Spring and summer long on our crowd cast a channel and i want to take a moment to say thank you to the Madison Public Library and the Madison Public Library foundation. Their support for online cultural events has been absolutely unwavering. Im just so excited to see john nichols. The support for these events has been unwavering and theyve been so dedicated to bringing these author events to all of you whether you are watching in your home in madison or across the country or across the globe we have seen an incredible uptick in our audience, people from all over and its just absolutely wonderful to see the response so thank you to everyone here tonight and all of the sponsors that made sure that these keep going. Without further ado i would like to bring you to the screen and step away myself. Hello everyone thank you for joining and larry thanks for coming all the way from massachusetts to be here tonight. Larry is on cape cod as we speak and we have about 100 people with us and as was explained upfront we will take questions and i will ask larry some questions at the start and then about halfway in we will invite questions from you folks and wherever you want to take it we are excited to go there. Let me say a couple of things about larry and first and foremost he is a journalist and his books are journalism at its very best. We live in a time when journalism is under attack not only by political figures but also the economic forces of the moment in which we live and the challenges we face and so it is a great honor to be with a journalist into someone who really has practiced the craft and some of the most creative and exciting ways i will also mention we are talking tonight about another book put out, demagogues book on the former senator from wisconsin but i do want to emphasize larry has books worthy of your attention if you havent read them already. His biography of Bobby Kennedy was brilliant and really took the exploration to some new and exciting places. His biography that is a vital contribution to not just the sports history but the history of. The chairman of the marks on washington in 1963. You chose the word, demagogue. Why was that . Before i answer that question i just want to say that john is one of the many people that i interviewed for this book and two things stood out. One, he was the youngest person i interviewed when i was trying to get a sense of people that knew the mccarthy era and he was among the smartest people i interviewed. Any of you that are wisconsin readers know his work from the times and the nation and all kinds of other places hes published so having somebody as tuned in to not just mccarthy about his contexbut his contextn was extraordinary. The reason i picked a oneword title that wasnt mccarthys name is because this is a book that is about americas love affair with bullies from the earliest days until today and i felt the subtitle would capture the sense that it was front and center in this book and it was important to see him in the context. The reason we are here talking about him talking about him after his crusade is because he was the archetype for this figure in American History. Thats a longwinded explanation and a promise t i promise to ker answers shorter. A. We are here to hear what you have to say. I will keep you right on the title for a second. You used the term the life and long shadow of joe mccarthy. Give us a sense of what you mean by that. Is it the impact of what he did or is it this broad notion of the demagogue . We cast the shadow because of the impact of what he did and not just as joe mccarthy but the orchestrator of the movement, mccarthyism and its also to say we just cant stop with his death. We have to look how we influence the demagogues that came after him whether it be duke, George Wallace or people who are in the political context today. I want to say one other thing. The temptation with a lot of the interviews ive been doing on mccarthys to talk about donald trump, and this is really a book about mccarthy. Donald trumps name is mentioned in the preface and the epilogue and yet his story and the story of others is there in a way and every page of the book. And as long as you brought trump up im going to join you and try to avoid a deep discussion of him, but tell me when you started putting this book together it was around the start of his presidency, wasnt it . A week before the election i signed up to write a different book and that was the biography of barack obama and the day after the election i realized we wouldnt know the legacy until after the era of trump is over and it became apparent to me the day after the election what i thought was a story of also ancient history in terms of demagoguery was a story today we have not outgrown this affair, this attraction to bullies in the way that i hoped we had. Lets get into the book a little bit. One interesting element you take a very casual approach in referring to him to say it has a wonderful narrative throughout, just a great stream going through it. Its a little bit like being, i dont know, maybe sitting out in front of somebodys house with somebody who starts to tell a very long story and its very human. I think if you are writing a biography of somebody you have to humanize them and make the reader feel like they are getting into this. If this persons life whether it is somebody you think of by the end of the book as a hero or a villain. The same way Bobby Kennedy i talked about him generally using the word bobby and that was a conscious decision. Its to try to get in and see him from the inside. I saw that on the one hand, i want to go back actually to a quote thats one of the reasons i had to joe mccarthy in the back of my head ever since i was doing my research and its a quote from the one person of the 450 people i interviewed for the book irreplaceable, a woman named ethel kennedy, his widow and she said something about joe mccarthy i couldnt get out of my head and it was joe mccarthy my to be a monster too much of america, but to bobby and me, he was just plain