Foley from florida said it was the worst experiences in his life. In order to get the single vote they needed to get the fast track through the house to allow the trade agreement, someone is paying attention to politics, they would say look we do not have broad societal support for full speed pedal to the metal liberalization. Maybe we should slow down and listen. You can watch this and other programs on my booktv that org. Good afternoon. I am here with gail collins. I dont think i have to introduce gil collins. She is the columnist for the New York Times now while many other points of her career, which i want to get to during this conversation, im going to leave sometime at the end for questions. I wanted to say this panel, i titled it, its called dancing backwards and it comes from a quote, i dont know if you remember bill ruckelshaus, he was in the nixon administration, and his wife was also a policymaker and a woman of some influence patchy said it occurred to me when i was 13, wearing white gloves and mary janes and going to Dancing School that no one should have to dance backward all their life. Of course i was thinking about Hillary Clinton when i was looking at that quote. We will get to Hillary Clinton. I wanted to start with a little journalism, gail. You started in the early 70s and you have said you did not have to break down the walls of the newsroom that some women a few years ahead of you had taken their axes and gotten women in and you were the beneficiary of that. What was it like,. It was the years that ella grasso became governor. She was sort of an interesting person. She didnt bond at all with the other women who were in the capital. The very fact that she was there made everyone more conscious. We are allowed to say four letter words. Yes you are. In fact its encourage. I had all these papers around the state and i would cover their personal legislators for them. I was always interviewing these guys who had never been interviewed before their lives because nobody cared. Several of them kept saying, i am very nervous about this because i say leave a lot and im not sure if im allowed to say that right now. It was a little, it was humble. There was no powerpoint among the Connecticut State Legislative journalists. One of my predecessors was covering one of the first women reporters at the journal and she was reporting chemical industry. She would go to conventions where she would be the only woman and a guy would get up and say i have a great joke, but i cant tell it because ellen is here. Youre not usually allowed to say go leap ahead. Its actually, in a way, i dont know if there are any kids thinking about journalism careers, we have sons and daughters and grandsons thinking about it, when i get groups and they come in and their only real question, when you get groups of young journalism students and they pretend they want to know about you, but really all they want to know is how can they get a job, thats their only real question. Youve got to pick something that you really love to write about because there is a good chance you are not point get a career at the New York Times and you will wind up doing something else, but if youve spent five or ten years covering stuff you love, then those are great, fantastic years, whether they lead to the career you were imagining or not. The other is to get yourself into a position where you are forced to write constantly, just day and night. When we did the new service, my partner in the new service was trish hall and she became the oped editor of the New York Times print we never made any money for the new service but it worked out in other ways. We would sit there every night and we would get to write 20 stories. We had like 35 papers and they were all expecting daily or every other day updates on what the senators were doing so we were riding five, 10, sometimes 20 stories and stories a night and they were Great Stories at all. They were not prizewinners, but just just the fact of having to write so much all the time broke down the barrier between thinking and writing for me. It was sort sort of like learning to ice skate or Something Like that. Once you just dont think about the basics, its much easier to make it fancy and play around with it and enjoy yourself. It worked out really well despite the fact that we never made any money at all. You are writing on a manual typewriter and using white out. We started with a manual typewriter. We were talking about this just the other night at dinner. I was there for the transition between manual typewriters and computers and word processors, and i really do think the texture of the writing changed when we changed the way we inputted it. It became much less dense, much clearer, more crystal lying because you were just the racing stuff all over the place, but it also i dont know what it meant that it was different but the sentences got shorter and punchier and the paragraphs got smaller. Its changed again. It is changing the way people read and think about things. This is way off your subject. No, not at all. Lets skip, i know you worked at several newspapers, you mention them in your earlier talks, i dont want to go through each of them, but what is the general drift in your career, how did you move from the connecticut state house or the new service into the new york papers . One of the great things about covering a state legislature is you can get all kinds of small gigs because there is nobody else doing it. There are a lot of places that would like to know a little tiny bit about what is happening in the state legislature. Not much, but maybe a little tiny bit. If we had, newtown was just, they have a lot of antique stores. They wanted us to cover the antique legislation which was not substantial but it was there they called me and asked me if i wanted to come down and apply for a job because they had a copy editors job on the connecticut side open. They said we could get this for you. I was thrilled and i hung up and it is telling trish about it. The phone ring again and it was the strange voice and she said you dont know me but i am the copy it editor up for the connecticut section of