shows there was much more to reagan than the usual stereotypes are loaded by both democrats and republicans. so ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming jacob weisberg. [applause] >> thank you, bradley, for that kind introduction. i just want to say i love the bookstore, not just because i do think it helped of my last book on the bestseller list, but bradley and lisa have done an amazing job. it's one of the best independent bookstores in the country. you are lucky to have it here in washington and i'm lucky to be speaking here tonight. this book, it is a short book. i consider that a virtue although some biographies are often considered a virtue to be as long as possible. i had to take the opposite approach. this is really an exercise in distillation, internet figure what is essential in the ronald reagan story but also along the way try to take on some of these myths. the armistice on the left about reagan that i think it's a myth he was a dunderhead. to our myths on the right about reagan. i think elizabeth he was always a man of principle and didn't end and didn't negotiate. reagan was much more of a pragmatist and improviser that i think people if you were to the version of him represented in, say, a republican presidential debate. the reality is very different. i thought i'd talk a little bit about some of the things that i found really interesting that i learned doing this book, and parts of the story that maybe people haven't paid quite as much attention to that i think a really interesting and important. the first thing i wanted to talk about his reagan's childhood. reagan wrote about his childhood, the first place he wrote about it in any detail is when he wrote an autobiography in 1964, a book called where's the rest of the, which he wrote when he was moving from his career in hollywood to running for governor in california and he wanted to explain why he moved from the left to the right. in the process he told his life story. he writes about growing up in the small towns in downstate in western illinois and iowa, and paints this idyllic picture. he calls it a huck finn, tom sawyer idol. he didn't necessarily get the kind of darker side of huck finn. he describes sort of thing out in the woods in the beautiful prairie setting an ice skates on the river, it would freeze over in the winter and you could hold your code up and the wind would carry you down the river on ice skates. he describes the small town community, this neighborly life, and he loved everything about it. we didn't have a lot of money, but we had a warm family life. my mother would make this delicious thing called oatmeal made which is basically oatmeal and meet. you think what a happy childhood. then you hear about his brother recounting the same events. it is brothers olduvai couple of years and neil says dad was a terrible alcoholic. we went from town to town. by the time reagan was 10 he had lived in 10 different houses. they went to chicago at one point what his dad got a job. his dad got arrested for public drunkenness. they had to lay chicago. they were kind of being driven from pillar to post because of his father's alcoholism. oatmeal needed was a thing, trying once said i never want to taste that they can. it was like something you need if you can't afford anything else. basically oatmeal and meet and maybe put some salt into. teacher barely alive. they would go to the butcher and sake do you have any oliver? liver wasn't considered a great food to eat event. do you have any live or left over for the cat? they would make dinner out of it. a totally different perspective on how they grew up. reagan told these anecdotes again and again, his favorite, one of his favorite stories which i'm sure you've all heard is about the parents who take their two sons to the psychiatrist because the one son is such an optimist and the other some such a pessimist but the psychiatrist takes the pessimistic side into a room filled with toys, and the pessimistic census, they're just going to break anyway. and he takes the optimistic side into a room filled with horse crap, and the kid gets out of shovel and started taking. the psychiatrist is what are you doing? the kids is with all this horse crap in your there's got to be a pony somewhere. it's reagan and his brother. one was the optimist and the other was a pessimist. at some level you say this is just congenital. this is his view of the world. that's true to some extent. reagan was by nature an optimist, but they had to figure out how to preserve that optimism in these really tough circumstances where he was going out. at one point his father left the family for a mistress in another town. that parents never ended up splitting a. they got back together but this was a tough top, pour childhood that went into a depression era, we just didn't have enough to keep body and soul together. what i think reagan did, and this is a bit of a psychological theory that explains some of his behavior, but to be an optimist, having this kind of life, he learned to tune things out. he learned to not see things that were unpleasant to him that made it hard to maintain that he was not having a happy childhood. he would choose not to do certain things. he was a very isolated kid. he didn't have a lot of friends partly because he is being dragged from place to place them would have to make new friends everyday. he loved being by himself. he loved being alone. but this thing about not hearing things he didn't want to hear and not seeing things he did want to see was also physiological. when he was 13, he loved sports, he loved playing football your he wanted to play baseball but he couldn't play baseball because he couldn't see the ball. he only discovered this when it was 13 and he was driving somewhere and he tried on his mother's classes and he said, it's all clear now. he was sort of in this visual blog forceful childhood. then there's these