Capitalism. We conclude tonights primetime programming at 11 00 eastern with james votess book Freedom National taking a look at slavery 18611865. Visit booktv. Org for more on this weekends television schedule. Next on booktv, barbara matusow, editor of scooped it recounts the life of her career Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter jack nelson who died in 2009 at the age of 80. Barbara matusow is joined by former president jimmy carter, former mayor of atlanta and u. S. Ambassador to the United Nations andrew young and former Justice Department spokesman Terry Adamson. It is a discussion of jack nelsons memoir scoop the evolution of a southern reporter. It is about an hour. Good evening, everyone, good to have everyone here. My name is Hank Klibanoff and i will be moderating this wonderful panel tonight, as director of the Journalism Program at emory and coauthor of the book about coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, featured tags quite prominently. First of all i want to thank the Carter Library and museum for hosting this and cosponsoring this and also the Emory University library, particularly the manuscript and archives and rare books library. Which costs papers and wisdom of a great number of journalists, white, africanamerican, of all sorts and we are so pleased five of those are Pulitzer Prize winners and the latest among them is at the 11. Barbara matusow is so generous and made jack nelsons papers in our position and there is some rich history and i encourage everyone to take a look at them. We are here to celebrate the life, memoir, papers of jack nelson with people who knew him extremely well. Jack is a man of the enormous influence and consequence in the nation. The story of jack nelson for those who dont know is a story of news reporting and the latter half of the 20th century. If you look at his career, starting off, he was born in alabama across the state line, moves as a child from biloxi where he starts telling newspapers, he was a newspaper boy, and honorable way to begin, how i got my start. He gets his first job at the daily herald, afternoon newspaper in gulfport, purely serendipitously where i got my start. He portrays himself quite openly as a very gullible reporter and i certainly hope when you bought the book and had a chance to look at it you will be as entertaining as we were by some of his early stories of falling for cruises and having great faith that everyone was telling him the truth. As you find out later they were not always telling him the truth. He didnt develop such a reputation as a hardnosed Investigative Reporter which gets him beat up a couple times and sent him fleeing to the atlanta constitution where he continued to get beat up. He did some breakthrough investigative reporting that we will hear about tonight but beyond that he was a terrific gumshoe, he was a great reporter, easy to overemphasize that was investigative. His career was also about standing for the First Amendment and he worked with a number of organizations, helped create a number of organizations that to this day are quite prominent. The Reporters Committee for freedom of the press, the law center call all of which have jacks imprint on them. I want to say one last thing and we will start talking, tell a little story. As many of you know atlanta and the world lost a great editor this week in Jean Patterson who passed away in st. Pete, jean had been the editor of the atlanta constitution when jack nelson was here and she once told the story about jack being a reporter and a celebrated reporter when gene got a call from the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Otis Chandler and mr. Chandler said i am thinking the Los Angeles Times wants to set up shop in atlanta. You have a big story brewing in the south, civilrights story and the emerging south and i need a reporter to staff that bureau for the Los Angeles Times. You got any good reporter . And jean says mr. Chairman, we have tons of great reporters and started listing all these great reporters and purposely left off the name of jack nelson. Wasnt about to give him props and a week later chandler hired jack nelson. That is how jack got to the Los Angeles Times, great work in atlanta, brought investigative reporting to the civilrights story which was elevated through an all new level. Most of washington, the Washington Bureau, and the l. A. Times did not have a great imprint until jack got there. I am not saying it had none. It didnt have anything like what it had after words. It had 17 reporters, when they retired he had 57 and so i called the Washington Bureau of the los angeles time the house that jack built. I will return to our wonderful guest, we have barbara matusow, jacks wife who took on completion, about 80 done, and the atlanta apart, parts were done and polished it and turned it into a spectacular read. Everyone knows jimmy carter, former state senator. [laughter] am i going to try this one . President carter in new jack throughout his career and certainly if you did know him directly you knew his work and if i might take a moment to point out we have been joined, and by dont embarrass you, by mrs. Carter, great to have you here tonight. [applause] and ambassador andrew young who is part of the movement but jack covered, subject of stories jack would have written as ambassador to the u. N, jack would have covered them, got to know him and it is a real honor to have you here as well, ambassador young. [applause] Terry Adamson who worked at the atlanta constitution, got to know him later, got to know him extremely well, frequently and emory graduate, editor of the emory well which we are very proud of, and went on to a number of different jobs including working in the Justice Department of the Carter Administration as special assistant to attorney