humiliation from whites. nevertheless, these jobs were coveted in the back community because they provided a measure of economic stability and social standing. believing that civil rights were inextricably linked to economic rights, randolph fought tirelessly for the rights of americans to participate fairly in the wealth of the country they had helped build. twenty years in the future, randolph would address the multitudes at another march on washington, then concede the stage to a young charismatic minister from atlanta named martin luther king jr. later generations would associate the black freedom movement with king's name, but in 1941 as the united states oriented every aspect of its society toward war for the second time in less than 30 years, it was ranful to's long-term -- randolph's long-term vision and the specter of a martha never happened that pride opened the door that had been closed like a bank vault since the end of reconstruction. with two strokes of a pen, executive order 8802 ordering the deegg redivision of the despence -- desession redivision of the defense order and creating the fair employment practices committee to monitor the national project of economic inclusion, roosevelt primed the pump for a new source of labor to come into the tight production process. nearly two years after randolph's 1941 showdown as the laboratory's personnel reached the civil service, applicants of qualified negro female candidates began filtering into the langley service building, presenting themselves for consideration by the laboratory's personnel staff. no photo advised as to applicants' color. that requirement, instituted under the administration of wilson, was struck down as the roosevelt administration tried to dismantle discrimination in hiring practices. but the applicants' alma maters tipped their hand. west virginia statement university, howard, arkansas agricultural, mechanical and normal. hampton student just across town, all negro schools. nothing in the applicants indicated anything less than fitness for the job. if anything, they came to the job with more experience than the white women applicants after having had many years of teaching experience on top of math and science degrees. they would need a separate space, melvin butler knew, then they would have to appoint someone to head the new group, an an experienced girl. white, obviously, someone whose disposition suited the sensitivity of the assignment. the warehouse building, a brand new space on the west side of the laboratory -- a part of campus that was still more wilderness than a workplace -- could be just the thing. -- had already moved there as had some of the employees in the personnel the president. with round the clock pressure to test the airplanes queued up in the hangar, engineers would welcome the additional hands. so many of the engineers were northerners, relatively agnostic on the racial issue but devout when it came to mathematical talent. melvin butler himself hailed from portsmouth, just across the bay if hampton. it required no imagination on his part to get what some of his fellow virginians might think of the idea of integrating negro women into langley's offices. the come heres, as the virginians called the newcomers to the state and their strange ways be damned. there'd always been negro employees in the lab -- janitors, cafeteria workers, mechanics assistants, groundskeepers -- but opening the door to negroes who would be professional peers, that was something new. butler proceeded with discretion. no big announcement in the daily press, no fanfare. but he also proceeded with direction. nothing to herald the arrival of the negro women to the laboratory, but nothing to derail their arrival either. maybe melvin butler was progressive for his time and place, or maybe he was just a function their carrying out his duty. maybe he was both. state law and virginia customs kept him from truly progressive action. but perhaps the promise of a segregated office was just the cover he needed to get the black women in the door, a trojan horse of segregation opening the door to integration. whatever his personal feelings on race, one thing was clear: butler was a langley man through and through. loyal to the laboratory, to its mission, to its world view and to its charge during the war. by nature and by mandate, he and the rest at the naca were all about practical solutions. so, too, was a. philip randolph, the activism, unrelenting pressure and superior organizing skills laid the foundation for what in the 1960s would come to be known as the civil rights movement. but there was no way that randolph or the men at the laboratory or anyone else could have predicted that the hiring of a group of black female mathematicians at the langley memorial aeronautical laboratory would end at the moon. still shrouded from view were the great advances that would crush the notion that faster than sound flight was a physical impossibility. the electronic calculating devices that would amplify the power of science and technology to unthinkable dimensions. no one anticipated that millions of wartime women would refuse to leave the american workplace and forever change the meaning of women's work, or that american negroes would persist in their demand for full access to the founding ideals that their country and not be moved. the black female mathematicians who walked into langley in 943 -- 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations. they are sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the united states would consider one of its greatest victories. but in 1943 america existed in the urgent present. responding to the need of the here and now, butler took the next step, making a note to add another item to sherwood's seemingly endless requisition list, a metal bathroom sign bearing the word "colored girls." >> the 92nd oscar awards are this sunday, and we're taking the opportunity to show you some of the authors from our archives who have had their books adapted into movies. up next is jon ronson's "the men who stare at goats." it describes a secret wing of the u.s. military that was formed in 1979 called the first earth battalion. the film, starring george clooney, ewan mcgregor and jeff bridgings, was released in 2009. here's the author, jon ronson, from a talk at politics and prose bookstore in 2005. >> in 1995 the cia declassified the fact that they had a crack team of secret psychic spies. sounded incredibly glamorous, but it was basically half a dozen soldiers sitting inside a condemned clapboard building at fort meade, maryland, told by their commanding officers -- and they basically stayed there for 32 years x. because they were -- they didn't exist. after of 23 years that would really rankle them, they had to bring their own coffee to work. and they never got repairs tone on their building, because they didn't exist. the cia kind of declassified and shut them down in 1995. and even went crazy for theming you know? this crack team of psychic spies. and nobody really thought maybe this was the tip of an iceberg. and it turned out it was. and the iceberg is "the men who stare at goats." and it turns out that there was a secret team of soldiers at fort bragg in north carolina who had a hundred goats. the don'ts