Appropriations process. And, you know, its a, its a convenient and attractive, sometimes overly seductive tool in the president s Foreign Policy arsenal. From the shadows, a look at the cia, tonight at 10 eastern and sunday at 9 on after words, part of booktv this weekend on cspan2. And online at booktvs book club, comment on last months in depth guest, bonnie morris. Read a womans history for beginners and join the conversation. Go to booktv. Org and click on book club to enter the chat room. Cspan Gertrude Himmelfarb, author of the demoralization of society, deep in your book you suggest that the bicycle had more to do with liberating women in the victorian age, or some age, than the feminist movement. Is that true . Guest i think that is true. I think one of the interesting things about feminism, about all ideologies, is how in the end they are less influential than an awful lot of other things that are going on in society at the same time, and so while the feminists are talking about getting the vote or Higher Education for women or more Job Opportunities or anything of that sort, whats really happening is Something Else in the world, and that Something Else may be the bicycle, for example, which liberated women in all kinds of ways. It meant that they didnt have to have chaperons, for example; they could go off on their own. They didnt have to be accompanied all the time, didnt have to tell people where they were going at every point, and so it gave them the kind of liberty which the feminists, however strident they might be about all kinds of other issues, could not have given them. Cspan are you a feminist . Guest i think not as the term is used today. I think i would be as the term was used in victorian times, and i find those feminists whom i describe very congenial. I use the word feminist cautiously in the book. The term itself doesnt come up until the end of the century, but i think it is applicable to the earlier period. The word that is not quite so applicable is the word feminism as we use it today, certainly, but even just as a noun its not really appropriate. Its a singular noun; it suggests something homogeneous. It suggests a single movement, and thats not what the Victorian Women were about, the victorian feminists. They all were pursuing different causes. They were very strongminded, independent women, and they werent part of the group necessarily and they didnt follow each others leads and they often conflicted with each other and contradicted each other and even opposed each other publicly, and so there were many different kinds of feminism. There were the women who were intent upon the suffrage and there were those who focused on Higher Education and there were those who wanted greater Job Opportunities and there were those who were interested in divorce reform or property reform or the dissemination of Birth Control information. All those things were going on at the same time, and different women were involved in those different causes. There was some overlapping, but not all that much. Cspan you have a whole list of famous women that were not feminists, and one of them was Florence Nightingale. When did she live . Guest isnt that interesting . She was really midvictorian and, of course, she was enormously prominent in Victorian Society. She was very active, and she was not one of your retiring women. She was not one of the women who stayed at home, who was involved only in her Domestic Affairs and who was, as feminists now say, who was being put on a pedestal and not permitted to engage in public life. She was very, very active; she was very important. Cspan who was she . Guest Florence Nightingale was involved in nursing. Cspan lived where . Guest i think she lived in london most of the time. She was unmarried. She was very much involved in the crimean war, in the nursing reforms that took place at that time. She was being consulted on all kinds of other issues as well, and she did her thing and she did her job and she was engaged in whatever she was engaged in in a very public, prominent way, but she did not feel the need to engage in other causes. When she was approached by john stuart mill, for example, to sign a petition in favor of the vote for women, she refused. She said thats not her thing. She thought women could do a great many things that they wanted to do without having the vote. Cspan early on in your book you mention a couple of familiar names in this day and age. One of them is Margaret Thatcher and a statement she made back in 1983 about victorian values or is it virtues . Guest thats whats interesting. That as much as anything else provoked me to write that book. In 1983 she was involved in one of her electoral campaigns, and she was being interviewed by a young woman reporter who was rather hostile to her and who at one point said, mrs. Thatcher, it does sound to me as if you were approving of victorian values, to which mrs. Thatcher said, but of course. Exactly. Those were the values that helped make our country great. Then she subsequently went on and she picked up this expression victorian values. It was used throughout the campaign and in later campaigns. I discovered one occasion when, in fact, she used the expression not victorian values but victorian virtues, but it was reported in the press as victorian values. Thats the way we now understand, and she herself later picked up that expression. Cspan listed here are the cardinal virtues wisdom, justice, temperance, courage. Which one of those is your favorite . Guest well, its awfully tempting, of course, to say wisdom. Isnt that what we all want . I think from a social point of view, from a public point of view, the most important of those is probably temperance, moderation, and that of course is what the greeks emphasized, and i think thats a virtue that is singularly lacking in our time. I think if you ask me what one virtue, what one classical virtue, what one of these aristotelian cardinal virtues