the New York Times. She said dont do this. Whatever you do, dont do this. Its terrible. They never will let you write because they need copy editors and you will be trapped copy editing the stuff you use to write. Thats why im leaving, dont do it, dont, dont do it. So, i didnt do it. Someone told me there was an opening at upi which was going bankrupt in new york. Actually my career has been going from one to another. Its a great job opportunity. Then i went to the daily news from upi. They hired me at the business desk. I had no idea they had a business desk but they did and i went down there and i worked there and thats how i got to be a columnist, gradually. And it was when you were at the daily News Business desk that you had your First Encounter with donald trump. Yes, i think it was. He had just started, donald trump started the same time i started, sort of, in a way and he was doing real estate stories. I did a story on a guy like harry helmsley. He was very rich and very powerful old guy. Leona hemsley got to be sort of famous later on. I went and interviewed harry. [inaudible] when i interviewed donald trump who is an upandcoming guy, i asked him the same question. He paused for a minute and this is why donald trump is president and harry never got to be, donald said what i would like is to have a disease. I would like a disease like jerry lewis has muscular dystrophy, i would like a disease of my own that i could cure and it would be my disease. Ive been thinking about that and i was thinking of kidneys, but kidneys are sort of, he went through all the diseases while i was there talking about which ones would be cool for him to have been cure. He never did pick a disease that he wanted, that was my first time i ever met donald trump. And its only gotten better. Yes, really. When i was at the daily news,. He has a Publicity Team but the Publicity Team is encouraging us to write more stories about an affair. There was never a day when the Publicity Team came in and said dont write about the affairs, those are very embarrassing. That was his thing. The day that he actually announced he was leaving his wife for marla maples, i was on vacation and they call me back from vacation because donald trump was leaving his wife for marla maples. My job was to make fun of donald trump and there was another guy who was there who is friends with donald trumps. What was the column they like for you. I sort of like column days. By then i had an idea but i would come in and talk to people we talked about this the other day. You try and deal out what the other columnists were writing about so you dont write about exactly the same thing and its easier with some than others to coordinate. Nick kristof is sort of my partner on the page on the thursday paper and he is great about it. The other day i was when you read about the press conference. He said he thought he was gonna write about it we talked about how we might do it that would be different and he came in and said im not doing it because theres been a big breakthrough in my work on antichild trafficking trafficking in and going to do that. That is the great thing about him. He is aware that if he goes to sudan and risks his life and only almost gets killed and writes about women and children dying, hes not to get nearly as much traction. We all know now how many clicks we get for every story. He doesnt get nearly as much then when he falls out of bed and writes donald trump is a big weenie but he does it because he believes in it. We have researchers who fact check for us which is the most glorious blessing in history of the world. If you get any errors at all, no matter how stupid, you you have to write a correction and stick it in the next day and keep it up there forever and it lives on in memory into eternity. Its really important not to even have a correction. Its fun. I love doing it. You handed in and turn it in but nobody reads a spread that the other read thing about being a columnist. There is nobody out there who reads her and comes back and says you know that third paragraph doesnt make any sense, what are you talking about. Or maybe it would be more interesting if you did this, none of that happens. Theres a copy editor who make sure you dont libel anybody in the grammar is accurate, but i sent mine home today and reads it and tell me whats boring and whats not. He has a good way of doing it so i dont get too suicidal. And then were done and its a happy day. A home and start over again. Get up and then you realize youre gonna do that the next day. I used to work with mary kempton who used to write a column every single day. He was someplace else where he did it every single day. He kept asking us how we could do it twice a week because that seemed so hard to him. He said i feel like there was such a bar, one of my two columns of the week, i have to make a great and fantastic. I just do it every day so what the hell. Its there. Ill make another one tomorrow and ill be fine. I would get to hillary through the back door, and that is, tell us a little bit about the book you are working on now. The book im working on now is the history of older women in america. [laughter] its interesting in what is an older woman. One of the very interesting things that ive been finding is, as ive been going along, back in the 1600s when there were no women here at all, if you were still demonstrating that week, you are our primary topic. 