interesting things he writes in that first book. he hated wearing his glasses. arpeople always say he's a vain hollywood actor. no, he just kind of prefer things a little blurry. and likewise with his hearing, when he was on some of the first movies he made in hollywood when he got there in the late 1930 1930s, the movies to which place this heroic fbi agent, he breaks the smuggling rings and counterfeiters. in one of them someone fired up like a gun right next to his ear, basically left him deaf in one you. i don't know if his hearing was that good before the. all of the physiological problems got worse over time. his hearing got worse. his eyesight got worse but also think this was really, really functional behavior because through his life when there were things that he preferred not to deal with, because they were unhappy or unpleasant or involve conflict or in politics in bald contradictions that he did want to deal with, he had this way of tuning out and letting it be someone else's problem. letting it be someone else's issue. you see this in his family life. his daughter patti they'r theiry difficult relationship with nancy, her mother, and claimed nancy deter. reagan just did what to do with it. he just tuned it out and it's not that different from what happens in 1981 when david stockman comes to him and says, look, you can have the defense build up, you can have the tax cuts or you can get rid of the deficit but you can do all three because the numbers don't add up. and stockman described his frustration in not getting reagan to be able to understand that these things are were contradictory. i don't think reagan didn't understand it that he didn't have a solution to it, and the path of least resistance was to allow the deficit to grow at a not fully engage in the problem and leave it to aides. so i think he learned through life and to his political career that tuning out was functional behavior, and an effective political technique for him. i think people often, when they would see the way he would distance himself and not engage and tune out, they would think he's clueless, he's out of the. the great poignancy of this is at some point alzheimer's kicks in, and there's been an interesting debate, first acknowledged he had alzheimer's several years after leaving the white house when he wrote this moving letter to the country in 1994 about when alzheimer's started to have an effect. is actually had delicious fight going on between bill o'reilly and george will about it. george will says we'll o'reilly says he has libeled reagan i think alzheimer's was affecting him earlier in his presidency. in fact, i look at the o'reilly book. he doesn't say what george will accuses him of saying which was about the assassination attempt and recover from that sort of kick started his alzheimer's. he said it had a big physical effect on in which everyone around ronald reagan did, to reagan was slower, his hearing was worse, his recognition of people was worse after he was shot. i think the best evidence suggests that alzheimer's will start to affect him in 1986 around the time of iran-contra, around the time he was most embarrassingly unable to remember what had happened. people assumed it was convenient not remembering. i think by that point it's actual not remembering. i think when the question of what did he know and when did he know it became a sort of conundrum because he didn't know what he did at that point. with alzheimer's thousands to offer relatively earlier stages and it could days and bad days and he had days when you could see him and think that guy is out of it, and he had days when you could save and think he was at the same person he was 10 years before and it wasn't affecting about all. but at some point as far which is always in a certain sense cultivated became a real fog. i find almost poetry in that, that he sort of drifted away into this fogginess he created himself. under the aspect of reagan's earlier career that i think is really, really understudied is this period in the 1950s when he moved from the left to the right. household reagan grew up was new household. he was a liberal democrat. he was an anti-communist, a liberal anti-communist by the campaign for truman, and he voted for truman in 1952. in 1954 he was still, if you asked him what his views were, they would say a liberal democrat. 1962, eight years later, he is so conservative that your electric which had been employed him as a spokesman said we can't have this guy a round. he's embarrassing us. the adopted this view that basically liberalism was just a shortstop on the way to socialism, that there was a continuum between democratic liberalism and communism and we were sliding down the slippery slope. part of it came out of the height book served in which he read a which influenced him. what happened in those eight years? that's a huge gap from truman democrat to goldwater conservative. it's almost a blank period in reagan's life because everything before that is his hollywood crew which is incredibly well documented, document the way a hollywood star fly this document. there are pictures of authority went. everything he wrote was writing in celebrity magazine at the time, things written about him. once you into politics everything is documented dispute when he moved from left to right is like a hole. what he did during those years as he went to work for general electric. he was the host of ge theater which was this weekly television show where they would do a plans would have one week of drama, one week of comity, different actors. were the first television shows that got film was same actress to appear on television. he hosted and introduced a. some weeks he would act in a. there was a great one when he acts opposite james dean. man, he's going to be a big star. he also was kind of traveling spokesman for general electric general electric a huge company had factories all over the