Hello, good afternoon. Welcome to politics and prose. Thank you for coming out on this very beautiful day. Were very pleased to have Cara Robertson here to talk about her new book the trial of Lizzie Borden. First a little housekeeping. Lets all take a moment to silence our cell phones. Ill do that, too. We are recording. Cspan is with us today so we just dont want any extra noise interruptions. Also, after cara speaks, there will be time for a q a. If you have a question youd like to ask her, if you could use this microphone here so we can pick it all up, that would be great. Many of you know we have a lot going on at politics and prose. To check it out, read our Events Calendar and our social media. If you enjoy this book, you may enjoy our true crime Book Group that meets every month at 7 00 in the coffee house. Im very happy to introduce Cara Robertson. She is a lawyer. She was educated at Harvard And Harvard law school, formerly a law clerk. She served as a regional adviser for the former yugoslavia at the hague and was a visiting scholar at the law school. She started investigating Lizzie Bordens trial in law school. This is her first book. In it she addresses one of the most infamous murders in american history, the murders of andrew and Abby Borden and the subsequent trial of their daughter lizzie was so internationalized that they remain important even thousand, over 120 years later. Robertson strips away the details and using primary sources like court transcripts and lizzies own letters. She talks about how the gilded age set up Lizzies Treatment and set up the stage for what Lizzie Borden has become. Now heres Cara Robertson. [ applause ] im not expecting a call. This is just to make sure i dont speak too long. Thank you so much for coming, particularly on such a beautiful day. Also i think that when youve been working on a subject for as long as i have, there is always a fear that youre involved in some sort of intellectual stockholm syndrome. Its nice to know once the book is actually out, there are people who might want to know a little more about it. What i would like to do is tell you a little more about what drew me into the case to give you a sense of what my approach is. Although its a very familiar case to many people, ill give you a background about the story so were all kind of on the same page for the Question And Answer period. And i look forward to knowing what it is that grabs you about the case. I started out by thinking that something like this, a great public trial would be a good way to get a window into the gilded age, which was a time of great Change And Tension in american society. Also one that seems uncannily like our own in some regards at this point. You know, some of that is because, obviously, in a trial, the lawyers need to explain in a way that is comprehensible to people who are specifically supposed to be representative of the community at large, the jury, how something might have happened. So it gives one, i think, good insight into the stories that a culture wants and expects to hear. And it also i found while doing the research, it made me question also the sharp distinction that many people from a Law Background make between what the legal professionals do and what, for example, the lawyers might argue to the jury. It seemed to me that the same cultural assumptions were at play when the lawyers and the judges were discussing the evidence rulings as when the lawyers were making their arguments specifically to the jury. So thats just something that i had in the back of my mind. For this particular story, i must say i was attracted to the mystery, that its technically speaking. Its a whodunit. And even if youre pretty sure who did it, its certainly a whydunit. But in that mystery is almost a locked room story, a locked Room Mystery out of the gilded age. There is a small space, there are limited number of suspects. Its very difficult as a practical matter to understand how anyone could have done it at all, and its certainly difficult to know how anyone besides the person who was ultimately put on trial for it could have done it. So it has some of the, if you will, the puzzling out for those of us who like mysteries. It also has a mythical quality. At its base, its a story of an extremely unhappy family, and the tensions that erupt that many people see as symbolic of wider social questions or familial relations. That was basically my patrolman, and i probably should give you a nonspoiler alert, which is that i dont actually solve the mystery in the course of the story, that i thought it was important to lay out the story from the beginning to the verdict to the strange cultural afterlife of the case without officially taking a position so that it would be as evenhanded as possible and would allow the readers to puzzle it out for themselves. Theres always something that feels a little bit like a cheat when youre reading a Nonfiction Narrative and theres a solution to the central mystery. Its hard not to think that and i think this has been the case with prior works on the borden mystery, you do have a sense that people are really emphasizing and deemphasizing parts of the story. Again, that was something i didnt want to do. Anyway, all of that is the background. Just to begin with what we know for certain, and that is on august 4th, 1892, andrew and Abby Borden, an elderly couple, were found hacked to death, in the words of their local paper, in their Fall River, massachusetts home. Mrs. Borden had been felled by 19 blows in the upstairs guest room, and an hour and a half later, after he returned from a Business Trip downstairs, mr. Borden himself was killed by 10 blows while he was having a nap on the sitting room sofa. So it was a pretty