Of Georgetown University and author of lets get free. Also this week in the presentation of the J Anthony Lukas prize for nonfiction writing. Former army officer and historian looks at us involvement in the middle east. War correspondents christina lamb, Janine Giovanni and kim barker share their reporting experiences and we talked to local authors and visit literary sites in mississippi. For complete television schedule, booktv. Org. Booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction books and office, television for serious readers. We start with erin mchugh who talk about political blunders throughout history. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] good evening. Welcome, thanks for coming out here on a brisk spring evening. Appreciate you being here. If you would take a moment to look at your cell phones and make sure they are turned off. Following todays reading and question and answer you will find me outside, we have plenty of books available including one new were than todays. Great Graduation Day gift. We have them outside. Aaron would be happy to sign them i am sure. We are very happy to invite in the guest category our guest this evening. When she is not running the first line of defense upstairs Customer Service here at the barnes noble upper east side, she is serving as bouncer during our Broadway Events which she is most effective at. This publishing executive is busy writing awardwinning books and we are delighted to present and we are delighted to present one of bad calls, backroom hijinx, sordid pasts, rotten breaks, and just plain dumb mistakes in the annals of american politics. With this crazy election season im certain there will be a sequel. Ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming my colleague, erin mchugh. [applause] high, everybody. Happy to see you all. For those who dont know me i was briefly from late monday night to early Tuesday Morning ted cruzs secretary of state. A couple of years ago, for those who dont know how long it takes, usually a couple years you have an idea, someone else to sell it. A lot of people say yes. Finally has a home and then you have to write it. I knew the 2016 the election was coming and it would be sort of crazy but who could possibly have any idea how crazy. With that i think we all know what the landscape has been, what it will turn out to be we dont know. As mister obama said at the Correspondents Dinner the other night this is my last time up here and we dont know who she will be who serves next year so we will see. I am going to read the introduction to you and a few pieces. They are all, these people, so crazy. You can hardly imagine this all has happened before we were born, most of them. I got some of the pieces started as early as the 1700s. I will read one from someone who is presently in jail and got in trouble around 2010 and in between. In the 21 stoop century it seems the electoral process from local School Board Elections to campaigns for mayor and congressman to the selection of the next president of the 50 states has become a circus. I wrote this a year ago. What should be a series of thoughtful activities on which the future of the country rest is filled with budgetary tightrope routines, partisan costumes, ethical disappearing acts and clowns. Instead it becomes three rings of horror we are so fatigued by the time the mud is long and skeletons are out of the closet and election day is over and exhausted by legislators before they even have a chance to start their jobs. The bloom is off the rose, the thrill is gone and they havent even had a chance to screw it up yet but they will. Not all of them but enough to keep the headlines in the 24 hour news programming turning. Enough to make us wish we had voted for somebody else or wonder how could he think he could get away with that and we will shake our heads and say to each other that is political suicide. Who can understand it. Let me read a few of my favorite pieces. This is a man named robert potter, who lived 18001842 so not so long. He is a seafaring lad from North Carolina who went to the United States navy in 1815 when he is 15 years old and a midshipman until he was 21. In those days life at sea provided plenty of excitement from looking out for pirates to policing the slave trade. He may have left the navy was discouraged about not being promoted or as legend had it got sacked because he killed an officer in a duel. There were lots of duels. You think of Alexander Hamilton and ehrenberg, duels everywhere. Back to the landlubber life, he passed the bar in 1823, he entered congress and his congressional career as a tar heel was even shorter than his time on the bounding main. A summer afternoon in 1831 robert castrated two men. I know. One after the other. Potter was certain his wife isabella was stepping out on him with two very different bows, when admitted and the other a teenage boy. Some reports say mrs. Potter kept her affairs all in the family, that the minister was her cousin and the boy was her stepmother but that has never been confirmed. What is known is potter attack them both on the same day. In particular the details are sketchy but when potter found isabel and the reverend in a buggy together he wrote the man of god around the neck, front tied him and then down below he cut him. He was remorseful but seemingly his actions, i am consoled by the conviction that i have only acted upon those feelings which nature has implanted in the hearts of all men. It is in the dna of all animals and have done the same thing under the same circumstances. Maybe, maybe not. People may disagree with potters choice of punishment but have not forgotten his adventures with dice. Even today castration or the threat of it which is more common is still called potter rising in parts of the south. Potter resigned from congress in november 18, 31 and he and his wife divorced, no surprise there. A 3000 fine spent six months in prison, he did manage to get back