general griffin bell as spokesman, and objective editor of National Geographic and it is of pleasure to have you back here. [applause] so i will start with barbara. I want her to tell us what is it like . This is a moment others have faced. When jack died and you are faced with his papers and starting to go through them, what kind of an Emotional Experience is that and i will end it there. Tell us about the experience of going through jacks papers. I must say what a pleasure and privilege it is to be on the same stage with president carter, ambassador young and my old friend kerri and another Pulitzer Prize winner. [applause] also to say how pleased i am that jacks papers are here. This is where they belong. You may not know it but emery has has an astounding collection but the curator here, pursued jack with a special deal because they made a specialty out of southern journalists and they have quite a distinguished lobster, claude sydney, john smiths her i knew that would marshall for 80, many of you know celestes i am very proud that jacks papers are here where they belong to. Now to return to hanks question, initially i had a very negative approach projects papers the experience didnt start very well. When jack retired he came back, brought home with him about 20 boxes of the biggest mess you ever saw. Jack wasnt just disorganized. He was opposed to this organization. I started out to help him sort papers and i had bought all these file boxes and folders and everything, pick up the paper and say where do you think this one goes with the atlanta constitution or the Marvin Griffin administration and he said give me that and started reading it, he read every piece of paper, so after two days i gave up. I said it is all yours, and the second reason i had a negative impression was they brought silver fish into the house. After he died and i decided that his memoir needed to be completed, it was a wonderful read, an important book, but i knew that meant attacking his papers. I couldnt do it any other way. With a heavy heart i got the story going through them and to my astonishment i found these pearls, these gems, articles he had written, articles about him, oral history, speeches that he gave which were a mother lode of information, and i began to see that it was really going to be possible to fill in these polls that he left and not only possible but pleasurable. It became like a treasure hunt. I compared it to a jigsaw puzzle when you are down to the last pieces and you see they are going to fit and it really was actually a very enjoyable experience far from what i had expected. The deeper i got into his papers, the more i learned about him. I didnt think that was possible. Mike most wives i thought i knew everything about my husband. I really didnt know him in the days when he was covering the south and carrying out georgia and making a legend of himself on the civilrights trail. He was married to somebody else at that time but as i say i learned a lot by reading all these things. One thing i learned was the told that his brilliant career took on his family. His kids and grandkids are sitting out there. One great grandchild is out there and i think they could tell you better than i, karen whose daughter told me he had been gone so long, they put a sign on the wall that said welcome home, daddy. There were constant telephone threats, constant interruptions, no dinner practically went on without the telephone ringing. Sometimes the tips send him out into the night again. There was a serious episode after he broke the story of a police protected lottery ring and the fire engine came screaming to the house in the middle of the night. One time policeman was drawn guns started to approach the house saying they heard a report that he murdered his wife. So there were lots of things that must have been very difficult to live through. Another thing that surprised me and shocked me was the patients he displayed as an Investigative Reporter. He was the worlds most impatient person. From my point of view he was. And his granddaughter who was supposed to be driving up from florida today, stuck in traffic somewhere, said to me one time bar bark, i dont know how you stay married to papaw, he is so impatient. It is totally different when he was on the job. Investigative reporting requires enormous amount of patience. Jack one time took two years to track down a lottery ring and when he finally found, he was looking physically for the operation, found a neighborhood he went door to door knocking on doors until the woman told him there was an honor repair shop next door without much of a repair going on. Then he proceeded to spend 11 days in her kitchen, not very far, just looking down over supposedly Auto Repair Shop and spent 11 days documenting the whole thing watching cops come and go, take money, brought a photographer. When jack finished reporting the story it was reported and it took patience that stunned me. I knew that he was tough and tenacious but i actually didnt really understand the scope of his reporting particularly in his days as corruption buster you might say at the atlanta constitution. Wanted to read you a list of some of the scandals that he broke. Exposes on illegal gambling parlors in savannah, police protected or houses in athens, election fraud, trucks stop in rome, marriage mills in south georgia, state payroll padding, embezzlement of tax funds, use of conduct for private work, nepotism, purchasing schemes such as the time they bought those with no bottoms or lakes with no water. I could go on. Many of these exposes took place during the Clinton Administration which president carter can will attest was notoriously corrupt. I think it was the Readers Digest that sedna had never had so many stolen so much. Marvin griffin was a forgiving sort of crook. Quite