[applause] that was nice. And as dick says, its almost enough to make you want to run for office. We are delighted to be back here tonight and ive had the opportunity to visit the Nixon Library and museum on a number of occasions and served in the Nixon Administration during the first term and am always pleased to visit is part of the world and be reminded of the very important time in our history and i was happy to be a part of his and his nation. We are here tonight and i should probably explain the outset why we are here together and the fact is that i was born in lincoln nebraska and in 1954 when i was 13 years old about going to the eighth grade, my dad moved the family to wyoming and he picked wyoming and it was a good thing because when i grow up together and i first took her out when she was 16 years old to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. [applause] and if dad had picked montana instead of wyoming, of course i would never have married her and she wouldve married someone else ensures that the other night but then he wouldve been Vice President of the united states. [laughter] i dont recall that that was one of the jokes. I am a freelancer at this point and we are here tonight to talk specifically about a magnificent book about James Madison and has some great reviews and we are on the book circuit spoke to speak. And i am here and we had other books to write as well and publish. So now we wanted to have an opportunity for her to present hers. It is a superb book about our nations fourth president in the plan is that i will ask her questions and she will respond and at the end of that. Lack of timely will open it up and take some questions from the audience as well. So let me begin by asking what made you decide James Madison needed another autobiography max. Before you get there, i want to say that im grateful for deck joining me on his to her and i wanted to refer to him as my arm candy. [laughter] and i have known i have been interested in madison for a long time and i had the privilege of serving on the bicentennial commission for the constitution in 1987. It was then that i first began to understand how magnificent his accomplishments were and yet how little recognized he was in terms of his political life. It wasnt until five years ago that i became serious about writing a book and it has been a labor of love. I only hope that you will enjoy the book as much as i enjoyed writing it. He was the architect of the constitution and the bill of rights and crucial to the establishment of the first government under the constitution and he was president during the first war under the constitution. He performed if not magnificently, and all those jobs at least very well and at the end of his presidency, john adams was kind of a sour figure and not given to making compliments easily, he wrote that James Madisons administration had covered itself in more glory than any of his predecessors which is a great compliment because his predecessors were washington and jefferson and adams was out. I do think that he has been underappreciated and it has been so much fun. I know five years of labor doesnt sound like fun but discovering things and being able to put it into a form that i hoped would reach this audience as the book is called, reconsidering James Madisons life. Which was the most important contribution and if one, if you had to pick just one, what would it be . It would have to be the constitution. I think that he was a genius. The reason is that he was the kind of genius, what he had is that he was able to break through conventional thinking and when everyone else was thinking one way, he didnt necessarily accept that, he would think of other possibilities, and he did that in the case of the constitution and establishing a Great Republic, which is what we are. So the conventional wisdom was that we had a Great Republic of people who voted for representatives of themselves and Representative Government and it would the to lose and fall apart unless you had monarchical power at the center. So madison thought that that was not good. He thought, in fact, the danger is that one faction will dominate and his genius was to see if you had many factions as there would be in the larger public than no single one was likely to become oppressive and that was the rationale for the constitution that was produced in philadelphia. So his genius was to see through what everyone else believed time and again and to transform the world. You talk about his relationship with the other founders including George Washington, as an example. Sometimes we think of the founders sitting around having a polite conversation and all of them having the greater good in mind at all times. And its much more interesting to realize them as they were, which is people who firmly believed in their point of view and were willing to fight to see it succeed. In the beginning he was washingtons chief lieutenant and when the first government under the constitution began and this will be familiar to any of your politics, washington had an aide to write his inaugural address and not produced a 72 page disaster. And so washington wrote to madison and asked him to please come to mount vernon. So he did so and he wrote the inaugural address of washington and did a very good job of it. After washington delivered the address, madison was leader of the congress wrote the response to washington. And he will Congress Response to that. And so by this time he thought that he was so good at this kind of thing that he asked him to write washingtons reply back. [laughter] its hard to imagine how his voice was echoing off every wall and im not sure theres been another time in history when one man has been so influential at the beginning of an administration the way that madison was in the beginning. If we talk about the constitution convention, obviously there were battles of various provisions in the constitution with articles one and two and three and it took a long time and many hours and days of work putting it all