and look at fdr's and by mental record with douglas brickley. author of right but heritage. now, from the tucson festival a book, discussion about women leaders in washington. this is one hour. >> good afternoon. it is my pleasure to welcome you to the eighth annual tucson festival of books. we are live on c-span right now. i am going to remind you that if you have not a ready checks those cell phones please do so now, shut them off or silence them. we will be having a question and answer discussion for about 30 or 40 minutes. we will open to audience questions after that for the rest of our time. we have two microphones in either i'll so if you wish to ask a question of our panelists please start forming a line about 1:35 p.m. or p.m. or so so we can look to your questions. we will be handling the book signing in a different way than you may be used too. peter will be going directly from here to that you of a bookstore tent on the mall for sales and signing immediately following the presentation. a ms. hirschman will be taking calls and giving an interview on c-span so she will be at the same tent approximately half an hour after this presentation isd over all and that appearance. it is our pleasure to welcome you here and we also liked it very much thank c-span and the communication first monitoring this venue. we like to thank the national institute for civil discourse for sponsoring this particular session. i hope will have some lively civil discourse about these of h subjects. make sure that if you are enjoying the festival and you are not already a friend of the festival to check out our area in the south wall room where you can sign up to become one. there are some special benefits including earlier access to two skit for presentations like this. i. i would encourage you to do that. it is my pleasure to introduce to you our panelists today. linda hirschman has brought hisc sport historical perspective and analysis of headlines and social headlines of her books and columns in the new york times, washington post, newsweek, the daily beast, political, glamour and salon. she will will discuss her most recent book, sisters-in-law. from saturday honor and ruth bader ginsburg change the worldp it was published in september, 2015. she received her phd and possibly from the university of chicago. at. linda has predicted the recent supporting court ruling of gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry three years in advance of it in her acclaimed book, victory, also from harpercollins. her earlier book include get to work, a manifesto for women of the world, the woman's guide to law school, hard bargains the politics of sex, she has been a great guest on 60 minutes, good morning, "good morning america", cbs news, cnn, nbc, npr, and the colbert report on comedy central. before becoming a writer she was professor of philosophy and women store these at iit, chicago chicago college of law. i'm visiting professor at northwestern while practicing law and focusing on labor law she appeared on three sip bring court cases herself. peter slavin is a associate professor at northwestern university. he is a veteran, national and correspondent who spent a dozen years at the washington post. he teaches clouds on politics and the media. the the u.s. rule and rule of affairs and interviewing techniques and oral historyhi which he used to great account in his book that he will discuss today. he admires creative and approaches of storytelling and believes the best journalism. the research before that first question is asked. his career as a reporter has taken them around the country and the globe and allowed him to tell stories rich with the voices of the people involved. he he will be discussing his most recent project, michelle obama, a life, releasedhe in 205 for which he received a pen award nomination. he is also reported in many other countries. he moved to washington as a chief diplomatic correspondence before crossing to the national staff, on time for the bush gore recount and ps the clinton scandal. he was a diplomatic correspondence after the 9/11 attacks and wrote extensively about u.s. foreign policy and the iraq war. he has written a dance of lee about barack and michelle obama and has cover campaigns and policy debates across the country. erie main supposed contributor. he he has an undergraduate degree from princetonions and ad from oxford. please join me in welcoming our guests. [applause].on t >> and since we're here to discuss powerful women of washington, we will will start our remarks with a comment on that theme. can you describe the source of your sub checked power and how they have employed it to the best of their advantage.bination >> i think my subjects ruth bader ginsburg and sandra day o'connor, who were born o'connor in 1930 and ginsburg in 1932, devry their power from a combination of social change that happened around them as they reach their maturity. and good fortune and what was most interest to me, their 195 characters. th hundreds of thousands of women went to college in the 1950s and hundreds if not thousands of women went to law school in those years. but only they made it to the supreme court and change the world. i attribute that distinction to their traits of character which enabled them to rise in a hostile environment and in a friendly environment. >> it's such a strange a job in first lady. you're right in washington, you are not the one who is actually summoned to washington, laura bush and others have said well you become first lady on the boat of one man. one vote. peopllle arrived she's got no armies to man, no