had all been debleated -- don'ts had all been de-- goats had all been debleated. they didn't want the locals animal rights activists finding out they had goats on base. so the goats were just standing there with their mouths opening and closing with no bleats coming out. this is because they'd been shot in the leg and then nursed back to health in regular, conventional medical training programs. the goats would all be herded into a room and thrown a hand get grade, and they'd all rush in and try and nurse the goats back to health. terrible things were done to goats in the u.s. military. but if that wasn't bad enough, in the early 1980s and once again today, once they had all these goats on base, potential forces decided to try -- special forces decided to try and kill them just by staring at them. [laughter] so they started staring. they got in martial arts experts from around america including a man called guy sivelli from ohio and they basically just stared at the goats. i managed to track down guy with colonel alexander who eerily told me about him. i found him, and i said, is it true, did you ever manage to kill a goat just by staring at it? he said, yes, that's true. i said, i don't suppose you still practice the technique, do you? yep. only last week i killed my hammer the just by staring at it. -- hamster. he said he videoed it, and i could come and watch the video if i wanted to. so i turned up at his martial arts studio in ohio. he showed me the documentation of him in special forces at fort bragg, showed me photographs of soldiers in the act of karate chopping goats to death. with the quivering palm which is martial arts technique where where you walk around for 24 hours and then drop dead. and then he showed me his hamster video. he was very suspicious, him and his son were filming me the whole time i was there, and they wouldn't -- turns out they thought i was al-qaeda. well, when i phoned, they kind of thought, well, you know, how do we know he's not al-qaeda? so they phoned up special forces and is said there's this guy, claims he's a journalist in england who might be al-qaeda. special forces said meet him, film it, we want to know what he looks like. and i think i've pinpointed at what moment guy realized that i wasn't al-qaeda, and it's when i discovered that his daughter had danced with richard gere in the movie chicago x. i kind of screeched, you know, i love katherine zeta jones in that movie. and they thought even a deep cover al-qaeda wouldn't think to go that effeminate. that was the moment the guy relaxed. so he showed me the hamster video. now, on one level this is basically a hamster in its wheel with a guy staring at it and providing entirely random psychic narrative to this. look, have you ever seen a hamster like that? i've never owned a hamster. it did stand very, very still for a long time at one point, and then the otherster, which was the kohl hamster, climbed on top of it. and i kept on saying to guy, am i going to see it die now? just wait, just wait, it gets weirder, it gets weirder. and then the tape ended just as the hamster gets up and brushes itself down. it's a very inconclusive video. later guy toll me that the reason why he didn't want me to see the bit where the hamster actually dies is because he was afraid i was a bleeding heart liberal and would take it out of context. but he assured me that the hamster did die. more recently, a few months ago, i got a very excited telephone call from guy. he'd had a call from special forces because the goats and the hamster-staring experiment taking place in the early 1980s, but in 2004 guy was phoned by special forces, and they wanted him to go down to fort bragg with an animal. i said to guy, is it a goat? he said, no. i i said, what kind of animal was it? he said, i'm not going to tell you. and i said, was it a small animal, cheap to purchase? guy said, yes. i said, was it a hamster? guy said, i can never confirm, nor deny that. [laughter] turns out that the reason why they're doing the staring again now is because they don't want to kill a hamster anymore. what they want to do is learn the art of the stare, that if you can really freak out the hamster, that he can really freak out a summit of interrogation. subject at a prison camp in iraq. so they're teaching the interrogators the art of the stare with guy cevelli. back in the '80s they were trying to kill them, and at one point by guy's account -- see, all the videos are inconclusive. each time you've got a goat strapped up to an e e cg -- ecg machine. you hear the soldier off camera saying, he's down, but the camera never pans out, so you never see it. three videos shot at fort bragg with these experiments, i've never actually seen any animal fall over. but at one point, apparently, they put 30 don'ts in a room, put numbers on each of the goats. guy was staring at goat number 16, and goat number 17 fell over. which, i guess, is collateral damage. [laughter] so, obviously, i was curious to know how all this came to be. and it turns out it was all because of one man, a remarkable and really quite wonderful lieutenant colonel called jim shannon. jim was in vietnam, and he realized that his men were being kill because they impulsively and kind heartedly fired high. they just weren't cunning. the viet cong, they were cunning, but not the americans. so after the vietnam war, jim wrote to the pentagon. he said he wanted to teach the american army how to be more cunning and would they fund him on a two-year odyssey where he would learn these things. the pentagon agreed. jim spent two years in california amongst the communities of california. he never told them how the ideas that he was picking up there in his faked hot tub encounter sessions and so on could be adapted to teach a battlefield soldier how to be more cunning. but after two years, he came back with a manual, and it was called the first earth battalion operations manual. and it was a redesign of every aspect of military life. in the first everett battalion, soldiers would carry baby lambs into hostile countries, and they'd place the lambs down on the ground, and with sparkly eyes, they'd give the enemy an automatic hug. the soldiers would have loudspeakers attached to their uniforms, and these loudspeakers would emit indigenous music and words of peace. and if that wasn't enough, then switched to broadcast discordant sounds like acid rock music out of sync, the idea of blasting detainees with discordant sounds is one of jim's legacies very much alive today. blasting barney the purple dinosaur at insur gents and fleetwood mac and metallica and so on. that's one of jim's legacies that's alive in the war on terror. anyway, my guess is that at any other time they would have laughed him out of the room. but i i think it wasn't just individual soldiers who were traumatized after vietnam. i think the army as a machine was melancholy and in a funk and just wanted to be comforted by something that was nice, and they really embraced jim's ideas. they instantly offered him the chance to set up a real first earth battalion where soldiers, one of jim's biggest ideas was that oldiers would learn how to finish soldiers would learn how to pass through walls. so they offered jim the opportunity to try to get soldiers to do