together. But can you cite the specific compromise and most important provision that they had argued about and were able to resolve the max. Yes, its a thing that we all learn in history about the big states and the small states and they wanted states to be represented a portion only according to the population. The small states one of the states to be represented and we all know the compromise. And so madison was appalled at that. He really thought that they should be proportionate of representation across the board and he had gone into the Constitutional Convention thinking its a great threat to the republic and he called them the evil states because they had been so irresponsible under the articles repressing religious freedom and rhode island was especially part of this and it was called road to the island. So turning out money than when they passed the laws that made it necessary for debt that had been incurred the states were texting one another and oppressing one another, actually and conducting their own foreign policy. So madison thought that this needed to be controlled and when it turned out that the compromise was part of this, he was very distrustful and it took him a couple of days to get around to accept that. What made them think they needed a Vice President . [applause] that is kind of an eternal question, isnt it . [applause] well, it was definitely the Electoral College and every electoral area had to vote. And so the alternate at that point was to let the congress choose the president and just imagine how different that wouldve been if they were cheesy. So i dont think you wouldve had a nixon either but plenty of speakers of the house bill go on to become president. And so everyone gets two votes in the big states and the small states and the small states are worried that the big states will elect the president. Swiss wage their concern, the deal was made that you can only cast one vote in one of those two votes were someone from your own state and the other one had to be cast for someone for another stay which would give the smaller states a better chance. So then you have all played this kind of game, if you want that one vote for your own guy and own state to be important, throw away the second vote and you ask done that on jim that doesnt have a chance. To prevent that, they invented the vice presidency. The idea is that the person got the second highest number of votes would then become Vice President and that seemed like a pretty good idea. But then they started talking about well, what was he going to do. [laughter] and its so interesting to see how this builds up. He decided that he needed a job and that they would make him president of the senate. So by the end of the Constitutional Convention there were two delegates that were so worried about the Vice President and the executive branch being president of the senate about his violating the separation of powers to the delegates, this includes randolph of virginia, average gary and george mason of virginia, specifically cited it as reasons they went signed the constitution and they called it that dangerous office. So there you go. [laughter] during the course of his career in the terms of implementing the constitution, Alexander Hamilton became an important player in all about and of that and can you talk about what it was that led to their major disagreement and confrontations . Maybe its important to understand that he and hamilton were not ready to backley but firmly colleagues. He wrote the federalist papers together with a little help. So the story of this is so if you dont mind it is so interesting because it was done at such speed in such haste and as i was explaining to a college , and you can appreciate, that what madison did during one period of time, 40 days, it was the equivalent of writing a 10 page paper every other day. And that doesnt seem impossible in the papers became immortal. So writing philosophy and writing politics, writing in an effort to convince people to support the constitution at breakneck speed, it was putting the beginning parts of essays into print often before they were finished. So madison and hamilton respected one another until hamilton became secretary of the treasury under George Washington and began to make his Financial Planning career. So madison was troubled from the beginning but he eventually won the establishment of a National Bank came up, he was deeply concerned that he didnt think the bank would be a bad idea. But at the Constitutional Convention he thought it was such a good idea that he had proposed giving the congress the power to grant charters which is what you needed need if you want to establish a bank. However, they turned that opportunity down and congress didnt have that power and that was madisons problem. Hamilton was simply running roughshod over the strip number of powers of congress have been given and there was no power charters and therefore madison thought that he should not doubtless a bank. He lost the fight but he went on to win the war, agassi would say and he established the first opposition political party. Parties didnt have any better reputation than than they do now and again it was counterintuitive and a against the conventional wisdom that says that parties were divisive and noisy and we didnt want them in the republic and madison said yes, we do. A government without opposition is a little bit more of a monarchy and so he organized this in order to change and defeat the way that hamilton was trying to carry the government to make it so strong that madison thought it was something that the constitution having consecrated. By finding this, he managed to get jefferson elected president in 1800 and jeffersojefferso n like madison was a small government guy. One of the most important functions that we have seen in recent years throughout her his eerie is the role of commanderinchief including whos going to be in charge of the military and as you mentioned in the opening, madison was the first president to ever have to conduct a war under the