good fun. The idea of joe mccarthy is good fun was counter intuitive to me. I felt there was some side of him that caused wisconsin to overwhelmingly elect him into two different statewide elections i wanted to understand so i came out of this book feeling like on the one hand, joe mccarthy became much more of a human being as opposed to the caricature we study in our history books than i had ever realized. He is somebody i would have loved to have gone out for a beer with and sat down and really understood all of his charms and ability to convince ethel and Bobby Kennedy he was a great guy to spend time with. On the other hand, the documents i looked at made him seem even more sinister than the history books did so the upside was he became more of a human being. The downside was a lot of the political things he did and his motivation and doing them the more we could see some of the papers that gave the more candid sense of that made him omit somebody if you went out for a beer at night that would be fine but you sure wouldnt be on the witness stand when he was growing you during the day. One of the most interesting things about mccarthy was his ability to joke with the people he was about to attack or jokingly attack them. We remember the stories of John Patrick Hunter longtime political reporter who battled with mccarthy throughout the 40s, throughout the 50s for sure and plan hunter would go to events he said he started to hide behind the polls at evens because he knew if mccarthy saw him in the crowd he would launch into a rather jovial attack but it wouldnt be so meanspirited it would almost be for the fun and the joking in the crowd and i think that was very common. That suggests two things. One he didnt understand how brutal he was. Being there with an angry crowd was putting hunter at risk and i think mccarthy didnt quite get that aspect of it but it also was joe mccarthy did see this as a bit of a game and assumed everybody who was there, journalist ojournalists or polie was going after what understand that it was a game and understand the rules and they would be able to go after with him and put it all behind them because after all it was a game. I think youre right about that and it comes out in your book and quite a few ways because you do talk about these human relationships he had along the way. I dont want to go through the whole narrative of the story because i think people should read the book that i am interested in your thoughts about at the start of his career he was a new deal democra deal t one point or at least relatively liberal character. Was that opportunistic or do you think that is where he started and that it evolved into Something Else . You cant talk about much of anything with joe mccarthy and an opportunistic element. Was he the liberal he started as or the ultraconservative he ended up as and i think where he started out is where he hand the most choice. When he ran for the District Attorney he ran not just as a new deal fdr loving democrat but i think as somebody who was fired up enough about that if he believed that that was what was best for the country and also his irish roots that suggested the party where he belonged and i think the only time he questioned his being a democrat and liberal is when he realized he couldnt be elected from the area he grew up and he was going to do whatever it took to be elected so some night probably in the middle of the night when no one was looking he changed his Party Registration to republican and as you know the story it wasnt just that he became republican, but the opening in the Republican Party, thparty,the progressive wing ofe Republican Party was taken up by robert junior and the opening was the stalwart republicans, the most conservative element and if that was the opening joe mccarthy was going to take it if it meant changing his ideology, he was going to do that. He did whatever it took and i think that that was if there was any theme that ran throughout his life, it was the theme whatever it took. Were there people along the way who helped him make that change . I am thinking of some of the folks in appleton particularly. There were a lot of people who helped him. One was his best friend and advisor and he helped to steer him. The people at the newspaper helped steer him. He helped lots of people who ended up being his enablers, his benefactors and he was willing to take advice from anybody willing to serve the ends of joe mccarthy and they liked that. That made him appealing. A. I think that from the comments that were made over the years to everybody from journalists to authors to his children, they suggest he truly adored joe mccarthy and understood his flaws and shortcomings as well as anybody did that he was a loyal friend and stuck with him and never publicly repudiated him even when his temptation was to do that and when he was telling his kids mccarthy had gone off the rails again. I think that was a lot of people had a lot of loyalty to joe mccarthy including somebody whose entire family was representing the iconic liberal first family of america, the kennedys. Bobby kennedy remained loyal he not only never publicly questioned him, but when his brother said stay away from mccarthys funeral in appleton in 57, bobby said thank you, jack, thats interesting advice. He flew in with all of his republican congressional people and on the one hand he went up in the loft so nobody could see him at the funeral, at the Graveside Service he stood to the side where nobody could see him. After the funeral he begged the journalists who were there not to put his name in the stories and not get him in trouble with his big brother but until the very end and until today the kennedys generally in the body specifically state a very loyal and mccarthy for all of his flaws he was a guy tha the guy t inspired on a personal level that kind of an enormous loyalty. Is also notable john kennedy who danced around mccarthy rather than standing up to him. John kennedy had a different relationship. Bobby was a more straightforward. John