to the legislature but the next you got tossed out for an episode involving a card game and other shady dealings which may have been cheating, brandishing a gun or a knife, stealing money or trying to get out of a debt. Those were the reports. Potter decided it was time to move to texas. Let me just say here there was a lot of moving around because there was no 24 hour news cycle and not a lot of newspaper coverage. When you got in trouble you would just move far, far away where people had never heard of you. So he decided he was going to move to texas. The wild west, better agreed with the ruffian congressman. He got to military credibility back and even signed the texas declaration of independence. He took up with a new woman who he married, she still seemed to have a husband somewhere. He served as secretary of the navy in texas, the texas navy and even wormed his way back into the texan congress. Perhaps potter had quite enough. In 1842 during a littleknown texas regulator moderator role he found his home surrounded by members of enemy regulators, he thought he could get away by jumping into a nearby lake and escape by screaming underwater to safety but he came up for air and the minute he did he was shot in the head. He is buried in texas and has a doublesided gravestone with one side highlighting his political achievements in North Carolina and on the other side texas. Colorful to say the least, right . Here is a man, talk about crazy people in washington, who lived from 1901 to 1936, born in poland in 1901 he was but its hard when his family moved from the United States and settled in seattle, washington. There he eventually entered politics first as a leftleaning College Student and then a new deal democrat. By 1932 at the age of 30 when he ran for congress and in washington in 1933. Early on he showed great promise. He was energetic and interested in reform, and a staunch advocate for the great depressions forgotten man. He seemed highspirited but much of it was chalked up to youthful enthusiasm. He was a bachelor, new to the Nations Capital and the truth was he was probably bipolar, something that would be more quickly diagnosed today but remained untreated in this congressman. It began with pranks and partying, though excessive, his behavior was hardly unique but by 1936 the stories were multiplying. He referred to Supreme Court justices as old fossils. He hosted one legendary new Years Eve Party where when they arrived to investigate the noise complaint he had taken over the building at switchboard and was calling up all the neighbors. He was also arrested for speeding down connecticut avenue at 70 miles an hour which must have been hard in a car in the 30s it seems to me. Not only did he resist arrest but tried to run out of the courtroom upon appearing before the judge and was cited for contempt then he found a girlfriend, a Works Administration secretary named ruby louise next. She didnt remain a girlfriend for long. They married in a jiffy, unwilling to wait for three days for her papers to clear in the District Of Columbia they hipped in a car and im sure spread to maryland to get hitched. When the groom didnt have a license he borrowed it from the justice of the peace, reporters were thrilled of course. He was there no good to guy for headlines and this one was a winner. Before departing for his honeymoon he hosted a small event in his apartment, mix cocktails made of hair tonic or something while wearing an indian head dress and entertaining inquiries. When asked how he met and married his bride to quickly he explained i met her a week ago when she calls me up one night. She asked me down so i went down and looked her over. She was okay. Aint love grand . They then took off to puerto rico for a honeymoon where more wildness ensued. He got in two separate car accident including one where he bit the driver on the neck and cause the car to crash in a ditch. He incited a small political riot and was forced to call the marines. Things were getting out of hand and it didnt help he was tossing cocktails with some abandon. On returning to the mainland he continued his downward spiral. He drove to the white house into the driveway which you could do, anybody could do then with gifts for fdr. The president wasnt home but he wrote a little note and left behind in the driveway along with a collection of empty beer bottles and pingpong balls. Later that day he was arrested and brought to a sanitarium. He escaped, finally several days later and was picked up again by the police. Ruby had him transferred to a different hospital, and was a rested and brought back, to gain his freedom he voluntarily returned to his hometown of seattle. Rather than risk imprisonment in dc. In seattle he found he had quite a fan club. People nationwide loved the crazy stories of what was being called the capital clown and none more so than residents of his home district. They embraced his craziness. Not as if anybody had gotten hurt except the guy bitten on the neck. The guy was just a nut. When he told his constituents he would not run for reelection a friend filed papers to run for his seat and he reversed his decision and said he would run again. But he would never see the campaign. On their way to a gala ruby and her husband stopped by his offices in downtown seattle. Why ruby stayed in the car, he went upstairs, wrote a suicide note and stepped off the ledge of his window on the fifth floor. His body struck the ground next to the car. The hastily scrawled suicide note said my only hope in life was to improve the condition of an unfair Economic System that held no promise to those that all the wealth of a decent chance to survive littleknown live. Was it because his friend had threatened to take his seat or a combination of growing instability . We will never know, but he still holds the record for being the only sitting congressman everson to an insane asylum. Think about that. Yet, we should say, i guess. Okay. I would like