>> pulitzer prize winner lawrence wright. he talks about his book thirteen days of september of 1978. [inaudible conversations] [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> thank you. i appreciate you all coming, so i've been asked to talk about two books, originally i was asked to talk about 13 days in september, the carter summit in 1978 which i will do but since i was invited to this conference, another book of mine has come out that's the collection of my articles on terrorism called the terror years and so i will first talk about peace and then i will talk about terror. [applause] >> seems like a national progression, right? i guess the best way of beginning this is telling you how i got started 13 days. gerald who was jimmy carter's adviser in the white house called me up and if i was willing to write a play. pitch was born again christian, or orthodox jew and emerge with the only durable piece in the middle east. pretty good pitch. and it was affecting because my wife and i had lived in georgia when jimmy was governor and when he ran for president, we had lived in egypt when sadat became president and as a reporter i spent a lot of time in israel so i thought, if not me, it seemed like a natural for me so we went down to plains and jimmy lived in this incredible modest house, you know, one story ranch house built in 1950 when he retired from the navy and came to take over the near bankrupt peanut business that was left over when his father died and we sat in the den and sitting on the blue couch with flowers on it and matching blue curtains and behind the couch was a painting of the room they were sitting in that jimmy had painted and it looked just like and i lust ration of goodnight moon. [laughter] the red balloon. i'm about to do a play. you have carter, anybody else? and so jerry says, well, mr. president, larry works for the new yorker and he recently wrote a piece about saturday saturday -- scientology. since when did you start reading the new yorker? i read it every week. i needed somebody who could talk to jimmy carter like that. jimmy is 93. he saw her in the cradle. they've known each other for almost a century and they still have that kind of relationship. so as a matter of fact camp david was her idea, something that i found out when i was there. so i -- after that went to israel and to egypt to talk to the surviving members of those negotiating teams and to see how this actually happened because i've lived a lot in the middle east and if there's one lesson you learn from spending a long time in the middle east is that things can always get worst. here is one thing, one agreement between israel and egypt that had a single violation in 38 years and think about how bad things are, how much worse it would be if these two nations which had four wars in a single generation were still at war with each other. egypt was the only country in the middle east that really posed threat to the existence of israel. now, what i learned, first of all, let me tell you about the men that that came to camp david. first of all, jimmy carter. he was a one-term governor in georgia. he -- he lost his first race to -- he started running the election the next day and he won four years later. he was a man jimmy when he grew up the only jew he knew was his uncle in chat -- chattanooga and could chin himself with one hand. this made a huge impression on young jimmy carter. the first arab he met was at the daytona 500 while governor. that was his experience and when he was elected governor while he was running for his governor, strongest supporter was iranian jew who was a businessman in savannah who was a pilot and he use today fly carter around the state to make speeches and there was so much time that he would take a nap and jimmy would take over the wheel and one time the plain coughed and died. david. what, we are out of gas. then we are going to crash. he let that sit there for a moment. then he reached out. when he calmed down a bit, he said, david, appears that i'm going to be successful. you've been so helpful to me. what can i do for you and he said, jimmy, i don't need anything from you. only one thing i would like from you which is to do something to remove the mill stone of racial hatred and so carter reached over and got a flight map and he wrote out, i say to you that the time for racial discrimination is over and he showed and says if i'm inaugurated, i will say this, fine it. [laughter] >> so he signed it and he said it and that got him on the cover of time magazine and planted some ideas. in 1973 when he was governor he and roselyn went to the holy land. she lent them a station wagon and they drove around the country and went over to west bank and got special permission to bathe in the river jordan which was meaningful to them. and they saw the settlers at the time, carter estimated there were about 1500 of them and he already saw that they were a real obstacle to peace but he was struck by how secular they were and when he brought the station wagon back, he said, he told her about how secular the settlers were and he said, whenever the jews turn away from god, they lose politically and militarily and he laughed in his face. this is governor of georgia telling -- and then a couple of months later sent egyptian army. now, i will tell you a bit when carter got elected. he told me on the very first day in office he walked into the oval office and said top priority is to bring peace to the middle east. what would you think, you know, this peanut farmer from jordan is going to bring peace to the middle east. that's your top priority. he felt that god had put in that office to reconcile these people so he began interviewing middle eastern leaders who in the course of things had come to washington and he could