that. but jim said no. jim was kind of a pragmatist, and he realized that these ideas were good on paper but not necessarily achievable in real life. he said if you want this manual to float out there, it took root that person would be a member of the first earth battalion x. because the army is full of -- i think jim wanted people to strive for the impossible but find a greater level of human potential. but because so many of jim's spear corpses were literal-minded men, they actually tried to walk through walls. and the book opened with a general, the commander of military intelligence between 1980-1983, getting up from behind his desk and jogging -- [laughter] to his wall. he's thinking to himself, what is the atom mostly made up of? space. to me, the keyword in this is mostly are. [laughter] what am i mostly made up of? atoms. all i have to do is merge. the wall is an illusion. am i destined to stay in this room? no. bang. [laughter] bumped his nose. and he was confounded by his continual failure to pass through this wall. and he eventually went to special forces at fort bragg. he kind of thought he had too much -- [inaudible] being commander of the national army to do this, so maybe special forces would be able to do it. so it was he who put into special forces the idea that they should try and kill animals just by staring at them. and that was, that's how the first earth battalion, how this think tank idea floated into the fabric of the military. >> another nonfiction book that was adapted into a movie was "the accidental billionaires" by ben mezrich that chronicles the founding of facebook. it was used as the basis for the movie "the social network" which was the winner of three academy awards including best adapted screamplay. ben mezrich spoke to booktv at the 2010 miami book fair. here's a portion of that interview. >> guest: i got an e-mail out of the blue at two in the morning in february of 2008, and it was a harvard kid, a senior who said my best friend cofounded facebook, and no one has ever heard of him. and i went out for a drink, and it was this killed eduardo savrin who, with mark zuckerberg, his friend, had cofounded the company, and he had gotten kicked out, in his words. he was very angry, felt betrayed and wanted to tell his story. >> host: who is eduardo? >> guest: well, he and mark were two sophomore at harvard. geeky, kind of socially inept kids who were kind of on the outside, and they met in an underground jewish fraternity at harvard. and mark came up with the idea of facebook and went to his best friend and said if you puppet $1,000, you'll get 30% of the company. and that's essentially where it started. these were the two guys who were there in the very beginning, but there's a lot more to the story than that. people who have seen the movie, it's pretty intense and announcement what happens. >> host: what happened? >> guest: well, it actually started as a college prank. it was late one night. mark zuckerberg was drinking, he had been on a really bad date. he hacked into all the computers at harvard and pulled up pictures of every girl on campus, and he made a web site where you could vote on who the hottest girl was. this got 20,000 hints in under a few hours -- hits. mark almost got kicked out of college. instead the, you know, he went to his friend and said if people could put their own pictures up, we might have a cool web site, and that was really the birth of facebook. it started as a prank, but there were these other characters, the winklevoss twinnings. these were the good looking, cool guys at harvard, the studs on campus. they had been working on their own web site which was kind of a dating site for harvard men. they had hired mark to do their web site. mark blew them off of and launched facebook, so they claimed it was theirs and ended up suing. so the drama, there's these two best friends and then the winklevoss twins, a whole lot of fun. >> host: and this all came to you via one e-mail. >> guest: well, it started with eduardo. i had a book called bringing down the house about the mit blackjack team which was a movie called 21 which every college kid saw. so they had seen my movie, and they thought i would be the right guy to tell the story. i'm not a journalist, i'm not this dark writer who tells dark stories. they wanted me to tell it because it was about brilliant kids doing something wild and incredible. eduardo was very angry and did want to tell his story, but he grew and grew from there. i audiocassette talked to everyone i could talk to, and that's where the story came from. >> host: when and why did eduardo -- by the way, the numbers are on the screen if you want to talk with ben mezrich. when and why did eduardo and mark zuckerberg fall out? >> well, i mean, it happened pretty fast. they started the company together, they were college kids. halfway into the college year, basically a semester later, facebook started to explode, started to take off. everybody's on at the same time. mark moves off to california, and eduardo stays behind to go to new york for the summer and to finish school. when mark hits california, he meets a guy named sean parker who justin timberlake plays in the movie. he's the cool killed, he cofounded napster, he cofounded -- he's the crazy kid, basically. he found mark. mark kind of idolizedded him, and they didn't need eduardo anymore. eduardo freaked occupant, froze the bank account. that's where the battle began and, essentially, they just got rid of him. >> host: what is eduardo doing today? >> guest: well, first of all, he cut off all contact with me. my book proposal leaked out on the internet on a bunch of web sites. everybody freaked out. eduardo was in the midst of a legal battle. mark settled with him, and part of the settlement -- >> host: a billion? >> guest: a billion. eduardo told me he could never speak to me again, cut off all contact. so i don't really know where he is. i've heard rumors that he's in singapore, rumors that he's in taiwan, he's an amazing guy. i'm sure he's doing something in business. he got what he wanted. he's been reinstated as coformed of facebook. so, you know, he did get what he wanted out of meeting me, but i have lost all contact with him. >> host: where are the winklevoss twins? >> guest: so the winklevoss twins are rowing in the london olympics, they're training right now. i believe they're in new york. i actually saw them at the premiere for the movie, "the social network." they're really nice guys. when you meet them, you think they're going to be the bad guys, and they even said to me, and it's in the movie as well, you look at us and you think we're going to be chasing the karate keyed wearing sellen on the outfits. but they're nice guys. >> host: did they get a settlement? >> guest: they received $65 million together, but they are trying to throw that out and reopen the case, because they feel like they deserve everything. they're very upset, and they feel like the idea was stolen from them, so there you go. >> host: did mark zuckerberg talk with you for this? >> guest: no, mark refused. i spent a year trying -- >> host: have you met him? >> guest: i've never met him. he says it's all lies. he refuses to read it, so i don't know how he knows it's all lies, but i've heard that