country making different kinds of appliances, giant turbines, like bolts come everything from consumer appliances to huge industrial appliances. reagan would go around to these factories and facilities and he would speak to all the workers. he was department because he was a celebrity and they wanted him representing the company but is also supposed to be the face of ge and he was representing ge management and ge's view of the world. when you start to look at what they ge view of the world was at that point, it's an amazing match for what reagan ended up thinking by the latter part of that period. so very opposed to government regulation, why is government interfering in our business, very opposed to taxation and higher taxes, these taxes are killing us. what is government doing to support the business climate the reagan started using discovery talked about the business climate which is a ge for it. the guy who was ahead of public affairs coined this phrase which people use all the time. the view of the world he really represented was this 1950s corporate but which was very specifically ge's view and the view that ge water to propound to its workers. i don't think reagan took this on cynically or thought he was being a propagandist for ge. he was a big reader but i think a lot of the reading was coming through general electric. he was reading a lot of the literature from the early conservative movement at that time. he was a charter subscriber to william f. buckley's "national review." he read whittaker chambers witness which was an incredibly influential book on the right. he almost memorized that book. he read hayek and i think these books, having all of his connection to ge corporate world really influenced him. and took them so far that by the end of that period he sort of has the view that government can do no good, and business can do no ill. it was really a blind spot i think you could say for the remainder of his career. he was sort of incapable of believing that government can be effective outside of national defense and maybe a few other functions. he never thinks business does anything wrong. he sort of doesn't, that's not part of his vocabulary to think that this is could be abusive or coercive or monopolistic. he's always defending the prerogatives of big business. it's really hard to doubt that a. i went to the reagan library and a file on the ge years has like 30 pages into. there's not a single surviving copy of the speech a recording that anybody has found that any of these hundreds if not thousands of speeches he gave on factory floors in the ge facility. the are some speeches he gave at the period, some correspondence, some bits and pieces but it's almost like detective work to try to put together this gap in his crib with us or think is central to everything because it's not only were his views emerge but his views formed the core of the modern conservative movement and defied the conservative era that began with his election in 1980, this collection of where it all came from in something pretty important. may be just as a last bit and then we can open it up for questions, but just to talk about reagan's role at the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism which is also very contested and very interesting ground. what i went out to the reagan library the best thing i did was they said after i'd been there a few days, they said, the librarian was very nice, and have that many visitors and the presidential lifers and have a lot of staff who are super helpful, would you like to see the stuff in reagan's desk? i said sure. what's that? she said his desk, a boxed up all the stuff and you can request permission to look inside the box of what he had in his desk. it turned out it's not exactly clear which desk at which time it was all in but i'm pretty sure it was the stuff that was in his desk in his home in pacific palisades that he took with him to the governors mentioned in sacramento, and then ultimately to the white house and had in his desk in the white house. when he left the white house do was put in boxes like old desk diaries like this stuff you have that stays in your desk. so there's a kind of poignant, iconic quality. what are these things he held onto? there are a few speeches and some are speeches he heard before but some of these were speeches he kept in his desk. there's one thing he had written in 1962 which have never been published. it was a kind of essay he'd written. he was writing at the time essays. he wasn't doing his radio commentaries yet but he wrote about. he probably wrote every day of his life and he was a good writer. he wrote for the human voice. he wrote as someone who develop his the early career on radio. he was always writing this will essays and commentaries. and this one in 1962 he says, you know, it's possible that communism will take over and it will end in nuclear war and conflict. but i think it's more likely that communism, soviet union will just collapse. because, he said, communism isn't even a political system our economic system. it's just a form of insanity. he said it's a violation of human nature that doesn't make any sense. nobody would want to live like that. it's been this essay. it's an interesting view. people on the right didn't think that been. they didn't think communism was going to collapse but it was sort of reagan appointed commonsense perspective on anything, on everything that communism. he says it doesn't make sense for people to live like that. no one would tolerate it. if they knew how we lived they wouldn't stand for it. he had this colonel of an idea that he held onto and defied repeated in various forms when you start to do these really interesting radio commentaries in the late 1970s which was a place he really developed his political ideas between his losing campaign for president in 1976 when he challenged gerald ford and his winning campaign in 1980. that