50yearold women coming off the vote, there were 27 men coming after them. The idea that when you got old was a different kind of thing. Then of course once there were enough women in the cities we didnt have any economic point, 2424 was really over the hill. You were just done. You were wrapped up and sitting in a rocking chair or something so it just depends where you are. I was talking this week to gary trudeau, im not following hillary yet. Im not sure but note work out but i had been following joni caucus. When she started off as an older woman who iran away from home from her husband and joined the group and applied to law school when she was 38. He said she knew she was 38 because the law schools all sent him applications and he had to make up a name. She was accepted at berkeley and she went to berkeley and he gave the commencement address the year she graduated and he went through her life. When she was waiting for her applications to come back to find out where she was going, she is walking without in the cartoon missing nobody is going to want a 38yearold middleaged woman passed prime. Its too old. Gary said its true, i cant deny it. She is retired in washington now. I didnt realize it but she is still around and now shes retired in washington. Ive been thinking about hillary as ive been going on. How much did the fact that they said she was an old woman hurt her in the campaign. Actually know the exact answer to that question p the fact that she was 68 yearolds old would have been a totally central destroying issue if donald trump had not been seven years old, but given the fact that he was 70, it just didnt come up at all. I didnt even hear it discussed much among people because they were so engrossed, and then Bernie Sanders were running around and maybe joe biden was gonna come in, everyone everyone was over 70 except for hillary. So oddly, the age thing didnt come up as i wouldve expected it to be. Do you know her. I dont want you to try too over simplify or be glib, but what did you think of her as a candidate in this particular election. As a candidate in the selection she was not terrific. It was pretty clear out there, if you look at the history, in general the pattern has been if youve got a candidate whos been in for two terms, the next candidate up will be from the other party. Besides the fact she was not from the other party, she was so attached with barack obama and his policies but she really was an anti change candidate. The Democratic Party believes in changing things in many ways, but as far as what was going on in washington, there was nothing she was talking about that would be likely to make you believe there was going to be a stupendous change in the way things were operating. Its not entirely her fault. It was just the way things work. She is not politically the best candidate in the world. She is much nicer and more fun and more everything in person. She is very funny, very charming, very easy when shes off, but when she is on, shes not the most electric candidate in the history of the world. We might do some more hillary questions later, but i wanted to talk about William Henry harrison. Yes, i wrote a book about him. I bet they are selling it out there right now. Anyway, you you said the most interesting thing about this race was that it was the dumbest race possibly in american history. It was totally nuts. How did that compare to 2016. That one was dumber which was a heart warming thing. I would he was talking about how horrible this race was, it was the worst race ever and i said well, what about William Henry harrison and he screamed at me, even worse than William Henry harrison. I thought wow, this is a discussion that no one else in america is having at this time. It was just at the beginning of popular votes when they were trying to learn how to sell things. They stumbled on the idea of peddling William Henry harrison as this humble soldier living in a log cal cabin, remembering how how hard he fought with the boys his father signed the declaration of independence. He was signed born on a plantation pretty went went to medical school. They created this guy and they would have all these log cabin parades with the floats with log cabins and they got to drink a lot because of the hard cider connections. They pretrade Martin Van Buren whose father was a humble bartender in upstate new york as a rich guy who iran around wearing Womens Clothing and had the shrubbery in the white house reshaped so they looked like the bosom of amazon. Truly, that was a weirder election, but thats probably the only one that i can think of that was like this one. And ask you about something you wrote about. You said back when i was writing a column at the daily news i got a letter addressed to gail collins, liberal bi tch. I thought does this person actually think im going to open this envelope. Do you reject email . Has it gotten considerably worse worse i assumed this person wanted to communicate with me in some way so i figured this person thinking that putting liberal bi tch on the envelope was a little weird. There was a team that goes through it and screened it. They dont take out negative comments, but they take out all the racist stuff and the homophobic stuff and the other stuff that is the kind of thing that just makes you want to shoot yourself when you read things on the web. I missed all of that. I do read a lot of this, but i have to tell you, if you think this is not true, let me know later. We use to try to get the column to intervene during those discussions where people were writing in, and i tried it for a while and i came to realize that when people write in about your column, they are actually having a discussion among themselves about whatever topic you brought up and that if you get in there, you are actually interrupting in getting in the way so i tend to just stay out of it now and i just checked to see what people are thinking. Its not worth, at the daily news in particular, it seemed very easy for people to get to you. You dont feel theres a decline in civility. Oh, there is a way decline in civility but im not a target of it. Some of the younger women online a lot, its just ungodly horrible, but its not a problem thats been terrible for me. Is going to ask, is, is there any way to put that genie back in the bottle . Are we just on a oneway course to worse. The only way to put the genie back in the bottle is to do with the times didnt have someone who is screaming this stuff before it goes up and becomes available to the general public to push the civility back. You cannot be saying wildly sexist, its just just crazy. It ruins everything when people are trying to have a discussion and dialogue. But that cost money. Yes. So gal, i know know you are going to cover the migration. Arent you just one of the people standing on the street watching. Even the parties are pretty, you know,