he did see the movie and loved it, but i have no way of knowing for sure. i've never talked to mark. >> host: has anyone sued you over this book? >> guest: no, you know, it's a true story. it's not a negative story. everyone makes it out to be this negative attack on mark zuckerberg. mark zuckerberg is the genius behind facebook. i always said that all along. he's just done some things that have upset a lot of people. there's nothing in this book that's not true. as much as everyone wants to say it, you can't actually find anything that's factually incorrect in this book or in the movie, and i think that is an interesting thing. so, no, nothing like that. >> host: what have we learned about mark zuckerberg's personality? in this book you say that he cut off some relationships because it was all about facebook. >> guest: well, he was determined, he believed in facebook in almost a religious way. he believes everyone in the world should have facebook and be on facebook. he thinks he is changing the world. you know, he's socially awkward, very inept in person. i don't know if you've met him, but he shakes, he sweats, he can't have a normal conversation. finish he's just an odd guy. but he he's truly a p genius, and he's very good with commuters and has that whole -- computers and has that whole hacker personality. >> host: where'd he grow up? >> guest: in upstate new york. his father was a dentist, mother a psychologist and went to prep school, went to exeter. he's an outsider, he's always been an outsider. >> host: doris kerns goodwin looked at president lincoln's contentious cabinet in her 2005 book, "team of rivals." seven years later it was used as the basis for the steven spielberg film "lincoln" starring daniel day lewis who received an oscar for his portrayal of lincoln. up next, doris kerns goodwin talking about her bestseller in 2006. >> i've often been asked what surprised me the most about the lincoln who emerged from those years of research, and i think my answer would be his amazing personality. i knew that i respected him as a statesman, i knew that he was a person that i would feel great admiration for, but i had no idea the affection that i would eventually feel for him because he had this extraordinary gift for storytelling and a hilarious sense of humor. in fact, the stories that he liked to tell are not quite what you might expect from our marble monument. my favorite lincoln story had to do with the fact that when he told the story that. ed: than allen, great revolutionary war hero went to britain, and the british people were still upset about losing the war. so they decided to embarrass him a little bit by putting a picture of george washington in the out house where he would have to encounter it. he went in the outhouse, and he seemed to be smiling. didn't you see george washington there? oh, yes, he said. i think it was the perfectly appropriate place for him. what do you do you mean, they s? well, he said, there's nothing to make an englishman shit faster than the sight of general george washington. [laughter] [applause] so you can imagine if lincoln told stories like that and there were legions of those stories before tough cabinet meetings, it would make people relax. i came the believe that early on lincoln was aware that he possessed unusual talents, and yet it was so hard in that bleak childhood of his to figure out how to learn anything. he later calculated he had only gone to school one year altogether of formal schooling, a few weeks here, a few weeks there because his father needed him to work on the farm, his father would loan him out to other farms to whom he owed credit. but he scoured the countryside for books and read everything he could lay his hands on. when he got a copy of king james' bible or shake conspiracy's plays, he was so excited, he couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep. emily dickenson once said there is no frigate like a book to take us lands away. though lincoln would never travel to england, he went with shakespeare's kings to that merry land. literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings. but there were so many losses in his early life that he was haunted by death. his mother died when he was 9 years old, his only sister a few years later in childbirth. his first love, anne rutledge, at 22. moreover to, when his mother died, he didn't promise them that they would meet up again, she simply said, abraham, i'm going away from you now, and i shall never return. as a result, he was haunted by the thought that when our earthly life comes to an end, that's the end of us. it's dust to dust. so as he grew older, he seemed to adopt a great consolation in an old greek notion that you could live on if you accomplished something worthy enough so that your deeds could be told after your life, so your story could be told after you die. and i came to believe that that huge ambition which was so much larger than simply for office or power or celebrity, but rather as he said it, the desire to leave the world a little were br place for his having lived in it, that ambition carried him through all the early days of this his life, all those difficult times. it carried him through the one significant depression he had when he was in his early 30s when three things had come together to lay him low. he had broken his engagement to mary todd lincoln, not sure he was ready to get married but knowing how much it hurt her for doing so. his greatest friend, joshua spees, was leaving illinois to go back to kentucky, and his political career was on a downward slide. he once wrote to a friend at that time saying he was the most miserable man a ahive x his friends worried that he was suicidal. to they took all knives and razors and sid corpses -- scissors from his room, and joshua came to his side and said, lincoln, you must rally or you will die. he said i would just as soon die now, but aye not yet done anything no make any human being remember that i have lived x. then he expressed this lifelong desire to somehow accomplish something so that his story could be told after he died. he went back to the state legislature, he eventually won a seat in congress. he tried twice for the senate, lost twice. someone else might have said maybe you better go into a different profession, but instead he became a dark horse for the republican presidency in 860. everyone isn'ted sherd ward, the most -- seward to be the nominee. if not, they thought it would be claus, governor and senator from ohio. and if not chase, earthed ward bates, the elder statesman of missouri. but somehow lincoln became a dark horse candidate for that position. he worked harder than all the others. unlike the others, he had not made enemies along the way, and he won that mom to nation -- nomination, stunning the convention. but then he stunned the country even more by putting each one of these three rivals into his cabinet. it was unprecedented at the time especially when each of them thought he should have been president instead of lincoln. they were far more experienced, far more educated, and somebody said to him, why did you do this? he said it was very simple, these are the strongest men in the country. the country is in peril, the country needs their services. but maybe lyndon