eccentric if you matched up with some other eccentric views he had. you find also reading these commentaries rating hated nuclear weapons. he had been a pacifist. he called himself a pacifist in the 1930s. partly his early involvement in the theater. he went to see when he was very young like 19 years old this point journeys and which is the point about the first world war british play that's kind of a pacifist play, about the waste of the first world war and the trench warfare and these young men dying pointlessly. had huge impact on. the other thing that had huge impact on him was when he was in the second world war making training films in hollywood, but at a military base. the base was sent these early films of the liberation -- the liberation of auschwitz. he claimed he was one of the people who liberated auschwitz. he never said anything like that. that kind of thing you can only delete if you don't actually know the story of reagan. but he did see in 1945 films of the emaciated prisoners, the piles of corpses and had a huge effect on. were on junior remembers his father trying to make him watch it is years later, he does he suggest to understand this about humanity. that was another thing that influenced this idea he had that nuclear war would be totally horrifying and unacceptable, and he thought especially after he became president in the assassination attempt that his mission was to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. and the conventional view, the conservative view is that, well, he had the charge of peace through strength, came into office, but military buildup, makes the soviet union bankrupted, force them to collapse and surrender. i don't think that's at all what happened if you look at the record. he was desperate for connection and negotiation with the soviet leaders. in the reagan library you can find these handwritten letters, long handwritten literacy wrote to every soviet leader when he was president. starting with brezhnev, chernenko, fila gorbachev. these letters are really touching. he says you and i have the power to destroy the world. we also have the will power to save the world and make peace. we have to be able to communicate. we have to meet and talk to each other. he was reaching out to try to form a connection and he would get back these letters that were in this leninist boilerplate about western imperialism. it was clearly from all these guys were dying we now know one after the other but he wasn't able to make any connection. he was terribly frustrated, terribly upset about it at all the time this defense buildup is going on during the first term when it's sort of a day of the neoconservative and hawkish view of the world. rating is on board for that but he's also really, really unhappy because he thinks the world is getting more dangerous. -- reagan is on board. when he finds out from his cia briefing that the soviets actually think that the united states might attack, that we have aggressive designs on them, he is shocked. how could you think that? we would never do that. i think in his second term he didn't continue that strategy. he turned around completely. second term in relation to the soviets and more like a repudiation of the first term and an acknowledgment of what he tried to the first term did work. he didn't scare them to the bargaining table. and that's the point where it becomes an, more radical than almost anybody on the left. they keep saying in meetings, why can't we abolish all nuclear weapons? of course this is tied up with something of a fantasy about star wars because he thinks he can replace nuclear weapons with a nuclear shield. be that as it may, he wanted to get rid of them and he's constantly at these meetings with gorbachev tried to make the more radical proposal to get rid of the weapons. at that point he's really at odds with almost everybody in his own administration, all of the foreign policy people around him are saying this is a crazy idea. they think it's lost his marbles. one person supported him, george schultz. the secretary of state said look, this is what the president wants. i think is right and we have to figure out if they negotiate an agreement like this, which they became very close until reagan walked out over gorbachev not being willing to accept the star wars research he wanted. if they had agreed to that we have to be prepared to implement it. i think the picture of reagan that emerges goes back to the early roots, his early pessimism, whole history he had of ink and above of nuclear weapons. it has a lot of relationship to the story we've been told that it's not exactly the same story but i think you see a second term and very different president than you would see in the first term. not because he's gone soft in the head because he is activated some views that are really at odds with what he was known for previously. maybe i'll stop there. that's a lot of food for thought i hope, and thank you. [applause] >> yes. come to the microphone if you have any questions. >> just one microphone. >> i really enjoyed that very much. i thought it was great balance for the whole life and certainly raised a lot of questions in my mind, but most of those kids would've at least partly answered already. the one that i'm not clear on, sort of his entrance into politics or sort of personal interest in getting into politics, coming from a family of somewhat dysfunctional i guess, but also a family not have great means or anything. as far as i can tell, his father wasn't involved particularly in politics, or mother. when did he get the idea that he could kind of take part in that, as opposed to having ideas about, having political ideas? i guess i'll just throw this in because i had the opportunity to do so. you mentioned that his ge years ended in a situation where ge felt he was too far to the right. i always thought ge as having lured him to the right, that he was kind of bored on