we were most in need of today, i think i might say temperance. Cspan another person you mention, and i think it has even a Family Connection for you, is bill bennett. You mention that the book of virtues has sold a million copies at least, and its been on the bestsellers list for over a year. The reason i say family, didnt your son work for him at one point . Guest he did indeed. When he came to washington he worked in the department of education with bill bennett. Cspan and your son is . Guest and my son is bill kristol, william kristol, otherwise known as bill kristol, whos always identified as the republican strategist. Im not sure i know what that means. Cspan and your husband you give a lot of credit to in this book as you start it out, saying you almost cant give him enough credit. And who is your husband . Guest Irving Kristol, whos a writer, an editor and publisher and whos acquired the tag, the label of the godfather of neoconservatism. Cspan so what does that make you . Guest it makes me the wife of Irving Kristol and the mother of bill kristol is what it makes me. Cspan are you a republican strategist or a neoconservative . Guest im not a republican strategist. In private life i suppose id be a neoconservative. As far as my writing goes, im simply a historian. Cspan how did you and Irving Kristol originally hook up . Guest thats a rather peculiar story; it goes back to our youth. I was very young. I think i was 18 when we met, and i think he was probably all of 20 or Something Like that, and we were both trotskyists. We were both youre surprised at that. We were very much involved in the radical movement, and we met at a trotskyist meeting and we were married a year later. Cspan where . Guest in new york, in brooklyn. The meeting was actually in brooklyn. Cspan what were those meetings all about . Guest they were rather ludicrous from any point of view, and even at the time i think we thought that they were rather odd, rather bizarre. There we were young, very militant socialists who thought we were going to reform the world. I forget the Young Peoples Socialist LeagueFourth International i think was the grand name that was given to this little group, and we were going to convert this little group of we, this handful of people were going to convert the masses to socialism, i suppose, was the idea. So that was the ostensible background of all of is. Cspan where did that come from in your life . Why were you even interested in doing that . Guest socialism was very much in the air. Remember, this was just before the second world war. This was post depression period. We were still, in fact, in the middle of the depression, but socialism was a very powerful influence among young people. There was this socialist impulse that was very, very Strong Social justice, social reform, equality and all of these things and trying to overcome the very desperate poverty of that period. So it seemed to me to be perfectly natural to be a socialist. Now, what made our condition just a little bit different is that we were also very, very strongly antiantalinist, which is why we became the trotskyite version of socialism. Cspan who was leon trotsky . Guest leon trotsky was the great bolshevik leader who, a rival in the beginning with stalin for power and who was then deposed and then finally assassinated by stalins henchmen, as we used to say. Cspan why would he be somebody you would follow . What was so strong about him . Guest he was a socialist, he was a marxist, he was unlike stalin. He was an intellectual. He was a man of great quality, and at the same time he was antistalinist and he was against what was happening in the soviet union, so that made him a rather attractive figure for us. It was all a wildly utopian dream, and even at the time, as i say, we took it with a certain sense of frivolity. We werent totally serious about it. It was intellectually very stimulating, and we actually read marx, for example, and we had very heated debates about the meaning of this or that marxist dogma. Cspan what were your families like at that time . Guest we both came from immigrant families, both very poor, both struggling very hard to make ends meet and to lead very respectable lives, both very jewish, and they were both good roosevelt democrats in their politics, but we young people were going to go beyond that, and thats the way we did it. Cspan when did you get married . Guest we got married i was all of 19, and my husband was all of 22, and this was just the month after pearl harbor. Cspan had your families stimulated your interest in reading and thinking and all that . Guest well, they had, absolutely, but almost unintentionally. It was unwittingly. It was an enormous respect for learning as such. They could not have predicted the way in which, the direction in which i would have gone or whatever, but there was an enormous respect for the book. There was a tradition among jewish families, and mine was a rather observant jewish family. There was a tradition in jewish families that when a book of the bible or the prayer book fell on the floor, you kissed it when you picked it up in order to preserve its kind of purity. I must say, that respect for the book transferred itself to secular books as well. Im not suggesting that we kiss secular books when we were rather hard on books in that we annotate them wildly and so on, but there was that respect for the book. There was a respect for learning. My parents had no formal education at all, but it was understood from the very beginning that both my brother and i would go to college, for example. So that is the intellectual background. Cspan what countries had your parents come from . Guest russia. Cspan both Irving Kristols and yours . Guest yes. Thats right. Different parts of russia, parts of russia that were later poland and so on, but essentially russia. They regarded themselves as russian jews. Cspan if you go to your book the demoralization of society, you go back