not, they were all hopeless until sadad walked into the office and it was love at first sight. he actually said he loved, not normal diplomatic language. but during a lot of things they had in common, jimmy use today plow the red dirt and they would do the same in this little -- the village behind the water buffalo. so they had some similarityies, but sadad looked at it now and this visionary piece when he was a child in -- in denial delta. he came on the way to negotiate the future of india and he was totally captivated by the fact that this small brown man was bringing inpart to his knees, so he discarted his close and went around wearing an apron and he began spinning thread. he was consciously imitating and you can imagine what the other people in the village thought of. a bunch of kids were running and were jumping into irritation pond and so he jumped in with them and then he realized he couldn't swim and he says that the thought that went through his mind was if i die, egypt will have lost, what kind of child speaks like that? [laughter] >> but he was shopping for qualities of greatness and one other figure that he deeply admired was adolf hitler. this wasn't totally unknown and egypt which was occupied by the british at the time and hitler was fighting against the british but sadaad took it to a higher level and also he joined what he called his murder society. they liked to think that they modeled themselves on the resist ands and mainly what they did was pick up drunken soldiers in the streets in cairo but when sadaad became part of the group, he tried to raise their levels to assassinating the prime minister but they failed on two occasions but they did kill government minister and sadaad spent five years in prison before he escaped. one of the most significant moments in sadad's life, i would have to say this is one of the most moments in the entire middle east was the 1967 war. sadaad was in the military and at the time he was vice president. egypt was provoking israel and the israelis were terrified. they were digging trenches in city parks where the mass casualties that they expected to have, they were passing out gas mask because egypt was already in a war in yemen and they were using poison gas and he blocked the straights of tehran and a lot of provocation that is took place and then moreover there was jordan that powld probably fall in and then there was syria and three arab armies suddenly that they would have to face and so they struck first and it's called the six-day war. you might as well call it the 60-minute war because they eliminated the egyptian force within a short period of time. the psychological effect on this specially on jews, tremendous migration from israel and then suddenly it was a miracle, you know, they had recovered jerusalem, jews began to stream into israel and this awakened a lot of fundamentalist questions because these are signs of the end of days and these are, you know, the time of gathering of jews taking place and there was a tremendous amount of excitement in the jewish or christian communities. in the muslim community, the effect was god has turned away from us. why did this happen to us and the answer for many people was, we are not good enough muslims, we are not pure enough, we are not fundamental enough, we are not radical enough so that stream of radicalism which was already present began to blossom and grow. so 1973sadad send egyptian army across the canal. it was a chattering blow to mentality of israel because they felt invulnerable after 1967. and then in 1977sadaad was making a speech in a parliament in egypt and he put down his papers and he said, i would go anywhere. i would go to the ends of the earth, i would go to israel and speak if it would safe one more egyptian life and nobody believed it. they applauded. he wasn't even mentioned in the nearps -- newspapers the next day. now, you'd have to understand thinking of both sides at this historic moment, here israel's greatest enemy coming to talk to them really uninvited. he invited himself but they had to invite him but the israeli symphony was there out there and they didn't know how to play the egyptian national anthem. they listened to radio cairo to try to get a sense of how it goes and then there was a question of is sadaad really in the plains, could it be full of terrorists or explosives, we are going to have all the leaders of israel here waiting for them, there was snipers all over the rooftops just in case and the plane is at the end and his plane comes in and lights that catch and, you know, people are on hooks and sadaad embraces and shakes hands, you know, people are jubilant. a sense of unreality that this could happen. he made a speech and it was stern. he expected something in return and left jerusalem empty handed and a lot of that was because of bagen. bagen is fascinating figure in history. he was born in a polish town and his first memory was of polish soldiers flogging a jew. when the nazis invaded poland, bagen, his mother was in the hospital with pneumonia and the nazis went through the hospitals murdering patients in their beds. his father, they tied him up with ropes and filled his pockets with rocks and threw him into the river. he was hiding in lituania and spent two years in soviet prisons in the -- so bagen joined a jewish unit and they were sent to palestine and when he got to palestine he became head, a terrorist organization and as a terrorist he was brilliant. there have been very few in history of terrorism that had quite as much effect as bagen. there was -- he was imaginative and -- booby trapped the bodies. he blew up the king david hotel which was at the .... .... >> after 9/11 when american troops went into bin laden's compound they found a copy of reagan's memoir. i think it must be because he wanted to know how a terrorist leader becomes a prime minister and win the noble peace prize. this is a trip very few accomplished in history. after the british left, reagan turned his attention to the palestinians and there is a little village outside of jerusalem that is now a psychiatric hospital. it is weird. the grounds are occupied by lunetics. it was a jewish village. but reagan determined instead of strategic approach to the city had had to be macon. there was initial resistance and they went through the village throwing grenades through the window and killing people. 