johnson would have put it more imply and more crudely are. better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in at you. [laughter] now, to be sure, seward, chase and bates were all strong and able men. but in the end, it was the prairie lawyer from illinois who proved the strongest of them all, becoming the undisputed captain of this unusual team of rivals. at as the arc of these relationships show, many of them came to love him by the end of his presidency. seward was so disappointed when he didn't become the nominee that at first he said as he walked around his hometown in new york he felt like he was hearing his obituary because people were feeling so bad about what happened to him. when he first assumed the job of secretary of state, he thought, i'll run this thing. i'll be a prime minister, he'll simply if a figurehead. but within months he came to understand lincoln was unlike anyone he'd ever known. he settled back to give up his own presidential ambitions, becoming lincoln's ally, his partner and, indeed, his closest friend during this period of time. lincoln loved nothing more than going to seward's house at avenue yet park talking about everything except the war. they went to the theater together more than a hundred times during his presidency. lincoln loving nothing more than to settle down in the darkness with a shakespeare play coming on and imagine himself back in another time, in another age. seward was affable, outgoing, loved good stories, loved to drink, loved to smoke his cigars. chase had almost the opposite personality. he spent his evenings writing in his diary or practicing jokes that he could never deliver with ease, forgetting the punchline. unlike seward, he refused to give up his own ambitions to be president. indeed, he tried about five times to be president of the united states. he had this relentless desire to be in the white house. in part, i think, because his own private life had been sod sad. he had married three young women, all of whom dued young. his wife in childbirth at 22, his next wife of tb at 25, his next wife in her early 30s so so that presidency became almost an obsession with him. so much so that even in 1864 while he's still secretary of the treasury, he's trying to organize the treasury as a machine against lincoln saying all sorts of mean things about lincoln. lincoln knows everything he's doing, but amazingly, he keeps him on the job because he realizes that chase is doing a fabulous job raising the loans and the money necessary to keep the troops in battle. and even more amazingly when he finally beats chase, of course, and wins the nomination and election in 1864, a vacancy arises in the supreme court, chief justice, and he appoints chase to position. and his friends come to him and say, lincoln, how can you do that? don't you know the horrible things chase has been saying about you? he says i know meaner things that chase has said about me than any of you do, and he said on a personal basis, i'd ratherring swallow a chair than appoint chase to this post. but he will be the best man for the rights of the emancipated slaves, and that's far more important than my personal feelingsing toward him. and he was right. chase served honorably in that post. lincoln was always able to have priorities of what mattered above everything else. now, bates, who becomes his attorney general, had almost the opposite around of life experience to chase, because at first he was very ambitious, as chase was. he was in the state legislature, elected to congress. but then he fell so deeply in love with his wife julia, that he said he just couldn't bear being away from her. he said i can get true the days okay, but the nights i'm so restless, i can't bear being away from you. so finally he gave up his political ambitions so he could be with his julia. it turned out he was with his julia quite often because they ended up having 17 children. [laughter] now, when he first becomes attorney general, he thinks, well, lincoln's rather unexceptional, nothing important. by the end of lincoln's presidency, he thinks lincoln is as near a perfect man as anyone he has ever met. but in some ways, the most remarkable transformation of attitudes towards lincoln took place between his secretary of war, stanton, and lincoln. they had met as young lawyers in the 1850s. lincoln known only in illinois, and when they met, there was this big patent case that stanton had, and it was supposed to be tried in illinois, so they thought they needed someone of counsel in illinois. interviewed lincoln, put him on the case. but then the case got transferred back to ohio. they didn't need lincoln anymore but they forgot to tell him. so he worked all summer on his brief. he was so excited. he went to cincinnati, he goes right up to stanton in his typically affable way and says let's go up to the courthouse together. stanton took one look at lend con, saw a big stain on his shirt, his trousers were too short. he turned to his partner and said we must get rid of this long-armed ape, he will hurt our cause and our case. they never opened the brief he had painstakingly prepared. lincoln left since natty feeling so -- cincinnati feeling so humiliates he said he never wanted to go back to the city again. nearly six years later when a vacancy arose in the post for secretary of war, everyone said stanton's the man for the job. he's blunt, he's passionate, he's brilliant, lincoln was somehow able to appoint him to that most powerful civilian post. and by the end of lincoln's presidency, stanton said that he had loved him more than anyone outside of his family. >> this sunday is the academy awards, and our look at nonfiction books that have been turned into movies continues with mark bowden's blackhawk down, a report on the 1993 american military mission in somalia gone wrong. the book was adapted into a movie in 2001 and was the recipient of two oscars. and now from our archives, mark bowden discussing his book. >> battle of mogadishu happened on october 3rd of 1993. and it started in the late afternoon, went about 20 u.s. army helicopters loaded with rakers and delta -- rangers and delta force operators launched to attack a target building in one of the most crowded and dangerous neighborhoods in mogadishu. the mission that day was to capture two lieutenants of a somali warlord, and the idea was that the delta that force operators in particular would land in these little helicopters called ah-6s right on the street in front of the house where these two somali clan leaders had been seen. they would take down the house, as they call it, arrest anyone inside, and a convoy of vehicles would pull up out in front of the target building. they would load up the prisoners and everybody else, and they would drive out of the city. now, they'd done six of these missions previous to this day, and they knew that they had about 30 minutes to get on the ground, round up their prisoners and load 'em up on vehicles and drive out of the city before they'd run into trouble. because they were going into a very densely populated city, and and mogadishu is perhaps, even more than detroit, the best armed city in the world. and so every minute that they were on the ground, somalis would be converging toward where they were, hot