Getting images. We work back and forth on a list together. They suggest some things, i suggest some things, we come to an agreement and it is later refined. It is a process that is ongoing but it really started when i sat down with some members of my family, including a very smart young boy. I asked him, what do you think about the 100 most Important Documents in history . He is only 13 years old. He is a nephew. And i thanked him. And his parents for their contribution. How did he know 75 of these . He is a omnivorous reader of history. He has a very wide range of interests in history. An encyclopedic knowledge of history. It was with his good graces that i came up with this list. If you had to pick one in this book that is in your mind the most important, which one would it need . I have a preference for the gutenberg bible. The gutenberg bible, which Everybody Knows the term but they dont understand the significance of it, was created in the 14 50s by a printer blacksmith in germany. He had a staff of 20 people. He was a highly skilled artisan and he set out to print a new copy of the bible using movable metal type, which was something that had never been done before with a project of that size. At that time there were only 30,000 books in all of europe. It took years for scribes to copy one bible. He gathered his people together, they used highquality inks, highquality paper. Of vellum that was used took over 150 caps they had to slaughter for just calfs they had to slaughter for just one bible. A very wonderful products, sold for a very high price. It revolutionized printing and the world of books. Scholars say between 160 and 100 80 copies 180 copies were printed. I have not seen a copy close up. I have seen pictures video other images from the gutenberg bible. It is an extraordinary magnificent creation, which now a complete copy goes for Something Like 35 million. Why do people pay that kind of money . If you have that kind of money, you are a collector and have some particular reason for it. Maybe you are somebody who was involved in publishing or religion. But there are very people very few people that can afford that kind of thing, or institutions that can afford that kind of a price. They are barely highly prized very highly prized. They were expensive when they were made at the time but today, they have grown in value. Where did you get your personal interest . Scott i had a varied career. I was an Investigative Reporter, i worked for the government, several positions involving criminal justice and the law. I am a social scientist and a particularly a criminologist and i am a documentary filmmaker and i have been curating documentary exhibitions. Also, of course, i am an author. It depends on how you count them. Probably over 20 books. In the course of doing this, i worked very closely with documents. As a writer today, we spend our whole life creating documents moving documents around archiving documents. We have a different conception today of what a document is, so much so that we live in the age of documents today. Where were you an Investigative Reporter . Scott i cut my teeth in new york, which was a ross awash in corruption in the late 60s and early 70s. We had Nelson Rockefeller as governor and we had a local tammany style political machine so i had a great Time Starting out. Doesnt seem to have changed much. Scott it really hasnt changed. The beat goes on. Where were you in government . Scott i worked under three governors of new york state. I worked primarily for governor mario cuomo in a series of criminal justice positions. I worked from the 70s through the 80s, into the 90s while i was completing my doctoral work. I am also a teacher. I have taught at several universities. One of the last documents out of the hundred was from 2013 and it is Edward Snowdens files. Yes. What is this piece of paper here . Scott that is a letter Edward Snowden wrote making it available to various people in the media and members of government in which he attested to the fact that he had acquired this information. He worked as a government contractor, British Government agencies. He had obtained a great deal of information which he believed showed the government of the United States was involved in illegal gathering of information and intelligence information from a massive front of people spying on government officials abroad. It was one of those things that horrified many people when it was going to be disclosed. He believed it was his duty as a patriot to disclose this information. He said he thought disclosing the truth was not a crime. Many other people have disagreed and he was charged he has since been charged with theft of Government Property in violation of the espionage act and he remains a fugitive in russia. Here he is from 2014. This is what state surveillance looks like. It does not stop with phone calls. The covers your emails, text messages, whether history. Every Google Search you have ever made and every plane ticket you have ever bought. The books you buy at amazon. Com. Whether it is an essay or other government services, it can collect. Defenders of this kind of dragnet say there is no room for abuse because we have policy in place to address these concerns. But ken pollack policies can change with every president congress, every new director of the nsa. When do we address the threat . You say the full extent of snowdens disclosure is unknown what Intelligence Services estimated a number of files at 1. 