20 people who survived were taken and shot. some of the women and children who were survivors were placed on a flatbed truck and paraded through jerusalem and deposited outside the city. there were palestinians who were already leaving. but after that, hundreds of thousands of palestinians fled into the west bank and neighboring arab countries. so women and men who came to camp david, an inexperienced unpopular failing president and a terrorist. those men, carter budgeted three or four days to reach accommodation. he actually thought they would get to know each other, like each other and trust each other. an the second day, he realized he could not put them in the same room at all. they hated each other. it was really one thing that was key, i guess if you are going to draw a lesson from camp david, there are no perfect partners for peace. these are really flawed individuals. but one thing they had in common, a lot of political courage. they were willing to make the compromises and sacrifices these required. the second thing is it took america to make that peace. they could not make peace with each other. carter reluctantly put forward an american plan and developed a technique of -- he would list all the things that had to be resolved and then each day th that -- when he could finally scratch one thing off the list got shorter and shorter. finally they agreed to the american plan. now, you know, those are two of the lessons we can take from this except of camp david but there is another part to the camp david accord and that has to do with israel and the palestinians. the palestinians were not present. the plo was considered a terrorist organization and the qutar was politically talked into dealing with them. it was naive to think they could solve the palestinian problems but they laid out a road map to the eventually solution to the dispute between israel and the palestinian. every camp, even up to john kerry's latest failed attempt, has been built on the archit architecture of those camp david accords. this leads me to segue to terrorism because that entire palestinian, 750,000 people, that was the entire population of the people who fled and think of all the misery they have endured and the misery the terrorism that came out of the modern terrorist movement has caused not just to the israelis but people all over the world. right now there are five million syrians woo are refuges outside of their country and dwarfs the palestinians. this is part of the refuge stream that is greater than at any time since world war ii. just on the syrian side of it, half of those refunges are children. only 20% are getting an education. so if you were five years old when the fighting began you lost your element education. think what kind of future you might have. people like to think there is a cause of terrorism. poverty, apartheid, gender inequality. there are number of things and none of them show they someone would behead themselves or stand in line to blow themselves up at a fruit market. the idea you can deal with the root causes of terror, there is no evidence that was either. so terrorism is a -- the way i think of it, all of these cause i have listed are tribataries that run through the arab middle east and southern asia. now, i will tell you a little bit about how i got started in writing about terrorism. i wrote a movie in 1998 called "the siege" with annette benning and denzel washington. the cold war was over and it realizes the cia did have a real life antagonist and it was the fbi. once i discovered this and d denzel is the fbi agent and anette was the cia agent. the question the movie asks is what would happen if terrorism came to america the way it had already visited london, paris and tel aviv? other cities and countries have dealt with this problem. how would we deal with it? there were protests outside the theaters. pi pickets. muslims who were tired of being stereotyped. the movie came out in november of '98. in august of '98 began their first attack on america by bombing two american embassies in east africa. more than 1100 people were blinded by the flying glass. but there was another bombing that took place in the same month that most people don't remember in cape town, south africa at a planet hollywood. and they were protesting the terrorist for the siege. bruce willace was in the movie. two little girls lost their leg and i was shocked and devastated. weirdly enough, after siege became the most talked about. i was trying to get out of journalism before 9/11. i was planning to be a movie director and then 9/11 happened. and you remember in new york, there were -- the phones were down for a while. so i sent an e-mail to david rimnick, the editor at "the new yorker" and i said put me to work. we had a conference call and every "new yorker" writer was grounded because planes were not flying and he said go out and find individual stories and i will try to blend them together. i was fortunate enough to find a young man named kirk wilson who was a young reporter. he was supposed to be an appointment at the windows if the world at the top floor of the world trade center. for the first time in his life he slept through