constitution. And so the way that that was their strikes me as a great story. The Constitutional Convention was just about to go through and the congress among its delegated power had the power to make war and so his mind was so quick and his intellect vast what would be the results of various proposals. So he changed this to declare that congress would have the power to declare war. And he had been a member of the Confederation Congress where there was no executive and congress would decide and say, some like him and then they realized that there was more trouble in the north and it simply wasnt, it was in the way to run a war. So madison that congress has the power to declare war is what that did was make him the commander in chief once it had been declared. How did he do as a commanderinchief . They burned down the capital and burn on the white house malaise he could commanderinchief in a rematch he was patient. And so like lincoln, he had trouble with generals and in the war of 1812, the generals were those who had served in revolution and they were getting a little bit long in the tooth. And they werent as brave as they mightve been in their younger years red one who was supposed to invade canada near detroit became so alarmed at the rumors that turned out to be true that the british had a Strong Alliance with the indians and the great warriors that americans might have to face this but he turned around and not only invaded canada but this is well. So as they were with lincoln, they were a problem. But not so with admirals. They had eight or nine by the war of 1812 and the british had more than 100 warships. But the navy had trained all that time and broad new and younger blood and you cant just told us up again, so the navy kept going all that time and as a result they were making magnificent victories in the war of 1812 and people like this were fleeing from the british and indian allies and one who was related to the general, isaac, he was commanding the constitution and the uss constitution most famously encountered the british and just, you know, wiped her out. And so part of the reason is the cannonballs bounced off the side of the constitution, which is why she was a part of this. So they had splendid naval victories and toward the end of the war we were developing this. And so he suffered through that and im not sure what choice commanderinchief has been that. And absolutely he held to celebrate the glories of the navy also changing his mind and he was not afraid to do that when circumstances changed and he had long regarded armies and navies as too expensive and as a threat to the republic to the easily used and by the end of the war of 1812 he was suggesting that congress provide for a standing army. How would you evaluate this endlessly viewed in the same way as the public successfully or not very successfully enact. His contemporaries, madison was one of those fortunate few that left the presidency highly regarded by all of his countrymen and they regarded him and we dont pay much attention to the war of 1812. But it was regarded by americans as evidence that we could and should, but by gosh, be recognized on the world stage and we deserve to be on the world stage and the rest of the world begin to do that, as you pointed out, after Andrew Jackson beat the heck of the british at the battle of moral and. One of the most intriguing aspects of the research had to do with madisons hell and i think its a major contribution from a historical standpoint as well. He had an affliction throughout his entire life and yet he was able to achieve these phenomenal objectives under extraordinary circumstances and it was one of the most important founders. Can you tell us about that and what his problem was and how he dealt with it . You know, it was one of those puzzles to me in the beginning and people called him shy, which he was in. He was simply reserved. And they said that he was sickly. You could see that he was sick from time to time but he also between the episodes of whatever it was, he was enormously energetic taking trips traveling when travel wasnt easy between his home in the capital. And undertaking those routine treads that i have often thought that i thought none of them could manage. So he was on horseback for 60 hours when washington was earned. And there is a letter it that he wrote toward the end of his presidency that hasnt been published and i didnt discover it. But i was the first person to Pay Attention to it, it is a draft of an autobiography in which he says that he was subject to sudden attacks somewhat resembling epilepsy and suspending the intellectual functions. And well, nobody had taken it seriously, really, and i think people wanted to shy away from it because of kind of a difficult topic to figure out and i think i decided i would take him seriously and you can see where he did have these episodes in his description, in fact, fit quite well with what knowledge is today call complex partial seizures which is a mild form of epilepsy. First he had seizures as a child and he is often part of the syndrome that involves epileptic seizures and as an adult and so he had this into all of that. And he suffered the first at princeton in college. So once you say that he knew he was talking about and were taking him at his word, he fell under this. Matter of the despondency when he worried that he wouldnt live long and he was lucky that he found doctors and his family urged him to exercise, it didnt end the seizures but he was remarkably bad and i think he decided once he had taken his fit physical health, he decided to take his soul in hand. And he was not going to believe all the things that people said about epilepsy. People said if you had epilepsy or seizures dissembling that, that you are evil and full of sin or possessed by the devil. And madison finally just decided that he didnt have to believe that. And i think that this fed into his freedom of religion people can believe whatever religion or no religion into his strong support for freedom of conscience and