7 million. Scott it certainly is an enormous bonanza of information. There has to be some scrutiny exercise in terms of what information is disclosed to make sure that it does not endanger the lives of people. It really does perform a very final Public Service vital Public Service and i know it remains controversial. There is also a very strong feeling that he is an american hero. He is viewed as such around the world. It does call people to question who controls documents, who owns documents, what is the power of documents. What are these things about that the government is collecting. Let me ask you for another one of your most Important Documents. Scott there certainly are many types of documents. I am interested in 1984, George Orwells book. You get a look at the manuscript of 1984 to see what it actually looked like. As he was making his final changes and about ready to retype it. It is a very interesting thing to me that it is such a prissy and work that he precedent prescient work. He depicted a totalitarian state that he was warning people about. In the course of writing this book, he had a tough time economically. His wife died during the course unexpectedly, his home in london was destroyed i a by a nazi bomb. He was very ill, he almost died in a drowning accident, and he was fighting tuberculosis. In addition to that as he was writing more about this totalitarian state he was becoming more and more paranoid. It is usually one page for an essay on each of these documents. The surviving manuscript of the novel is at the Brown University library. How did you get this photograph. Scott all of these require approval from the institution. The library, the archive, that holds them. There are very few examples of the manuscript of orwells work that are available. This particular one was contributed to Brown University by an alumnus. Somebody that talked about George Orwell all the time was the great late christopher hitchens. I have been in north korea. I thought i was going to try not to mention 1984 because everyone says it was an orwellian state. In fact, it is a cliche. The same thing over and over again . Kim ilsung founded the north korean state the same year 1984 came out. It is as if someone gave him the novel and said do you think we can make this work . Did you ever read it . Scott every kid who grew up in the 1960s red 1984 and animal farm. I have read it since. It is a great work. Where do you do your work from . Scott i presently live in the berkshires of massachusetts. I spent many years in upstate new york. I work at home, i am a fulltime writer. I worked on many projects at once. Books, articles, films, many different types of projects. How long did it take to put this together . Scott i think every book takes a writer his or her old whole life to produce. You have to learn how to write a book, it takes a lot of training to do that. You have to learn a lot. It takes various amounts of times to actually physically produce it, to type it. This particular book was actually quite a short. Of time. I have done books that took as long as 25 years or 18 years of work. This book was just a few months. I am working from the back to the front, so here is a 2001 document. Bin laden determined to strike us,. What is it . There was a president ial Daily Briefing to president bush who was at his ranch in crawford texas. It was delivered by a woman named barbara sue who was a Senior Analyst specializing in al qaeda. Prior to that time, the new president had received 40 or more warnings about al qaeda. He said many things about al qaeda attacking the United States. The Bush Administration did not respond to it. It was by Condoleezza Rice and other government officials. The United States was attacked on september 11, 2001. That has changed our history. Condoleezza rice testified before richard ben the nasty richard benvenisti. The august 6 warned about possible attacks in this country. I believe the title was bin laden determined to attack inside the United States. Thank you. I would like to finish my point here. Given that you asked me what i ask you what the title was. It did not warn about attacks inside the United States. It was Historical Information based on old reporting and it did not in fact warned of any coming attacks. When you hear that today, your reaction . Scott mumbojumbo. There were repeated warnings. What is a government to do in response to these space threats without specific information vague threats without specific information . I remember being in the area of the world straight World Trade Center and i noticed individuals taking pictures. I had a feeling of unease. I was aware of the attack in the 1990s. It made me very uneasy. There was not a response. John ashcroft, the attorney general at that time, was asked to approve 400 more fbi counterintelligence agents. He refused to do that. In a lot of ways, the administration really blew off these warnings and did not respond until the attack occurred. The Apple Computer company. What is it . Scott in 1976, 3 young fellows out in Silicon Valley california decided they were going to create a small venture by the skin of their teeth, with very little money in the garage of one of these young men. They were going to manufacture computers and computer parts. They formed this company, called Apple Computer. You may have heard of it. Since that time, it has become one of the most successful businesses in world history. It was really done on a shoestring, a relatively short. Of time ago. Unfortunately for one of these partners, mr. Wayne, he signed over his interest in the original Partnership Agreements for a paltry 800. It is amazing. They agree to pay and deliver to wayne, as their sole obligation the sum of 800. Does that mean that is all he got . Scott that is all he got. How