his subway stop. he got back on the next train frantically. in the world trade center in the elevator bank there were 110 elevators: right? you had to go up an escalator to get to it. he went up the escalator and ran into the elevator and there was an attendant holding the door on the elevator and kirk was looking at this phone to see what time it was and very impatient because he was running late and this well-put together business woman was taking her time walking to the elevator and just as she stepped in the elevator he noticed she had a rose tattoo on her ankle and then the plane hit. in that moment it was in some ways like the last bit of innocence because nobody knew what happened. was it an earthquake? was it a bomb? there had been an attempt to blow up the world trade center in 1993. so kirk stepped off the elevator and the doors accordion and he saw things, objects, on the ground that were weird. you know? they were different sizes. some he said looked like a clock radio and some like an office chair but just a morph of concrete. and he saw the glass doors that led outside and he thought he was leaving the building but we had to go to the escalator so he was walking out into the a plaza. he walked out and first thing he saw were hundreds of shoes everywhere and things he thought were luggage and he realized they were torsos. i got this story which became the book end of the black issue. after that, i realized i felt i had to get to the bottom of what had actually happened here. i began reading obituaries online. i call these individuals donkeys because they are beasts of burden who can carry a lot of information on their back. i found an obituary for john o'neill who was the head of terrorism for the fbi. he is guy denzel washington played in the movie. the obituary made him sound like a disgrace because he took classified information out of the bureau and was told to resign and took a job as the head of security at the world trade center. i thought at the time how ironic. the man who was supposed get bin laden didn't and bin laden got him. who he took that job people said john, you will be safe. they tried the world trade center already and he said no, they will come back to get the job. he placed himself at ground zero and that is one of the profiles i include in the terror collection. greta and i lived in egypt when we were young teachers and i was trying to get into saudi arabia to write about bin laden but they were not letting me in. so i said i will go to egypt and write about the number two man who is now mb number one. i found out he was the brains behind al-qaeda. al-qaeda at the time was really an egyptian organization with a saudi arabian head-on it. i want you to understand the dedication of the people that become our greatest enemies. i went to cartoon three times and spent a lot of time bouncing around. the first time i went to sudan i was impressed with my sudanese contacts to help me hookup with al-qaeda and one day there was a knock on the door and there was one of these sudanese guys, big character, who has been somewhat helpful to me and has with him this rotund, jolly fellow with an iconic in pindonesia hat. i was having back trouble and was carrying a rubble ball and ahmed, the intelligence guy, his eyes were bothering him and i said fall asleep. he fell right to sleep and left me with this al-qaeda guy. and i said who you have and he said you can call me lo-a. it turned out lo-a knew everything. he was a dream. he knew about the beginning of al-qaeda. bin laden came to him saying he wanted to start this organization and he said i said how are you going to get him to the battle? air france? i think he slapped his knee. and it was terribly maddening to me. i came back to the u.s. and started with low-a being the only clue. i did triangulating and i found the name. he was the guy that took the notes at the founding of al-qaeda. he was bin laden's business manager. what a great source. i went back to car tim to see him and he wouldn't see me. that was disappointing. i went back a third time and he agreed to see me and i said why didn't you see me the last time? it is a lot of trouble it a lot of trouble to it come to cartoon. and he said i didn't know how serious to take you. last time you were sitting on a balloon. the saudi's finally let me in. they would not let me in as a reporter so i got a job being a mentor to young newspapers to men in bin laden's hometown. it was a far better arrangement than being just a reporter. instead of being in the hotel, i was living in a middle class flat, i had a car and a job i had to go to every day, and i had these wonderful young reporters teaching me far more about their culture than i could have ever done on my own. and i learned things about saudi arabia that i think really helped me understand a lot about the culture. saudi arabia, for one thing, doesn't really have a civil society. what we are doing here couldn't be one. the idea of freedom of assembly is almost not unknown but rarely practice. just to give you an example. when i went there i was supposed to be mentoring young saudi arabian women journalists as well and i said where are they and they said you cannot see them. they are in an office under the stair well and i said i can't teach them if i can't see them. finally, it was agreed that once a week i would meet with the saudi women journalists who would can come in with the young men. they had the black hijab, and they covered everything except their gold-rim cat eye glasses. naga. she liked covering herself because she said, you know, i can make faces at people and they don't know it. small consultation but there you are. she had to go to an interview in riad one day before the first flight from jida arrived. so she had to fly in the night