belt somalis, well-armed ones. and they knew that they had about 30 minutes before there would be enough somalis who had raced to this area or bussed in on these little buses that they would run into some real problems. but their tactics were speed and surprise, and they had relied on it previously with great success. on this day though, they ran into some problems. a number of things happened. probably the most important thing that happened is that one of the going rangers, as he went to grab the rope and slide down 70 feet to the street from a blackhawk, missed the rope and fell instead 70 feet to the street. his name was todd blackburn. now, todd was obviously very severely injured in the fall, and, you know, p bitch everything that happened over the -- given everything that happened over the next 15 hours, the force probably overreacted to his injuries. but it was, in their defense, the most serious injury the task force rangers had encountered in the six weeks or so they were in mogadishu. so they took stock, detached a couple vehicles from the convoy, lead loaded this keyed up and evacuated him as quickly as possible. but this delayed them by about three or four minutes. a number of other things happened that contributed to the delay, but at about 35 minutes into their mission, one of the blackhawk helicopters that had been flying in orbit overhead was hit by a rocket-propelled get maid and crashed about five blocks away from the target house. this, of course, changed everything. it meant that they weren't going to be able to load up on vehicles and race right out of the city. instead, they ended up, most of the force, trapped in the city overnight. and for about 15 hours, they fought against an overwhelmingly, an overwhelming number of somalis who basically formed a ring around where they were pinned down. and it wasn't until very early the next day when a gianten convoy of vehicles -- giant convoy of vehicles fought their way into the city and rescued them. this battle became over those 15 hours probably the most serious, sustained fire fight that soldiers had been involved in since the war in vietnam. i say probably, it isn't probably. it is the most serious gunfight that american soldiers have had. eighteen americans were killed in the battle, and i think very conservative estimates of 500 somalis were killed. over a thousand somali casualties. now, i was safe at home in my kitchen in new london, pennsylvania, when this battle took place. and i found out about it the same way that everybody else in this country did, by news reports on tv and by newspaper stories. i remember seeing those terrible images of dead american soldiers being dragged through the streets of the city. and i read the accounts in the days that followed. i went out, i think on the sunday after this, and picked up as many sunday papers as i could find to learn more about what had happened there. and what struck me about the story was this image of 99 american soldiers pinned down, surrounded, fighting for their lives. it didn't particularly strike me at that time as, you know, a terribly significant or important story for our times. it struck me as just an extraordinarily dramatic story. and i had long felt that for the kind of writing that i do, which is sort of intensive reporting and investigating in an effort to be able to write a true story, to write nonfiction with as much drama and detail as fiction. and what would be a better or more compelling subject matter for that treatment than combat? so i remember reading these stories and thinking, my god, what a great story this is. and thinking that, boy, some writer was going to get a chance to tell a great story. and being the go-getter that i am, i didn't do anything at all for about two years. [laughter] i didn't do anything because i figured if i could see what a great story this was, that there were hundreds of writers who would see that, and i have no military background. nor have i ever written about the military. so i assumed that writers who specialized in this sort of thing would be all over this sooner. and by the time, if i even wanted to do it myself, and i had no idea each how to begin, but -- by the time i got up to speed, there would be people way ahead of me working on it. so i went to work on other things. in the spring of 1996, this is now more than two and a half years after this battle took place, the "philadelphia inquirer", where i work, assigned me to a story in the magazine section. every four years, every presidential election cycle the inquirer does a cover story in the magazine on each of the major candidates for president. and in 1996 i got the booby prize, which was to write about bill clinton. now, i say booby prize not to unsubtle the president -- insult the president, but because as a writer, it's a very difficult assignment. he's easily, if not the most, one of the most written-about people in the world in the previous four or five years. so what is mark bowden going to write about bill clinton that's worth anybody's time to read or even worth any of my time to write? it's not as though i'm going to go hang out with him at camp david for the weekend and form, you know, a personal impression. so i began casting around for a way of writing a story about the president, and what occurred to me was i could choose a series of small stories or anecdotes where the president interacted with other people in varying capacities, official and unofficial. go to those people and interview them about how the president handled himself in those situations and write the story on on that basis. and so the first of these anecdotes that occurred to me was i had read in 1994 a little 7-inch wire service story about a meeting that the president had at the white house with family members of men who had been killed in this battle. .. >> mortal life of henrietta lacks, a woman whose cells taken from her without her knowledge, became the source of important scientific discoveries. in 2017, oprah winfrey produced and stared in the movie by the psalm -- starred in the movie by the same name. here's a portion of that interview. >> guest: scientists have been trying to grow cells for decades, and it had never worked. no one knows entirely why, but hers just never died. her cells are still alive today, though she died in 1951, and it became one of the most important things that happened in >> they are the baseline for any research. to know how cells behave and what to expect from them in a dish for when it's exposed to a drug or something else. and the cells react, they know what they are starting from the vacancy how it changes. >> what are the fears for the reasons that her cells survive? >> there aren't any. we know that she had hpv, which is the virus that causes cervical cancer and that it inserts itself into your dna and changes. that's how it causes cancer. there's something about the hpv and how it interrupted with her cells that cause the cancer itself to be very the ãshe had a nickel sized tumor. it's not huge. but it went from that nickel size within six months, every organ have been taken over by cancer. so it grew very fast. more than her doctor had ever seen before. there was something special about her tumor. we know there is an enzyme in the cells that