the left and was still of the left win ge made some sort of overture to him to take part in their ge our or whatever. and that he was very, pleased with that and lured into more at least thinking along the lines of corporate america, but how did he move so quickly? i don't come anywhere, but mostly how did he get into politics? >> i think ge didn't want to be perceived as being, of having, taking political sides publicly. so we got too far out it was a problem for them. the excerpt from the book which we ran in slate today includes the interesting issue about ge firing him and why they fired him. i have a theory about that. i think it involves this antitrust case that was brought against ge. ge executives went to jail and a price fixing case right around them, and at the same time reagan was being investigated in a antitrust case around his working in the screen actors guild. he had been called to testify before a grand jury which not many people know about at the time i think it was the risk of embarrassment on the issue. reagan had his own myth about what reagan got ge fired him because he was too conservative and because he was speaking his mind about the government. i think the evidence suggests that wasn't the reason why they got rid of them. on why reagan into politics, his family, during the depression both his father and brother got patronage jobs working for the new deal, that bpa type jobs. there was a think a political awareness in the family. i think it always enjoyed arguing politics. he was always interested in politics. there's a description of them defending fdr. he was famous at a rate of station where he worked in davenport, iowa, for doing this great fdr imitation. we got to hollywood he was a hollywood politician. he sought out electio the electd leadership in the screen actors guild. he became a figure in the black list, so that we didn't talk about. part of it he just enjoy politics and was always interested in it. the other side is i think reagan had a pretty good self-awareness about certain things. he knew he was a great actor. he knew what his strengths were as an active. he was reliable. he was on time. there was no monkey business from him. he knew he was limited in his range. he could only do certain parts but he was always frustrated with the party was getting. i think i did fairly early stage after the second world war his career never really got going again. i think at that point he started to think about what else he could do. he had been approached to run for congress as a democrat a couple of times in the 1940s, and he passed it up, but i think he had his eye on that for me pretty early stage. >> i would like to echo, thank you for a very nuanced picture and questioning some of us. in terms of question if i could do a double, procedurally, how long did it take you to research and write the book? the second substantive one is, reagan has big ideas about things like communism, does he think much about how the government works, how it might work? >> on the practicalities of writing the book, it depends on how you measure it. in some ways i've been thinking about reagan my whole life. i was trying to promote my book on facebook and so my high school friends were responding and one of them reminded me that in the mock debate we had in my high school in 19 aei played the reagan part but i played the reagan part not because i was a reagan supporter but because there were no reagan supporters in my very liberal progressive high school and someone had to take a bullet and i did it. but i was thinking about reagan at that point. i was 16. i have been thinking about it and following it but i never fully engaged with it. i think sort of reading and thinking and research part of the book with a couple years. the writing of the book i think i did in under a year. >> i think it's understood question because it points to the answer which is i don't think he had a sophisticated or detailed understanding of what the government did in most cases the it's a little bit bifurcated. as a governor and some extent as a president, reagan was very practical about government. and worked with the other side, with compromised. if you look at what he did in california, ended up in some ways a very strong progressive liberal. he doubled the state's funding for higher education, helped to build although he was often seen as being at odds with the states great university system. he was an environmental president. he protected a lot of life in california. governor, sorry. he protected a lot of land in california. he got very involved in a big welfare reform bill which was kind of a head of its target consumers the origin of the idea of warfare and replacing welfare with jobs at a time when the nixon white house was aboard a guaranteed income which reagan played big role in defeating the going to washington and testifying before the senate that is a bad idea. it was again reagan's sort commonsense approach. he said how can you be a good idea to pay people for not working? people will not work if you do that. that was the level they often engage with programs but he was thoughtful about government in certain ways but he was possessed of this idea that more government midwest freedom. and that you simply wanted less of it. when it came to following through on the notion he often sort of threw up his hands, gave up, didn't pursue it. if you asked him he always come would always oppose government taking on any additional function, any expanded role once he got to the white house. >> do you have anything to say about the role of nancy's father, dr. davis, in all this? apparently very conservative position at almost feels in some respect for life row of data in ronald life. >> there is one of the recovery can for them to the right is he fell under the influence of nancy's father. they spent a lot of time together. nancy's parents were friends with barry goldwater. they