a few years later he and jack and some other reporters were sitting around drinking and Marvin Griffin said to jack i used to think every time i see you walking into a press conference with a notebook, jack said what . He said i used to think i wonder what that be the eyed son of a bitch has on me today. Jack left the constitution in 1965 to pursue the civil rights story for the l. A. Times and he was always we have to watch our time so i will just end by saying how happy i am this book is published because he had such a wonderful career in washington, tended to overshadow this earlier phase of his career in the south and this book also ends halfway through his career, doesnt cover his career in washington except in an epilogue, and helps the reputation, beam roberts, one of the most important journalists, and may be the story of his wife to cement that place. [applause] president carter, and given jacks reputation would you be afraid of him . Tell us about your experiences please. The remarkable events described in the book and i hope how many have read the book . How many are going to read it . I knew jack when i was just a peanut farmer and no no interest in politics at all. When he came to the atlanta constitution. The first president was city editor of the Atlanta Journal, they counted competition, and everyone in georgia came to know jack nelson as one of the most incisive and aggravating reporters who ever lived. I can say all the epithets i heard described, one was his and. That has a connotation that is always burrowing in where they ought not to be. They should not be exposed to different people. Jack would do that and was incredible success and sometimes under unbelievable danger. The first time he came to georgia he was inducted, went into the national guard, inducted to go to the korean war. He went to fort stewart, georgia and became a staff sergeant. If you read the book you find out he never learned how to shoot a rifle, never had any basic training at all, he was promoted above the other people who came with him from biloxi to the army and did that because he was a reporter and expert at publicizing his Commanding Officers great exploits. He did this by becoming friends with all the editors of newspapers up and down the coast from savannah to florida. He ingratiated himself there and finally went back over to biloxi, mississippi but at the time he was asked to work for the atlanta constitution and never got back to mississippi but stayed that is how he first got there. He was given a crash course in how to shoot a rifle. The last week he was in the army just like so they could get rid of him. He would get involved in the most exciting and dangerous events in a community and at that time there was practically no legitimacy in the georgia political system. It was shot through with absolute corruption. Most of georgia was socalled wet, circle drive. You couldnt buy liquor in most of the countys but every county had plentiful liquor. The sheriff and all his deputies supported and protected liquor dealers. That happened in my county as well as the jack would find out about these ongoing crimes as well as prostitution which was already mentioned and other things like bribery and he would investigate and find out people who gave him information and would certify the information was accurate and provable in court and he would bring it to the attention of the public. So vividly that Law Enforcement officials would have to go down and do something about it and when he got to atlanta he had the whole state as a target and he would single out individual places to shoot and he would go in and find out the most horrible thing going on that hurt the people of georgia and he would expose those embarrassing things that were not embarrassing until jack told about them because it was generally accepted and the same thing happened in the cases of vote fraud. Until it was a hold up he and his son became very famous. You suppose how corrupt the vote fraud was, i think about 15 people died and names were never revealed. Another thing that happened was at that time in 1962 when jack had been absent the atlanta constitution i decided to run for state senate and that is how i became famous. [laughter] to distinguish like jack over here the election was stolen from me and i didnt know jack nelson personally but the editor of the atlantic journal, John Pennington was the other Investigative Reporter from the afternoon paper of the Atlanta Journal to help me and eventually i became a state senator. Jack always resented that i didnt call on him instead of having jack do it. I knew jack pretty well. At the time that i knew jack he was not in the forefront of reporting on civil rights. He was basically finding out crooks in georgia. Even at the top level of government and exposing them in such a way that their depredations or the people of georgia were corrected and that is what he did, concentrated on those individual things. The people of georgia and new if they had experience in their own community of someone who was cheating or violating principles of human rights they could cause jack nelson their own state police, there sheriff, called jack nelson and take care of it to the top levels all the way to the county commission level. He went to harvard, i believe the second year that i was in the state senate and came back for my last start in the state senate and from there he went on to be an employee of the l 8 times because they offered him a 50 increase in salary and this was something he couldnt turn down if he had a white and three kids to take care of. I have experience those kinds of things myself. When i got to washington i was not particularly afraid of jack nelson. One reason, jack will give excuses, jack was not a crook. [applause] i havent had as much opportunity to be