horrifying scene regardless of anything else. I mean, that that alone was enough to generate generate frontpage news, but the police soon discovered some anomalies. You know, they expected, as i said, that this was the work of a madman and that some crazed stranger would be found wandering the streets with an axe or a hatchet, but they noted two central facts. The first was, as i have mentioned in describing the murders, the interval between the murders seemed odd. You know, it was strange that that someone from the outside would have come in, killed mrs. Borden, waited at least an hour and a half to kill mr. Borden and then departed. It was a small house, quite narrow, with no Central Halls because it had been a converted Twofamily Tenement House so there werent that many places to hide and there were other people in the house. So if someone from the outside had come in, that person would have had to elude the others. And the second even more important point was that the house seemed to have been locked. The front door was certainly locked, and the back door was certainly locked. That left a Side Door that was kept closed and latched by custom of the house and was often in the sight of the familys housekeeper, but it wasnt conclusively shown that it was locked throughout, but thats still left very little room for an outside perpetrator to have come in. So the police turn their attention to the people known to be in the house at the time. There were three others who woke up in the house that morning who survived the carnage. The first was a man named john morse. He was andrew bordens brotherinlaw. He had been the brother of andrews first wife. Abby who was killed upstairs as i mentioned was his second wife, and he had arrived the day before to pay a visit on the bordens, and that seemed suspicious to many people. He was also an attractive suspect because, you know, he was an outsider. He was from the west. He was a horse trader. People said he consorted with gypsy traders who were down in westport, and there were just things about him that werent so appealing so he seemed plausible, but he had an alibi that was straight out of a detective novel. Shortly after breakfast, he had gone to visit other relatives in a different part of town, and he had been riding on the Horse Car with six priests. [ laughter ] and while, you know, if that were an agatha christie, he would have definitely done it. That seemed like a pretty good alibi. That left two women who were in the house at the time of the murders. The first, Bridget Sullivan, the familys irish catholic housekeeper who incidentally was called maggie by everyone except mrs. Borden, and the reason she was called maggie is because maggie is the name of their last housekeeper, and they just couldnt be bothered to learn a new name, so anyway, mrs. Borden did maggie, aka Bridget Sullivan, another favor which was to ask her to wash windows that morning inside and outside, so that meant that Bridget Sullivan happened to be outside washing windows in sight of other people at the time that mrs. Borden was killed, and so that seemed to rule her out of that possible murder, and it was thought that whoever killed mrs. Borden had killed mr. Borden as well. At the time mr. Borden was killed, she was upstairs in her attic room napping. The family had suffered from some Food Poisoning the day before, and she was feeling unwell and possibly was getting a head start on her on her usual Thursday Half day. So that left one person, and that was andrew bordens younger daughter lizzie who was 32 years old, unmarried, still living at home. She had an older sister named emma who was ten years older, but she had been away visiting friends for about two weeks so she was definitely in the clear, and there were a number of suspicious things about lizzie. The first was that she hadnt actually looked for her stepmother when she discovered her Fathers Body at around 11 00. She said her stepmother had received a note and had gone out. No note was ever found. An investigation failed to disclose any potential sender of the note. It was also the case that she seemed to give, you know, shifting accounts of where she was. She said that she was downstairs ironing handkerchiefs at the time that mrs. Borden died, a task that was significantly left undone and that she was outside in the barn looking variously for a sinker, for a Fishing Line or a piece of tin to fix a screen and also eating pears in the upper part of the barn at the time her father was murdered. All of this probably wouldnt have been enough to place her under arrest, but it was also discovered that she had tried to buy poison the day before the murders. She had gone to the local Drug Store or she was identified as a woman who had gone to the local drugstore, to be totally precise, and asked for acid supposedly to clean a seal skin cape. The druggist said, we only sell that on doctors prescriptions, and this particular woman insisted she had done so on various occasions. But no one believed that she had actually that that woman had actually managed to purchase the acid, and the bordens themselves were not poisoned. But it went a long way towards explaining why a woman might turn to a readily available household implement to execute a murder as planned that she had already formed. Poison was considered to be a womans weapon, and so that that held a lot of sway, and it also was discovered that the family seemed implacably divided between the generations, that there was a lot of ill feeling and that lizzie in particular had disliked her stepmother. So all of these things culminated in Lizzie Bordens arrest, and that catapulted what would have been probably a passing horror into something much darker and a case of