would all vacation in arizona. reagan got no goldwater through his father-in-law, and then paying family friends. but i think in the end it happened by that point. first of all nancy herself didn't really have, she wasn't particularly political when she met reagan. she ended up adopting and following his politics to the extent she had her own view of things, but loyal davis was her father. he sometimes is portrayed as anti-semite and a bigot and a sort of ultraconservative. one of the things that's plausible, the evidence isn't really there. in all this correspondence can you don't find correspondence between them. the timing doesn't quite add up. i think part of what is interesting and surprising about reagans moved to the right is the extent to which he did do it on his own. it was a product of his reading, is thinking, his writing things all this time. reagan wasn't an intellectual but he was a reader and writer and originalist certain way and he had to come to ideas even if their ideas held by a lot of other people through this independent path. thanks. >> i was going to ask a question of what effect nancy reagan and jane wyman, his otherwise, had on his political fun. i think maybe you partially answered it with nancy's father. by procedural question was on the series of the president, i went to a lecture at the smithsonian about 15 years ago moderated by professor schlesinger. they were books on franklin pierce and chester arthur and all. i thought the series sort of went away when doctor schloss and your dash the unimaginative but i thought john dean wrote the book on board harding. is it still going on? and a garland of books on obama and spitted yesterday are all done now except except for clinton which is in progress. obama ism code some point, might be years from now but you don't almost all the president and they're all written by different people. some art historians, some are journalists and some are hard others. gail collins had william henry harrison who was present in 30 days and the book basically as a supposed be about the presidency. so she said there was nothing, nothingthat she used every piece of information she could find it was nothing left on the cutting room or. reagan was the opposite. a wealth of material, so much stuff that you to digest it and. they are parallel at different kinds of exercises. >> were you strictly limited to 200 pages? >> it was a word limit but not by too much. the point of it is to keep -- i think they're supposed be in the range of 40,000 to 50,000 words. i will answer your other question briefly about his otherwise because i do think it's interesting and relevant. jane wyman his first wife, when the marriage came to it and jane wyman left him and i think is one of the things that helped to produce a dynamic i was talking about at the beginning where he did hear things, didn't see things, isolate himself. to some extent the failure of the marriage was result of that because she felt it wasn't simply be there and couldn't get through to them. he had been engaged when he was in college the woman who grew up with called margaret cleaver. she broke off the engagement and sent him back his ring. she said she couldn't tell the difference between fact and fancy which was an interesting observation. i think both of those relationships ending surprised him and left him even more feeling he couldn't trust people. he was on his own. he did want people to know him, to understand him. it's part of this impenetrable quality compass and so people can't understand what was going on inside his head. because there was -- it was because he became very self protected based on all of these experiences. i think his first marriage was very much a story, the story of his second marriage is he finally found someone he trusted. i think if you could save who in his life was regularly close to, it's his mother and we know very little about the relationship because neither of them wrote anything about it, and nancy. >> the last thing you said really speaks to my question and i was so glad to talk about reagans preferred an unrealistic rosy picture of the world. because i'm a clinical social worker -- worker, something i've always wondered about reagan and particularly whenever the biography and i tried to think of his name coming over, he's the one who put himself -- >> that would be ed morris. >> and does little things in there. you talk of his preference forcing the world being different from what it was. in my business there such a thing called dissociative behavior, associative thinking that what it means is you leave reality. we all do it sometimes when we daydream. daydream is disassociative. it can be conscious i think this is born, i think i will just drift off. but the more you go towards pathology, the less voluntary it is. it's always deliberate but as far as being consciously deliberate, it gets less and less and less so. i've always wondered if ronald reagan, as i thought you were saying, sort of chose this as a conscious thing to do. my impression has been it happened to me. he had to zone out. so i'm wondering what speakers i like the way you put it. i think you start to do this but don't think you do it consciously but if it works for you, it's functional, you do it more. so i don't think reagan thought i will turn off my sugar i think sometimes he did turn off his hearing aid actually. i don't think he said this is how i deal with things. i ignore them. but i think he did. he did do that and he did it more over time. as certain things in his life heard him and wanted him, he went deeper into the. i don't try to put him on the couch. it's all a bit of an later explanation but i do think, edmund morris we were talking about who wrote this kind of comets of the famously disastrous biography, right? because he got the invite him into the white house, second term. you can basically be a fly on the wall. he had more access