kennedy was always thinking of the next step and im convinced the day john kennedy was born he started plotting his president ial campaign. His father did that absolutely but jack picked it up quickly. In 1952 when john kennedy was a relatively unknown and an unaccomplished congressman from massachusetts running against a powerful Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to try to take that seat away from the republicans, joe kennedy had one request which was stay the heck out of massachusetts. Joe kennedy had given enough money to mccarthy that whatever he asked, mccarthy was likely to say yes. Joe kennedy was smart enough to say if he came to massachusetts and campaigned for the republican lodge, lots of Irish Catholic voters who loved joe mccarthy whether they were republicans or more likely democrats they would do what he said to do. And mccarthy obviously had the backing of the Party Establishment but and epic figure in the state and it appears that at least early on he did not take mccarthy seriously enough. So you just captured through the campaigns and his campaign seldom took him seriously, tone tom coleman who was the dean of the star republicans never took him seriously as the guy and tom colemans dream was somehow beating lafollette so that joe mccarthy call to do it is something that he didnt except that he watched mccarthy father can activist that he was so determined to him and he was the guy he had to get behind the desk behind i think he is getting older and been an opportunist long enough sure she wanted another return and to fight dirty like he had to do to music i like joe mccarthy he raise legitimate issues like whether that had been captured by the public and establishment and he still have the business in wisconsin and then also fought dirty so that he had a home in virginia and was a mansion and that was all it considered home, not wisconsin and anybody shouldnt have had to show that have deep roots in the state of wisconsin, was something his family he had given up as much better time that he came back and started to campaign hard it was essentially over and one by our hustling his opponent. It will is very close, a very close election and unlike the election for mccarthy and it was the toughest selection so conditions of washington showing up as one of the biggest surprises were least qualified new senator to take a seat like that but also from his earliest days to give an indication that nobody had been thing attention, he was somebody to be reckoned with bestselling bombs even before seated in the senate and then to think about a Death Penalty with a thought that nobody knows i think he did. He just knew instinctively everybody being outrageous and to say it and put them on page one and it was partly by a charming them. For mccarthy may have won the 46 primary because of the rise of the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party actually and 46 had been on the sidelines had genuine candidates and genuine competition and code run for governor and macquarie was a good candidate in primaries congressional seats and then that energy. You are exactly why the cliched story is mccarthy is elected purpose of congress and much more important was the fact there was a Democratic Alternative that would have been attempted to go to the Republican Party and stick with him there in a democratic very and then to offer a real alternative for the first time. That was just one more miscalculation on his part as a kingmaker that may have been otherwise. But its very and focused he didnt find his mark right away. You are being kind to him he gets there at the start of 47 he didnt find his mark until early 50. He tried a lot of issues some more legitimate way cozying returning our servicemen over some issues i think were outrageous suggesting an element of anti semitism like defending the perpetrators and defending the nazi perpetrators that the jewish prosecutors could not be objective and this was a victors justice. He tried just about everything with an issue to grab onto and not until february 1950 he found one that turned out to be a magical. Because he was outrageous and bumbling and because the Democratic Party trying to get its act together with the attorney generals job but mccarthy was starting to get scared he may be vulnerable wanting to make a name and to go so far and then to have desperate focused because he was coming up for reelection. If you made it three years still looking to take time by any ambitious democrats because you look so weak and illdefined that would abandon and embarrassment to lose the battle for reelection and because Holding Onto Power that was vital to joe mccarthy making it had a very young age only in his wildest dreams would he concede he would make it to which is wh why. So one of the great things that you discover in your Research Going to west virginia. You are exactly right so as his staff as called it we are talking about february 1950 on the one day of the year when republicans all across the country do the same thing on abraham lincolns birthday they celebrate as a way to rally the party and raise money. You are a prominent us senator you get invited to places like milwaukee or boston or washington or new york. Mccarthy gets invited to west virginia. He shows up at night with two speeches in his briefcase one is a snoozer on National Housing policy what she knew about and cared about and if the part that speech to give that night 70 years later we were not be talking about him because he would have been a one term senator. Instead he pulls out of his briefcase a speech im convinced he would the first time while delivering it that night written by a journalist and various staffers who did the editing. He pulls up in his hand a sheaf of papers and as part of the speech he has a list of 205 names at the state Department Names truman should have known about got rid of and this is a scary thing. He did this at a moment in American History where we were scared to death about the soviet threat. We had watched recently nationalist