international significance. So at this point, im just going to read you the description of the Newspaper Coverage of the opening of the trial. The trial of Lizzie Borden, according to the Providence Journal would be one of the greatest murder trials in the worlds history. The new York World more modestly declared it the trial of the most extraordinary criminal case in the history of new england. The Boston Globe proclaimed it will be impossible to exaggerate the interest felt and manifested by intelligent readers throughout the country in the outcome of this trial of a comparatively young woman for the murder of her father and stepmother. The globe estimated that among its own readership there are at this moment 100,000 persons devoting what they are pleased to call their minds in a hopeless analysis of this tremendous case. To satisfy this demand so many correspondents and reporters came to New Bedford, to see whether the New Bedford had a more unique collection of writers were ever to detail a murder trial. Some of them, you know, included many of what you might call the boldfaced names of the day, journalists who were so famous that they themselves wrote memoirs and were were talked of in the same way as significant literary figures. One was a man named Joe Howard Jr. Who covered the case for the Boston Globe. He was at the time the highest paid correspondent in america. He traveled, it was said, with a blond stenographer, and he paid a great deal of attention of bringing his readers into the courtroom so that people could follow along in the proceedings, not just what actually happened while the While Court was in session but also the sense of urgency that so many felt in their attempts to get into the courthouse. The fact that so many women were in the audience. The numbers of women steadily increased throughout the trial so that by the end more than half were women. Some even put the number higher, and he would scan the crowd for, you know, pretty faces as he was wont to do and other celebrities of the day, you know, would receive mention. He turned minor court officials into characters so that the readers would have the you know, the pleasure of reading about their, you know, the familiar people and the pomposity of the sheriff or the eloquence of the lawyer. He even reported on the activities as what he referred to as the cow of the day which was a cow that just happened to be across the street whose mooing was kind of audible at different moments and seemed to provide a commentary. The globe said that the that joe howards cow will go down in history on the same level as mrs. Olearys cow, the cow that, you know, started the chicago the chicago fire. And in terms of what they were looking at, of course, the person who was of most interest to all of the correspondents was Lizzie Borden herself, and she presented a conundrum for people because she had this quite extraordinary selfpossession, and that was read in opposing ways so that for those who were inclined to think that she was guilty, they saw her, as one newspaper wrote, as the sphinx of coolness, someone with this detachment that suggested the kind of masculine nerve that was consistent with premeditated violence and not consistent with, you know, late 19th century notions of proper infinity. For those who were inclined to be sympathetic, and as happened turned out to be most reporters from out of town especially like joe howard, they saw this consistent with the kind of inborn dignity, a mark of ladyhood, as they would put it, that this was someone who ticked all the boxes of respectable femininity. She had been active in she had been active in her local church and she was engaged in all the culturally sanctioned activities that one might expect of an unmarried woman in her day. For those reporters her behavior is sort exactly what you expected. She acquitted herself admirably, and that she was just bearing up in an impossible situation. And it was also noted that that and this gives you some idea of the theater thats involved in the trial. Theres a moment where the prosecution displays a bag that happens to hold the skulls of the bordens, and Lizzie Borden promptly fainted then, and earning the approval of all journalists, even the pretty hostile irish catholic paper from Fall River. So there is the sense that her own behavior, her own demeanor during the trial was essential to the question of her Guilt Or Innocence as the argument being made by the laurd lawyers. And i should say that the book is mostly about the trial, so ill just give very briefly a sense of that for the prosecution as was indicated by my summary of the murders, the case is one of exclusive opportunity, you know, mixed with a powerful motive. Basically no one else could have done it. Therefore, Lizzie Borden did it, and we know that she hated her stepmother. They are largely silent on why she killed her father. Thats something that the Prosecutors Cant quite grapple with themselves. All the focus is about lizzie and her stepmother, not about her father, so the only thing the prosecution can really argue is that Lizzie Borden meant to kill her stepmother and then didnt get out in time to establish her own alibi so that she was transformed, and thats the word they used. Transformed sort of like Jekyll And Hyde into a murderess who then kills her father, too, and you can imagine the defense makes a lot of that. They ridicule the prosecution for not being able to three what they thought was a reasonable explanation of the fathers murder. They also point out additional characters seen in the vicinity. My favorite is the dr. Handys wildeyed young man who is spotted staring at various people and staring into the ground. The judgment essentially, look, its not