to regulate any historian has ever had to impress was in office. all the time he went into the reagan. do you do what you got? exactly the same thing he got from watching regular tv. you could ask reagan and get this image. the thing about reagan is, exactly the same in private and in public. his conclusion from that was come he says reagan had no inner life. i just think that's wrong. i just think what he should have said is despite all the facts i couldn't gain access to reagan's inner life at this point i think it's very unlikely that we can historians, are going to have some right through access to reagan's inner life. it wasn't there. it just me he hit it very well. >> i think someone thinking in my business would say that maybe he was mostly in his inner life, and i'm wondering how much control he had over the disassociation, the zoning out. i suspect it just happened to them. when you have to tap into an extreme you really don't have much control over it. and if it is rewarding and make you feel good, but he wants to exert control? spirit but if it makes you unhappy, people come see. when people are made unhappy, but it didn't make reagan unhappy. >> thank you. >> thanks. speaking of his inner life, he mentioned he read a lot and wrote a lot. educate any sense of which authors including fiction, authors he liked and inspired him, and, indeed, how else would he spend his free time? did he listen to music and go to the theater, cinema? what else did he do? if i could ask a second question, can you speculate what he would make of this years republican -- [laughter] -- including donald trump. >> i knew that was coming. first on what he did for fun. he loved to watch movies. he kept these meticulous diaries and the diaries are a little burgers. he does anything have anything to he just says what happens. he writes it down 74, haircuts. every time he gets a haircut, he just writes went to the doctor further along i think partly a you can recognize the alzheimer's. they are very, very basic. he writes that every movie he saw. he and nancy, that's what they would do every evening, he knocked off work at 6:00, whatever time, they got their tv trays out, sat down and watch some videos on tv or the movies that has movies but he does write enthusiastically. he seems to be more responsive to movies he sees the people he meets. people in a diary are not present the movies he gets very excited about anything attention to who the actors are. i think he was reading, what kind of reading when he was a boy unlike adventure stories. another pair in the '50s it was very engaged in illegal literature. by the time he was president he liked to read human events, the right wing newspaper and his aides will try to keep it away from him because he would pick up these stories and fables and you go off and say things that were not true and then you have to walk them back so they were constantly hiding human events. but the writing is interesting. if you really want to get a sense of how reagan thought, i think these transcripts of his radio commentaries from the late '70s are the most interesting thing. they are really good and written out in longhand with very few scratches. he sat down and wrote them. they are cogent, somewhat different, very far out sometimes. they were original and interesting and has that quality, a little bit rush limbaugh quality. it's kind of compelling. you want to keep listening or keep reading. for the presidential field. i just did a kind of write up of exactly this, which is then, the gory details. it's sort of funny because greg is the patron saint -- reagan is the patron saint. saint. when they did the cnn debate, they invoked reagan 3800 they only mentioned odd 10 times. that you get a sense of the actual hierarchy in the republican party. i think it's a largely false myth. you are building up both the idea of reagan as a conservative purist as opposed to being a pragmatist and sword but also in terms of what he thought. reagan thought at least three things that would get in kicked out of the republican party today. one is about immigration. reagan, there's a great quote was taken 84 debate with walter mondale way reagan says i support amnesty for people who may have come in illegally not who worked hard, lived in this country. he was a southern californian. he thought the idea of a border fence was appalling. there was a migrant labor force that moves back and forth -- back and forth across the border. he thought it was a necessity, rather that he lived in a multicultural world filled with mexican immigrants. he liked the idea of immigration. he didn't like walls. his view of immigration which would probably be very tolerable in the democratic party but certainly not the republican party. he supported and gun control. he said i got a great idea to let people buy $20 handguns in pawnshops without background checks. because of what happened to jim brady. so he was for gun control. he couldn't have a position today and the republican party. alaska was abortion. reagan changed his view on this but he signed as governor of california something called the therapeutic abortion bill which probably did more to national level to make abortion legal as world the way. california was a big influential state early on. -- roe v. wade. he signed it that said your doctor can decide if you should have an abortion or not. that point it became a discussion of the doctor and he became very easy to get an abortion. then that happened and lots of other states. reagan said later he would do that. i think what most republicans think is largely consistent with what reagan thought along with all the contradictions and and possibility of having it both ways, that the reagan economic plan embodied. in other respects it just shows you how certain things have become required ideology in the republican party that were not 35 years ago your. >> i come from an old washington family