rebuild the chromosome. they don't age. they sort of stay young and never die. but why herself do that and others didn't is still a bit of a mystery. >> tell us about her family. tell us about her background. he said she was a tobacco farmer. but a little bit more information. >> she worked in the same farmland her ancestors had founded. a very impoverished family. she moved up - - her husband found work in baltimore so that's how she ended up at hopkins. she had five kids by the time she died at 30. and she was just a caretaker. she wanted more children. she was very devoted to her kids. if you were in baltimore and you didn't have money and we needed a place to stay, you've slept on her floor. if you are hungry, there was always a pot of food on the stove. she was this supermom to everyone. for her family, the fact that they have helped so many people make sense in terms of her personality and what she would have done. her soul is very much alive. but she was brought back as an angel to take care of people. the family has very conflicted feelings about the cells. their three kids are still alive today. her family didn't know the cells have been taken until the 70s. >> how did they find out? >> scientists, after the cells had grown. they hadn't really seen cells like them. and to learn more, scientist decided to track down her kids and do research on them in order to understand the cells. her husband who had a third grade education, he didn't know what a cell was. the way he understood it was, we got your wife, she's alive in a laboratory. we've been doing research on her for the last 25 years and now we have to test your kids to see if they have cancer. none of which the scientists said. but he thought they had her in a cell. that was his understanding of the word. so if you got sucked into the world of research that they didn't understand and the scientists didn't realize the family didn't understand. it had pretty dramatic effects on her family. and they've been struggling ever since. a lot of them are very emotional. her daughter very much believes her mother is alive in those cells. the scientist question, if you're sending her cells in space, can she rest in peace. when you inject them with chemicals, does that somehow hurt her? her son found out early on that henrietta's cells were also the first commercialized. they were bought and sold. her family can't afford health insurance. they were quite poor. they often say, if our mother was so important, why can't we go to the doctor? they've never gotten an answer to the question. >> has there ever been litigation? >> not for the family. there have been other. i think it's access to legal counsel. - - the courts have always ruled against people. the way the case stands, is you don't have property rights in your tissue once they leave your body. >>. [indiscernible] what about the johns hopkins doctor who took these beautiful was that? >> there are a lot of them. there was a team of doctors. howard jones was her initial doctor who saw this tumor and diagnosed it. there was this team at hopkins doing this research on the cervical cancer. the scientists who grew the cells were different from her doctors. so they gave them to the scientist. he gave them all away for free. no one ever patented the cells. that wasn't something you did in the 50s. he gave them to anyone who he thought would use them for science. they quickly went all over the world. i one point, factory was set up to where they were mass-produced to about 3 trillion cells per week. the volume of the cells was incomprehensible. >> warehouse had the cells gone? - - where else. >> you can use them as a baseline. you can grow various things. if you want to grow a certain protein. the research, if you go to a scientific database and you type in - - it's like going to google and type in the word, and. - - is the name of the self. and it's still going. i can't member the exact number. the journals published each month is around 3000 papers per month. >> in 1938, the race for seabiscuit was an international sensation. lauren hillenbrand chronicled how they can turn to this course into a sports icon. the film, starring colby maguire and jeff bridges was nominated for seven academy awards. now, from our archives, here's lauren hillenbrand talking about seabiscuit. >> tell is how charles was first introduced to the source and seabiscuit >> he and his wife were sitting in the - - the lowest level of horse race going on. he looked down at a very ugly horse and so did his wife and they were watching them. he bet her a lemonade that the horse would win. she thought this was silly and said no. and the horse won. they shared their lemonade. they both had a couple of intuition. he could recognize potential and unlikely packages. and he liked the source. he told the trainer to go look at him and he thought him. >> the head but. >> the trainer went back to look at the horse and he recognized him from seeing him earlier in his career. he liked the personality of the horse. the past performances were terrible. this horse had lost and lost and lost. but there was something about him he liked. he brought charles howard over to the barn area and said you better look at him. and the horse gave him a big headbutt. that was it for howard's hearts. >> i think, personally, there are three climaxes to this book. - - and frankly how you pieced together almost, how you put them together. we certainly don't have enough time for those of you who have not read the book, if there are any of you.don't want to give away the ãbut i do want to talk about - -. after reading your book and studying this. this race sounded like what the super bowl would be today. >> there were 40 million people listening to the race between seabiscuit and war admiral. it took two years to put this race together. >> including the president who put the staff on hold to listen to this race. >> he was listening to the horse race. you read about special trains coming from matches like this. describe the festive environment of a match such as that. >> i spoke to the man who arranged the match race. who died a couple years ago. he said, this was an event that everything a person in america. about. it was in every single newspaper. i went through hundreds of papers and you can see articles on it in virtually every single one. big front-page kind of stories. people speculating. people getting angry about it. on race day, they got 40,000 people into the track and they were only seats for 16,000 to 10,000 people were outside the gate hanging from trees and sitting on roofs. all the people i spoke to were there that day. most of them were just about all kids at the time. said it was really the greatest sporting event they ever saw. >> you have probably seen every photo and manageable. describe that photo for me. >> that's the start. war admiral was a very high strung horse at the gate. >> we will pass this around but take a look at the fence behind the horses. these people are 10 rows deep standing outside the track. watching this race. what is incredible about this is how this country stood still for a race like this. horse racing at that time, is it safe to say this may have been the true first national pastime before baseball? >> i would say that. it dates back well into colonial times. it was a big sport of presidents. and this was a combination of quite a long time of horse racing in america. >> you have a special show and tell here today. tell us what these are. >> those are seabiscuit's shoes. >> we will not be passing these around.