salary, andro you have people willing to hurl brickbats it all directions and michelle obama was no exception. she had to reinvent herself. she gave she gave up her 20 yearse career in chicago.circu she gave up the power if you f want to use that word that she had in chicago when she had to re-create it in a way that was meaningful to her. it was not easy to get to washington under those circumstances. what she figured out was one of her forms of power was her to voice. i that she could deliver messages and she needed to figure out what were those messages be.use what was it that would matter. what would move the needle, that's a phrase she often uses. she turned to things that annaeq made it her ever since she was a young. themes of inequality, themes connected to young people and mentoring. she found that voice and i would argue and i would argue in the voice in unusual places. she found it at a school in north london where she recognize the power of her own trajectory was one of the strongest card she had to play.hat >> we currently have a very serious contender for the most powerful position in washington, that a president of the united states. yet there seems to be a problem with her connecting with female voters.raphic she may be able to break the glass ceiling but she is struggling in that onemigh demographic.ar what experience or advice from your subjects might be instructive if hillary were to call them for resolving that gender gap? >> sandra day o'connor was a politician. she was in the arizona state legislature and she ran for a seat on the elect did judiciary before she went washington.t, tm and she is regarded as the natural politician on the supreme court, hardly the most natural supreme court politician since william brennan. b one of my sources told me after the book was written, this is so aggravating. [laughter] that but it's to be in paperback, that sandra day o'connor had a laser light sensitivity for people's emotional states. she could read could read people better than anyone else that my source, a a very successful woman had ever met. i don't know that if she were asked to tell hillary clinton what to do that she could explain to clinton what it was that she could do, it's like magic. there's a reason that the word charisma is related to the concept of magic. if if i can take one second i have anit anecdote. joan who was with o'connor rut interviewed with her for the much coveted position of the supreme court clerk. from the chambers of repeater ginsburg, the liberal. so she comes from ruth later ginsburg, a liberal circuit jug at that time.position with a recommendation otherwise you don't get into see her to interview for a position and o'connor's chambers. she and o'connor are chatting away like old friends and o'connor says so did you like court clerking for ginsburg and she says oh it was so wonderful to clerk for a judge where you agreed with her on every single thing she said. and then she told me she said to herself, oh my god.t what did i just do?ally made if so had justice o'connor magically made this very smart, very sophisticated rising youngr legal star and oak connor saidu to her so how would you feel about clerking for a judge that you don't always agree with. and she said, not being not beinger stupid, that would be fine too.. and o'connor hired her on the spot which is a beautifulon reflection of o'connor. so i don't know if you can teach that. it was something she had from when she was very young. should i answer about ginsburg as well? >> sure. >> so ginsburg has figured something out that hillary clinton could really use. which is how to relate impeccably and powerfully with very much younger women. they adore her. they had made her an internet mean. the notorious rgb, that that is a project of the lesbian woman, and i'm not outing her, i asked her before i put it in the book, who comes from a very greatd lesbian and gay tradition of using the internet and a powerful way and she turned ginsburg. she couldn't turn me into someone who would appeal to a bunch of 12 -year-olds. there's a reason why she succeeded so well with ginsburg and that is, ginsburg is the same all the way through.berg. every molecule of ginsburg is exactly consistent with every other molecule of ginsburg. her old opinions are coherent. her philosophy is coherent. so so they can market to youngsters who value authenticity about most things. very readily. i don't know that you could survive in an electoral system much less down the road that hillary clinton had to walk.r gi and have the kind of authenticity and coherence that ruth bader ginsburg had. having life tenure means never having to say you're sorry. [laughter] >> i do think if that word authenticity is so central. i think if hillary clinton were to call michelle obama and michelle obama were to say what she thinks works for her, she would say, know who you are, be that person and be that person very consistently. be authentic. be mindful, this is politics and has michelle obama had to learn that lesson. be mindful of who your audience is and what is possible but ultimately stick b with it and don't be cowed. there is a moment not not quite two years ago when my angelo died the poet, michelle went to winston salem column north carolina and spoke at her memorial service. michelle recalled in her remarks moments when she felt very lonely and ivy league classrooms and lonely on the campaign trail where she said my very womanhood was challenge.houg where people doubted so much about her. you will remember how people say she wasn't patriotic and american. she. she said in those moments she