to 1948 for your first book, where you edited a book about, i believe, lord acton. Guest lord acton, thats right. I edited his essays. Cspan so if you had gotten married around pearl harbor, where did you go to school . Guest what was i doing in between there . I went to undergraduate school at Brooklyn College. As i said, my family was poor and this was a free college. Then i did graduate work at the university of chicago. Cspan how about dr. Kristol . Where did he go . Guest he went into the army at that point. I was married in my last year at Brooklyn College and then he was already out of college and he was working in the Brooklyn Navy yard, would you believe. This was, as i say, the very beginning of the war years and prepared to go into the army. At that point i then, when i was graduating, after spending a year in new york, decided to go to graduate school and i chose the university of chicago because it had the reputation of being the most intellectual of all of the universities. This was the great day of i dont know if the name means anything to you or to people today Robert Maynard hutchins, who was the president of the university at that time, and there was a Great Books Program that was very active at that time, and all of that seemed very attractive to me. Cspan and did he go out there also . Guest he went out for a very short time, as i say, waiting to be drafted, and i think he was there for perhaps nine months or something until he did go off to the army. I stayed on and went to graduate school and did my graduate work there. Cspan what were you studying . Guest originally i specialized in the french revolution, and i did a masters thesis on robespierre, the political philosophy of robespierre. I did that mainly because i thought the most interesting person on the faculty there was this very eminent and very, very interesting historian who specialized in the french revolution, but then i came across lord acton, who had written a book no, he hadnt written a book, but a book had been published on the french revolution. It was actually his lectures that were published, and this was very, very stimulating. He was reputed to have been the most learned man in europe at that time. He knew everything. Cspan what years did he live . Guest he was very much a victorian. The queen died in 1901, he died in 1902, so his lifespan covered pretty much the victorian period. Cspan is he the fellow who said, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely . Guest tends to is what he said, and everyones always correcting everybody on that. Power corrupts, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely, yes. Cspan why did he say that . Guest he was a great, great liberal. He was two things; he was a very complicated man. This, of course, is what attracted him to me. He was a great liberal who was terribly distressed one of the things he was interested in about the french revolution is how did a revolution that started out with such noble ambitions liberty, equality, fraternity how did it degenerate into the terror that it did . So one of the great themes of his life was liberty, and that became almost an obsession. The great enterprise he was working on all of his life was to be a history of liberty, and that is said to have been the greatest book that was never written. He never did get around to write it, but he did write about liberty in antiquity, he wrote about liberty in modernity and so on, and it was the theme that ran through his whole life. Cspan where does that statement come from . Guest in one of his essays cspan why has it lived so long . Guest because its just a very powerful and very true statement, isnt it, about the relationship between power and liberty. What happens when you give a man or you give a party or you give even a dogma that kind of power . Cspan here you are editing a book on lord acton back in 1948, and 1995 youre writing about the victorian age. I think Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post called you the foremost authority on the victorian age. What does that sound like to you . Are you . Guest i hope im an authority. I wouldnt presume to say the foremost. But it is true. I have spent a good chunk of my life reading and thinking about the victorians. Its an enormously stimulating period, and these were very, very thoughtful men. Mind you, while i was doing this i was doing other things as well. When i taught, for example, i taught not only english intellectual history, but i also taught about the continental traditions of the germans and the french kant, hegel, marx and so on and it was very interesting to see my victorians in contrast to the continental thinkers, the continental thinkers very often much more profound, more systematic, more ambitious as philosophers than the english but lacking in a kind of humane quality that i always found in the english. Cspan what was Queen Victoria like . Guest very upright, very proper, occasionally given to rather unusual bits of humor. She was capable of being rather witty on occasions, not very often but very occasionally. I dont want to exaggerate the influence of Queen Victoria, but nevertheless there is a very real sense in which she was a symbol of the age. She represented that kind of domestic virtues that the english regarded so highly, that the victorians regarded so highly, and she epitomized that and people at the time were very much aware of that. Disraeli, for example, would comment upon that often. Cspan and who was he . Guest disraeli was a great, i think one of the greatest prime ministers that england has ever had and on very good terms with the queen. Cspan you also write a lot about william gladstone. Guest yes, he was disraelis great opponent, disraeli being the great conservative, gladstone being the liberal prime minister. Cspan do you think that we as a country ought to go back to the way it was . Guest no, that would truly be ridiculous. One cannot emulate a society in a tota