[laughter] >> those are very big feet for thoroughbred. a friend of mine who wrote the biography of secretariat. he outweighed seabiscuit by maybe 300 pounds. and was much taller and his shoe couldn't fit inside seabiscuit issue. he was an awkwardly built horse. >> we are with lauren hillenbrand. we will take some questions from the audience. have your hands up and ready to go. first question, right here. >> if seabiscuit - - [indiscernible]. >> i think most of it was hard. his desire to win which was simply phenomenal. the people i spoke to that road him said they'd never been around the horse that tried so hard. his jockey said - - i think that was it.>> i was impressed you didn't personify seabiscuit too much. not a lot of human emotions to his behavior. i'm wondering if that was a challenge.i do want to stick to one behavior, which was he said - - seabiscuit would hold back a little bit and then search for toward the end. how do we know he did that deliberately? >>. [laughter] >> one of the fortunate things about writing the book at the time is they were so few people around that had handled the source that had ridden him. i spoke to two people who wrote him regularly. they both swore up and down this horse was teasing his opponents. he would get next to them and the liberally slow down.he'd snort in their faces. he'd let them get a little ahead and then below by them at the last second. if you spend enough time around horses, they understand competition. they enjoy it. they understand when they won or lost. this horse was a highly intelligent horse and he clearly understood it. >> one of my favorite passages in the book was - - [inaudible question]. do you ever consider writing fiction? >> thank you so much. that's a huge compliment. it is what i enjoy most about writing. the description of things. small things especially. trying to capture what they are. sooner or later, i will write novel. when i was a teenager, i would write obsessively, fiction. i didn't think i'd end up writing history but, i kind of fell into it . >> it's a great read. i couldn't put it down. >> thank you. [applause] >> you talked about seabiscuit's heart and that was clear throughout the book but especially clear in the race. who was it that told you about the fear in war admiral's eyes. >> george wolf did a lot of detailed interviews about that match race. i had the wonderful luxury of writing about this race in that everybody did detailed interviews. george was a very observant man. he would tell you very tiny things about what horses were doing that could tell you a lot. which way a horses ear was pointing. which waythey were looking. that's where i got that from . >>. [inaudible question] >> it is and it's the most beautiful racetrack in the world. it still that rustic color and they have very - - racing much of the year. the mountains are behind it and they are just lovely. >> seabiscuit was the best book i've ever read. [applause] it's engaging. it transports you back in time. i felt like i was living with those people. it's just a phenomenal book. having said that, i'd like to know, why do you think seabiscuit - - [indiscernible] >> that's one thing i wish i could do differently. right that more clearly. the triple crown is only open to three-year-old horses. when seabiscuit was three, he was simply awful. nowhere near fast enough to compete. as a matter of fact, his stablemate was a favorite. i believe the day that grantville ran in the kentucky derby, seabiscuit was running $25 in new york.he just wasn't good enough then. had he been in the hands of tom smith at that point, i'm almost certain he would have won a triple crown quite easily. >> all the programs from our look at nonfiction books that have been adapted into movies are available to view at booktv.org. >> espn.com senior writer howard bryant on sports and race in america. he's interviewed by author and former nba player, even thomas. >> whether it's dealing with police, your work ethic. you are looking at other people. i mean your white counterparts. able to do things you can't to because there are two sets of rules. >> i noticed my white counterparts never question their own competence. they assume they belong. they always assume they belong. and yet, when you begin to look at the actual raw numbers of who gets hired and who doesn't. we are talking about this obviously in sports over the nfl coaching and how frustrating. it's almost like a full dissidents moment that nfl coaches are having where they are recognizing the matter how much time we put in and how much it. we have, they don't want us. >> watch authors charles murray and howard bryant this week and on booktv on c-span2. >> or a spouse. not one of them said, ban all guns but not one of them was unreasonable. all they said was, we need to find reasonable gun reform to what happened to my child or my family never happens to anybody else.now, that actually gave me some hope that we can get something done in washington. because if there was ever a group of people who are rational people who have the right to argue their position irrationally, it was this group of people. and they didn't do that. so i went to washington. i sat down with a number of senators and congressmen. you want to talk about rational people arguing irrationally? it was so disappointing. surprising. and maddening that we can't get anything done on this particular issue. they should talk to the woman that i talked to and have breakfast with that day that we sat and talked. if you're a parent. you can't even imagine. what this has to be like. i sat with this woman who looked at me and said, it's been a month since my son was killed. i go into his room every night and sit on his bed and i talked to him. imagine that. washington can't even do background checks. 90 percent of these people agree that there should be background checks. we've got to do something about this. i try to talk to congress about the inconsistencies in the gun laws. you know what a lot of the response was?are you sure? yes senator, i'm sure. he is to be 21 to buy an from about red federal licensed firearm dealer like us. you can buy that at 18. makes no sense. you need to have a background check if you want to buy a gun on the internet. if i want to buy a gun from someone that lives in new york, have to have a background check. if i live in pittsburgh, if i want to buy a gun over the internet no background check. just by the gun and off you go. we need to change some of these inconsistencies. >> to watch the rest of this program, visit booktv.org and search for ed stack or the title of his book, how we play the game using the box at the top of the page. >> next on booktv "after words", journalist andrea bernstein chronicles the trump and questioners families rise to prominence. "after words" is a weekly program interviewing top fiction authors about their latest work. all "after words" programs are also available as podcasts.

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