before. as a single saudi woman she can not travel without her male guardian's approval which could be her father, brother, even son. she got permission, came off the airplane and sat down in the airport because as a single saudi woman she can not stay at a hotel by herself. a guard came around and you can't be here. what are you going to do with me? what could he do with her? he left her sleep on the carpet floor in the mosque inside the airport. that is what it is like for a young, professional women in saudi arabia. one of my male reporters, we went to the mall together and they used to call these bmo -- black moving objects. they were coming down the escalator and without a trace of irony my young reporter turned to me and said check them out. [laughter] >> so you tell me. i was in saudi arabia in 2003 when we invaded iraq. our family was scattered around. our daughter was in italy in a demonstration, roberta was back in austin marching, my son was in chicago marching and i was there very close to the war. i was ambivalent about it because i bought the idea about the weapons of mass destruction and thought it was way too dangerous to let saddam hussein have weapons of mass destruction. i didn't think my country would lie to me. but the ways in which we went into iraq, even take home libby was an associatef -- associate of al-qaeda. he was picked up in afghanistan. at the same the cia decided to send him to egypt because there was an adage send him to egypt in the morning and you get the answers in the afternoon. the answers they got were that saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was working with al-qaeda to share them. that was the bases of colin powell's speech. we went into iraq on the base of that mistaken tortured lie. america was changing as a response to terrorism. the jihad was also changing. we think often times that isis is like the child of al-qaeda but the truth is, and you might envision it more like the younger brother, when i was researching al-qaeda and afghanistan, i was puzzled. where are the jordanians and the lebanese and the palestinians? the area of the middle east we call the sham in arabic or the la vont. i found there was oaring training camp in -- another -- al-qaeda ran by a man at the time same who a progenitor of isis. laden gave him money, $5,000, to keep him quiet. there were two very different men. bin laden was an international business man. he had an agenda that was mainly to drive the west out of the muslim lands. he had a different agenda. he wanted to start a caliphate and purpue purify islam and the do that was to create a civil war between the sunni and the shiite. we have seen the effectiveness of this tactic. i have written a lot about this in my book. i think i will talk a little bit about how terrorism might end. there is a study of i think 400 different terrorist organizations. it was found the average lifespan of a terrorist organization is seven years. al-qaeda just celebrated its 20th birthday so obviously it a lot more durable and religious organizations, terrorist groups, tend to last longer. there was one terror group called the hindu thugs that lasted 600 years. i don't think we are in for that but ways in which terror organizations come to an end? decapitation. it worked well -- taking the terror thing off islam, this was a blind japanese yoga instructor, and in my thinking it could have been a much more dangerous organization than al-qaeda because of the technical proficiency and their avid need to create some kind of weapons of mass destruction. once arrested that organization became toothless. sometimes, negotiation works like with the ira. it took decades but there has been a peaceful revolution. smooimz terrorist organizations dissolve into politics or crime and i think the taliban could go either away especially with their involvement with the opium dealing. sometimes terror operations succeed. nelson mandela's african congress had a terror wing, for example. most of them fail, though. that is the only route that al-qaeda and isis can go because they are apocalyptic cults without negotiable demands. there is no way to negotiate with them. they are going to be a presence in our life i fear were quite a while. now, i want to end this with a little statement about what is happening to our country since then. and i am going to take you back to 1965 when i took a date to the airport. i didn't have enough money to go to movies in dallas, texas. it wasn't that uncommon, in dallas at least, they call it love field. my girlfriend and i walked out on the tarmac and climbed in the this international jetliner that just came from an exotic area. he climbed in the first class and the steward brought us a treat. and we went up in the faa tour and i opened the unlocked door. hi, kids, come in. we sat down there and watched people landing the plane. that america is gone. terrorism killed it. i don't want it to be forgotten. i know most of you remember that america but your children don't and your grandchildren for them it will be a fantasy. but the idea that you have to have your photograph taken every time you walk into an office building, take off your shoes and belt when you visit the liberty bell. these are all individual liberties that seem small but they represent big losses to the kind of country we were. and i am not saying those sacrifices were not important. we had to make some of those sacrifices to keep us safe. but if we forget that america and we fail to steer in that direction then terrorism really will have won. thank you very much. [applause] [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> during booktv's visit to fresno, california. we talked to blain roberts who reports on another side of the civil rights movement in the jim crow south.