your business to unravel the mystery so that if you have any kind of doubt at all, then you cant send this woman to the gallows. The trial lasted two weeks which is a long trial for that period. But its worth noting that the jury was unanimous on the first ballot. They found that they were in total agreement and really didnt need to discuss the evidence. However, they waited in the Jury Room for about an hour and a half so that it would seem like they had been properly deliberative. And then when they came out to deliver their verdict, the foreman was so excited that he couldnt wait for the clerk to finish the question, and he blurted out, not guilty. And at that point theres pandemonium in the courthouse and tears, many congratulations to Lizzie Borden and her supporters. And the assumption is that Lizzie Borden will return to Fall River and live down her notoriety. But her supporters cooled in their enthusiasm pretty quickly. People began to wonder if she didnt do it then works did . She found that the pews around her own seat at her local church were empty when she tried to return, and this church had formed the bedrock of her support during the trial and that pretty much set the tone for her for her treatment in the polite circles of society. Her sister who i mentioned was ten years older and a bit of a Mother Figure to her lived with her. They had moved from the more cramped house to what you might call a mcmansion in the elite residential district of Fall River, and they lived there 12 years together with Lizzie Borden increasingly isolated, until they had a rift of a fight and the rift continued until the sisters died within a month of each other. Lizzie borden lived her last days on her own, shunned by most people who she wished to know. Its always struck me that that also shows the nerve that is remarked upon at trial and possibly also the provincialism that she had a sense that her universe was Fall River and thats where she was going to live. I think its that piece of the story, too, that contributes to the legend because very little about her later life is known for sure and so it enhances the the enigma that she presented at trial, and i just want to be sensitive to the question period, so i i think ill leave it there and then see where you all want to go with this. Thank you very much for your attention. [ applause ] i should say if there are no questions im going to talk some more. Im sorry. Just kidding. Is this on . Yeah. These days, of course, wed expect Mariska Hargitay with the Dna Stuff and all that sort of thing. Was there evidence . What happened to the evidence . Do you think there was any travesty of evidence . On the one hand, it was state of the art csi Fall River and the police came in and picked up pieces of carpeting and picked up wood molding. The bodies were autopsied. The stomachs were sent to harvard, so in you know, in some ways they did what they could. This is before fingerprint evidence, long before dna but even before fingerprint is used as identification let alone, you know let alone for investigative purposes and then, on the other hand, you can say they really botched things because there was nothing like the preservation of the crime scene that you would expect. I mean, one of the striking things about reading the accounts is how many people are just wandering through the crime scene on the day of the murders, and we know that based on the testimony that mrs. Borden was moved so there are things that, you know, insofar as they hinge on the exact placement of the body or the way that the bodies fell, we cant really be certain about them, so i think its kind of a mixed a mixed bag, but, i mean, one thing i would say is that based on how quickly the jury came to its decision i actually dont think that more evidence would have made that much difference, that it was a this was a story about what people believe someone like Lizzie Borden might be capable as opposed to just a question of whether or not she did it, that i think it wasnt you know, it wasnt what you might call reasonable doubt as much as kind of an unreasoning Certainty Or Anxiety at least not to to believe that that was impossible. Yes. Thank you for educating me. Ive been hearing about the Lizzie Borden case, hearing of the existence of the thing for, you know, all my life but never really ever known any detail about the murder or the case, but it does strike me that it would make possibly good material for a film, and i dont know whether there have even been films, good or bad films made on the case up to this point in time, but the real question i have is, do you think it would make a good film, and do you think it especially one based on any new material that you have in this book. And another related question would be would it be possible in your opinion to make a good film with this without changing the story in any in any significant way, without certainly without changing the story in any significant way . Certainly without changing the facts or, i dont know, adding in a romantic interest or whatever. Yeah. These are really just comment on the Cinema Potential of all this. Yeah. It is it is a story thats been retold over and over again in many genres, including film or, you know, a Tv Movie and a couple of films, and plays, a ballet, an opera. I just recently saw a rock musical, but it which was good, by the way. I recommend it, but all of them resort to heavy fictionalizing particularly on the point that you raise is that people seem to find that the story is kind of incomplete without a romance. Right. And that the you know, the festering tensions in the House Hold dont plus a Money Motive dont seem to provide an adequate motive for dramatic purposes, that there needs to