and we met ronald reagan many times. anyway, my wife's father was reagan's barber. his whole term. >> he loved the hair cut. [laughter] >> it was. he didn't have to tip. he knew a lot of secrets of reagan. the first with -- >> i can think of one in particular. >> the first one was hair and he would never talk about visiting the white house, never. so he died with a lot of secrets. anyway, i went to notre dame, tell me about reagan's special relationship with notre dame especially with father hesburgh spirit first and ask you all more about the hair? >> who does yours? >> as you can see, nobody. by having his hair at my age i know that reagan said, at his age was not plausible. was your father-in-law the one who died if you think? >> it's like women. they said i never dye my hair, with chemicals, but i use vegetable oil that's how they walk away from that. if you ever dyed your hair it falls out. it disappears. >> but your father-in-law was the vegetable man? [laughter] >> he always could've had a v-8. >> i see you have inherited his coin is on the subject. >> he was asked many, many times. >> but now it can be told. come on. >> only god knows. >> not true. there's a few people who know. but anyway, we know. on notre dame, i think, there's one part of that which, the gipper, reagan wanted to play his football legend. the one part of hollywood he was desperate to get, knute rockne all american. he went after any got this part. that's where the gipper comes from a student he nearly didn't get it. and pat o'bryan got it for him. >> you know this story for him. >> i'm a notre dame man. we have to know. >> exactly. i watched a lot of old reagan movies but there's a line that no one focused on. everyone focuses on his deathbed speech which is mythological by the way. never happened. the line in that movie which is country about what george gip is like, i don't like people to get close to me. i thought that a line that really resonates with reagan. at the way in which reagan really was like a character spirit when father hesburgh and would visit the white house, reagan would show knute rockne. >> thank you. last question. >> could you follow up on thecomment that was made during the introduction to the effect that i think you might think that reagan was the second most influential president in the 20th century, or since fdr any red? >> i think if you take a long perspective you have a liberal progressive way which you consider new deal era, forget the earlier progressive part of the, akins with roosevelt in 1932 ugly last until reagan is elected in 1980. in a lot of ways the republican presidents in that period were in many respects a liberal president. government continue to expand. the overall new deal project continued during those years and, of course, you had a democratic congress is. we have republican presidents with democratic congress is intended to perpetuate the direction i was under way. reagan halted that. he didn't really shrinking government. government to stop the growing anti-gave rise to a movement that still holds to his fundamental belief that is the modern conservative movement that i think, i think you could argue since 1980 we've been living in the age of are a compact just as the republican presidents in a liberal era before that, the democratic presidents have been democratic presidents and a largely conservative era since then. i think changing the direction of government, challenging the role of government, stopping the growth of expansion of government in the way he did was what he set out to do. it was an enormous project everything he was enormous effective at the. not the only things he was effective but he think which president really, really change the country i would so fdr and reagan in the 20th century. thank you. [applause] >> you can see there is a line. copies are available at the register and jake will be up there to sign. form a line to the right of the table and please are member to fold up your chairs. thank you very much. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] here's a look at some books that are being published this week. .. >> here on c-span2, "the communicators" is next, with look at fbi investigation into the san bernardino shooting. to help access information stored on shooters i -- iphone. talks about it on the bureau's 2017 budget request at subcommittee hering. also efforts to improve the military's health care system. >> host: this week on "the communicators," discussion about encryption, iphone and fbi. joining us josh sive agents association. general counsel there. critical la brees with center for democracy and. vice president for policy we have a working reporter joining our roundtable, dustin votz of reuters where he covers cybersecurity. mr. calabrese, let's begin with you. is this issue we're talking about the iphone and terrorism. is this a classic case of security versus privacy? >> guest: actually i think more of a case of security versus security. we're all concerned and about the privacy of the information on the device. we're also very much worried, building any tool that allows you to break security on the device is privately harm. one that bill come back to bite apple users around the world. >> host: mr. seive, same question. >> guest: we see it fundamentally a proper balance the tool was intentionally designed to be impenetrable. as a result. we believe it threatens the way that our search and seizure laws were designed to operate where reasonable searches under lawful warrant can obtain access to evidence. we view it as a real threat to the full trump crumb balance of privacy and security sits on. >> host: tim cook in his open letter writes about this issue. the government suggests this tool could only be used once on one phone. that is simply not tool. once created the technique could be used over and over again on any number of devices. in the physical world it would be equivalent of