available is this kind of a document . Scott some of these things are available from the company. They are proud of their associations that make some of these kinds of things available to historians and others. In all of these cases it involves a search. This particular one came from apple it self. Back to the 13yearold you talk to, what is his name . Scott joel gardner. He was in hastings on huston hudson. What was his reaction when he found out he named a third of these documents . Scott he was not interested. He was off reading more interest history. I inscribed it and dedicated it to them. Maybe someday, maybe it will mean something to him. He is still pursuing his own interests in history and maybe someday he will be doing something on the grander scale in my book. Where did he get his interest . Scott he, like many of the people involved in these documents and other books i have done is a polymath. He has many different interests. He is a mathematical genius and he has many interests but he just developed an interest in reading and history and he has been pursuing it on his own. He will get a contemporary book that has just come out 500600 page. Stalingrad, or some sort of event in history. The napoleonic wars. He will knock off those books. Here is 1969, apollo 11 flight plan. You can see it right here. Here is some footage from that moment and it is not the normal Neil Armstrong stepping off on the moon. It is buzz aldrin and michael collins. During the threeday journey to the moon the astronauts kept busy. Check lists, navigation and observation, housekeeping. They must work in a weightless environment, keeping their spacecraft and themselves in good condition. Data must be collected and reported, experiments must be performed. Including photography both inside and outside the spacecraft. It lays out the role of each of the three astronauts, at every moment of the mission. At this particular time, it suggests there was a possibility that perhaps the astronauts would have to be left on the moon if something wasnt working properly. The mission would go on. This was done according to a plan to july 1, 1969. There was a plan that set out this very detailed chronological time frame and according to this plan, they had to follow all of these instructions. Each of them knew exactly what they were to do. In the book, you write the Apollo Program had involved 400,000 engineers technicians and scientists from 20,000 companies at a cost of 24 billion. Scott yes. It was an enormous investment. It had great political significance and spiritual significance in the United States at that time. I had a relative who actually worked in the program at various times. It was a huge enterprise following from John Kennedys attempt to land americans on the moon. It was a triumph by the United States. United states technology. How close did you come to the vietnam war . Scott everybody my age came very close. Some people so close they didnt survive it. I did not serve in the military but as a journalist, i was involved in covering things that were going on at that time. Like everybody of my generation, i was involved in the turmoil over the vietnam war. As a young boy in 1964 i was watching on television when president Lyndon Johnson announced to the nation in a National Televised speech that the United States had been attacked by north vietnamese vessels and that as a result he was going to be authorizing the use of force and wanted congress to give him the authority necessary to effectively wage war against this aggressive power of north vietnam. This was during a president ial campaign. He was going to be running against barry goldwater. It was the beginning of a very long involvement. A long vietnam war. Where did you get this particular document . Scott this document is from a congressional office. It is one of the actual coffees copies of one of the executives that was working on that at the time. You mentioned you were responsible for the written word. Did somebody else have to go after the document . In some cases we would find there was not a suitable document available. Or they would come up with a document that was different from what i had written about. It is a back and forth between a publisher in london and me in the United States. The book is published simultaneously around the world and printed in china. So it is a global process. I have to read about the gulf of tonkin resolution. By 2005 the release of more classified documents from the nsa plus others new disclosures revealed high government officials had distorted facts about what actually happened. Scott a whole series of things occurred. We had the pentagon papers in 1971. We recently had a film involving robert mcnamara, in which he did effectively a mea culpa about this whole chapter in American History. We have had tapes involving president johnson and mcnamara and others. The bottom line is we see this resolution was really a deceptive one. Congress was not completely told exactly what had happened. This of course, is very unfortunate. It is not thing. Sensing that the words lacked power, the impassioned gospel singer Mahalia Jackson cried out tell them about the dream martin. Scott Martin Luther king during the civil rights march on washington in 1963 was, of course, at the lectern giving his great speech. But it really wasnt worth going over that well wasnt going over that well. He had a prepared speech that other people had worked with him on. It was handwritten by jones himself. And reverend king is up there and Mahalia Jackson had heard the speech some months before in which Martin Luther king got into a whole theme about be on