be, you know, a thwarted romance. The most recent movie puts Lizzie And Bridget in a relationship and that has practical i mean, it affords some Practice Help which is its easier if they were in it together from the point of view from the cleanup, but theres no particular historical basis for that. Right. So i i do think that the trial can be inherently dramatic. Of course, im biased because thats what my book is about but i do think that that would provide a way to capture the drama. There are real highs and lows in the story and with the skulls, all these moments of great theater, and, you know, theres still the the question of which i think we struggle with in many other contexts, too, trying to understand human behavior, you know. How is it that someone who led basically a normal life for 32 years might have committed two horrible murders in one day and then went on to live a basically normal life afterwards . Right. So maybe maybe in a contemporary sense the lack of a romance might be a good thing to do in a film. In other words, it would give movie Reviewers Something to say about this film and how it differs and that films shouldnt need a romance. Mmhmm. Thank you. Hi. Hi. I was wondering what precedent, if any, you think this case set for Law Enforcement officials and court officials handling similar cases in the near future . Yeah, i struggled with this one because i think that it doesnt it doesnt do much in the doctrinal sense because it was because it was so out of the ordinary, you know, so that its hard to imagine the rulings, for example, on evidence in the case, two significant rulings that really favored the defense where the exclusion of the attempt to buy poison. The jury never heard about her attempt to buy poison and the jury never got to hear her inquest testimony which was Lizzie Bordens only testimony under oath. Both of those rulings were criticized with being cite inconsistent with current evidence law, even if you could argue them on both sides. It seems pretty clear the fact that Lizzie Borden was not just a woman but a particular kind of woman had an effect on how the black Letter Law was applied to the case, so i dont think i offered much precedent, but i do think thats a really interesting question. Thank you. Hi. Hi. I really enjoyed your talk, and i really enjoyed the back. Thank you. I have two questions. One is kind of technical, and the other is more overarching. First one, overarching question. Youve touched on this a little bit but im curious as to what your take is why were still fascinated with this cases. What it it is that keeps it current . And then the second question is, if Lizzie Borden did do the murders, if we assume that judgment for the sake of argument, how do you think she was never found to have any blood on her. That seems like an amazing detail on it. Im thinking the stake one first if i may. Thats the question of why no blood, and obviously thats a huge Defense Part of the case. The short answer is she burned a dress the sunday after the murders. It was a dress that had been stained with paint, and she was able to demonstrate that via testimony from a dressmaker and also the painter, but its also true that the police had searched the house and looked for all of her dresses and had not found one that had been stained with paint. So the prosecution clearly thought that was the explanation. Its also true that the medical experts all testified that whoever committed the crimes would have been spattered on some part of their bodies. It depends on which particular murder were talking about. So im not sure if the burnt dress even explains all that given the practical problems of the cleanup. But, you know, thats pretty much what the Prosecutions Theory was. And as to, you know, why were still fascinated. Its a truly horrible case that ended with an acquittal which leaves it much more openended than a case that leads to a conviction. Its hard to know what an acquittal really means. Do they think she didnt do it . Did they want her to do it but didnt get away with it. I think theres a mythic quality to the story, that its hard to understand how somebody who seemed so normal transformed into such a violent murderess without benefit of, you know, the tonic that turns jekyll into hyde. Thank you. I once read a book about another famous Massachusetts Trial some decades later on Sacco And Vanzetti which pointed out some of the problems in Massachusetts Justice that the prosecutor failed in his duties and the defense failed in his duties and the judge failed in his duties, so in the end they concluded that there was no conclusion you could come to which made it an interesting book to read. Whats your judgment about the quality of justice in massachusetts at the time of this trial . Well, i thought the lawyers were excellent on both sides, and i should you know, one of the many things i left out for this short talk is that the prosecution was led by a man named hosea knowlton, a man when went on to become the Attorney General of massachusetts and his junior in the case is william moody, who is a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and ends up on the supreme court in addition to having an excellent record as a Trial Lawyer. And on the defense side, Lizzie Borden put her considerable inheritance to good use very quickly in hiring expensive legal talent from boston, one a Trial Lawyer named Melvin Adams who was also a bit of a dandy, had a curl right there before the trial, and most significantly the former governor of massachusetts, a man named George Robinson who was very folksy. I almost could hear a southern accent, though, of course, he was from massachusetts, or springfield, but theres no way he had one, but he had that air of just