to read to you the story of rita, my favorite story in the book. She is still alive, born in 1953. This is the biggest embezzlement scam you have never heard of. Ritas case was the biggest municipal fraud in American History and it took place in dixon, illinois. Dixon was most famous for being Ronald Reagans childhood home. The town had three fulltime employees and rita was one, controller and treasurer. The majority of employees were parttime and held other jobs to keep financial heads above water. The mayor made 9000 and had a cadillac showroom somewhere. It started out of high school in 1974 and was appointed to her city Financial Post in 1983. It was a sweet deal for her. Criminal was a horse loner and eventually became what was one of the best horse quarter horse breeders in the country. Equine business took up several months a year on the road going up to horse shows and the like. It was certainly more than her paid four weeks of vacation allowed but the small town controller had a luxury motor home she traveled around in and was generally on call for town duties even if she was away. The folks of dixon figured they had a pretty good deal as rita every time she took a day off was Still Available for work by phone or email. These are all her neighbors and friends. No one was quite sure how she afforded the fancy water home and horse farm. In addition to some pricey clothes, for, jewelry, it is under 83,000 annual salary, dont forget mine what she was unpaid for taking the day off. Everybody knew she sold lots of horses, they figured that was aware her all her money came from and a three home she owned. Others assumed she had inherited money from somewhere despite the fact her parents were local people who were not at all wealthy. A perfect instance of people seeing what they wanted to. They believed she was trustworthy, she was one of them so they didnt question it. So it came as quite a shock when in 2011 Kathy Swanson discovered a strange bank account when she was covering at the office during one of her many absences the amount had been opened in 1990. The city of dixon was primary account holder and secondary account holder, the scam was fairly simple. She would draw up fake invoices, often times just on a typewriter, she would miss belltown and illinois and things like this, she would drop the fake invoices and transfer money from the legitimate city of dixon bank account and deposit into the dummy account. Any audit would have uncovered this scam but no one ever checked, why would they . It was rita. She worked for the town and for them all these years so she got away with writing nearly 200 of these fake invoices in addition to checks from the city account to her account that were made out directly to the treasurer. Some of the checks were made to questionable facilities and they escaped attention. No one was noticing. It started small but in a few years after opening the account she was making checks out to fairly large amounts likely hundred thousand dollars, 500,000. Over the course of many years, sit down, hope you are all sitting, rita sold 53 million from the town in illinois out of the pockets of her friends and neighbors. At the same time she was doing that the city of dixon couldnt afford the most basic updates. I know, the police cars had all these old used radios, streets badly needed repair. There was a Water Treatment facility that didnt get built. When swanson, the secretary, found the dummy account it was rita, she immediately brought it to the attention of the mayor who wasted no time calling the fbi. They were ready and one morning in april 2012, the fbi was waiting. Rita confessed. She was caught red handed. There was nothing she could do and fully cooperated with the fbi. This is my favorite part, when asked what his thoughts, his comments on the episode was, he said it turned out rita didnt give a shit about this town. During sentencing a lawyer asked for leniency, she said she would have to endure shame and disrepute for the rest of her life but the former trusted smalltown employee was sent away for 20 years, dixon, illinois, for the luxurious lifestyle, now she would have to pay the price, she was due for release in 2030. That is the story of rita. This is a newer story. I have to read it because of the diaries. Many of you remember bob, born in 1932, here we go. He got in trouble later in the last century. Senator bob packwood came from a long line of politicians dating from 1857 when his greatgrandfather was part of the constitutional dimension, took a family trade as an energetic republican in oregon, playing Party Politics and making a name for himself. In 1963 at the age of 29 he entered the oregon house of representatives and five years later after a race with a long time economist he won the race for the United States senate. As the youngest senator in town, a moderate republican who supported civil rights, gun control and legalized abortion and won accolades for many womens books and planned parenthood and the political caucus, he and his wife georgie were a breath of fresh air, worked tirelessly to ingratiate into the political system and by 1985 replaced Daniel Patrick moynihan as chairman of the Senate Committee on finance. He was one of the most powerful men in washington but also a massive drinker. Before his 1980 Senate Campaign he was talked into seeking a therapist and talking to her about it. He returned and declared i am not an alcoholic, i have a drinking problem. So the charade continued. A decade later in 1992 it all began to come apart and he wouldnt be getting any more kudos from womens groups. Instead he was getting hit with charges of sexual harassment. Many of his victims were Staff Members are lobbyists. The former of the left is employed to avoid the problem. The weird thing, you remember when you couldnt get away with speaking up, the allegations that were coming to light, to efforts didnt understand what the problem was it seemed. He would say awkw