stopping by to chat with the jury and being extremely reasonable, so thats not really an answer to to the quality of justice, but i think she was that the lawyering was good on both side. My interest in this case goes back to seventh grade but peaked there and i havent really thought about it but i got interested in it there because my Cousin Ed Raden wrote a book that you probably know, it was a bestseller back actually in the early 60s, and ed took a different tack. He was a journalist in addition to a crime writer, and he basically decided shes innocent and picked the guilty one. Now you know who he picked. Yes. As the guilty one. And you dont have to solve the case now, but do you think he probably was right . No. I think he i think he was a terrific writer, and its a great book, you know, so i recommend it highly as a read, but can i spoil the book . Sure. I dont want to ruin your cousins posthumous sales. I dont think hes at risk at that at all. He fingers the servant, Bridget Sullivan, and, you know, it makes sense, if its not Lizzie Borden it makes sense that it would be Bridget Sullivan, but i would say he brings to bear a lot of the prejudices that would have been very familiar to late 19th century readers so that i mean, although his book is much later. Lizzie bordens lawyer at one point wonders out loud, you know who in the natural course of things should be the party suspected . You know, the stranger, and he might as we will have said, you know, the immigrant, or Liz Borden and so, you know, his book also has a yeah, so i would say that it incorporates some of those biasses in that the only explanation for why she would have done it is that she just didnt want to wash the windows on that day and it just pushed her over the edge. So without solving this case, tell us who you think probably but not certainly done it. Well, this is you can imagine youre not convicting them but i dont want you to exonerate them, either. This is the question i get the most. I would have to say that its hard to imagine how anyone else besides Lizzie Borden could have done it. Its also true that after looking through everything i am struck by how difficult it would have been for her to do it, too. I think that i was more smug when i first started about it, that this being a case about the biasses of a particular era leading to some blindnesses on the part of the men who were conducting the trial. I do think its harder than that, but, you know, i do come back to see its hard to see how it could have been anyone else and im content to leave it unsolved. Thank you. Thank you. I only read the first chapter, but i read a lot of reviews, and a number of them seem to be bringing up the adjoining door connecting the rooms and the ring that she wore and seemed to be creating a relationship between the Father And Father and daughter. Yeah. So this is you know, i struggle in some talks ive talked about that and in others i havent. There are many odd things about the family, and one that seems to particularly grab Peoples Attention is the way in which the house has no fung shui, to put it mildly. Its a tenement hall. Upstairs and downstairs are the same. No Central Hall and when that means for the upstairs is that the bedrooms open on to each other, and at the time of the proper dispute to which i had alluded, that either raised the tension in the borden household or, you know, created some new grievance, the Bordens Lock and Move Furniture to separate Lizzies Bedroom from the parents bedroom. So that now, for example, if you were going to go the house which is a b b, which you can walk from the second floor to the front and back, but then you would not have been able to because the doors that separated the Daughter Suite of rooms from the Parent Suite of rooms was locked and the furniture was moved in front of it. I think this gives us an example on the way in which we bring our own biasses and preoccupations to this kind of case. I dont think its unusual that the people looked at this saying this is an Incest Story and sexual Abuse And Someone who struck back against a father who victimized her and the stepmother who was complicit in the in the victimization, and it suddenly seems very obvious. And there are little details like Lizzie Borden had given father a ring and he wore it on his finger and always, though he had no room to commemorate his wedding to his second wife. That sort of analysis just sews us more about our own personal concerns at the time. Many of the things that are shown to be signs of that kind of Reels Relationship could have been equally true of unmarried women in this era, the fact that they were two systems living unmarried, it wasnt an unusual close relationship with the father where he controlled most of the mother, would also not have been unusual, and i think it provides and also gets at our desire to have an investigation for the its much more troubling to think that there might not be something like that at its base. Well, thank you. [ applause ] weeknights this month, were featuring american History Tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight we look at cabinet secretaries. James baker served as secretary of state for president george h. W. Bush and as ronald reagans white House Chief of Staff And Treasury secretary. Hes interviewed about leadership and his career by Attorney And Historian Talmadge Boston in this tale by Baylor University Law school. Enjoy american History Tv every weekend on cspan3. American History Tv on cspan3 every weekend, documenting americas story. Funding for american History Tv comes from these companies who support cspan3 as a public service. De we are presently in the re office of the chief medical examiner for theell statestud f