thought a mile angelo and she thought of the poem phenomenal women and how much that meant to her. she said at the time that the thing that made my angelo so meaningful to michelle was that she was comfortable in her own skin. and that's a piece of advice that has worked particularly well for michelle and he would she would pass along and indeed does to audiences all over the o country. >> were in the middle of a little tiny crisis having to deal with the supreme court right now. what could your subjects add to the equation there if they were going to weigh in on it or give advice? >> i think what's intriguing about the way michelle obama looked at the supreme court and the fact that the way barack obama looked at the supreme court is this notion of bringing to the court real life experience. you will remember the conversation in 2009 when sonya was chosen and barack obama talks about empathy, he talked about it in the campaign trail and use the example of lilly ledbetter. you'll remember remember lily ledbetter worked in this companyss n now let bame found out when some a pastor note that she was making less than men for the same job. she then sued the five justices on the supreme court and then that was a travesty as far as barack obama was concerned.king working on the book about michelle obama i spent a good deal of time at harvard law school where she spent three years in the mid- 80s talking with her that she was not the sort of legal scholar who cared about how many angels would fit on the head of a pin. as her mentors told me, she cared about outcomes she caredou about results and what the law would mean in day-to-day life, something barack obama talksr about, david wilkinson was one of the mentors and a law professor to harvard set in fact that she wanted to know what would be fair and just and what would matter to actual people. i feel we hear that in what barack obama says about what he is looking for. >> so sandra day o'connor who is now retired has been asked and answered that she thought the senate should participate in the nomination of a replacement judge justice. so she decided to read with the party that brought her.on. -- she disagreed with the party that brought her. she was a wonderful colleague. when i interviewed justice stephen, justice stevens sat on the supreme court of the united states almost throughout the tenure of both of my subjects. he was was there before o'connor came and he left just five or six years ago. so so he sat through most of ginsburg tenure as well. get i was trying very hard because i was a journalist and therefore rotten human being, to get him to say something bad about sandra day o'connor. with whom he disagreed, politically and very serious matters like the death penalty and gun control. so i thought, i'm going to get him to say something really nasty about her and i'm going to have, pardon the expression, a scoop. but he wouldn't. for he's no friend of mine so finally healing forward and said linda, she never cost us any trouble at all. is and what was so wonderful about that moment was you knew that that men on the supreme court were waiting for trouble when a woman came. she surprised them because she would go on her tombstone, she never never causes any trouble at all. yet, without causing trouble she actually made a lot of social change. so it's a wonderful combination. again, it, it's sort of mysterious how she did it. to she would preserve the right to abortion with her votes in 1992 yet they never went after her the way they went after the other justice. she was really good at getting things done without causing any trouble at all. ruth bader ginsburg is different from the obama's. she isy a true liberal. she was taught by robert cushman, a liberal a liberal from cornell in the 1950s. she has a well worked out liberal jurors philosophy which is that america is the story of increasing inclusiveness and that it started with a bunch oft rich, old white men, some of them slaveowners in the 18th century. the great story of america, to ginsburg america, to ginsburg is the story of how that experiment widened, and widened to let in white men whoe do not own property, to lead and black men, to lead in women, to the equal protection and she was the author of that movement. and to admit gays and lesbians to full citizenship just recently. so she would be, she said you could not now appointed justice to the supreme court like me.l d she is a clear, coherent, jurisprudential liberal. if i could have one wish it would be that someone could appoint a justice like ruth bader ginsburg. [applause]. >> i would like to shift gears and talk about the research project and the research process for your book.k. you are not allowed direct access to your subjects for interviews for purposes of theso books. so how do you approach your research and handling of that situation? how do you make the work authentic and respond to critics who might raise thatamas point?g >> i had covered the obama's from the washington post follting in earnest in 2007. it was during the campaign, is based in chicago, it was during the campaign that i started to dig deeper into the life that barack obama had led and the work he did in chicago and i came to realize that here was a person who deserved to be at the center of her own narrative, not just wife of the more famous president. she had a lot to say and i was looking forward to writing about her story against the history which you live. and starting starting the book, irt started the way one would mightc start reporting any biography which is to always start with questions and not answers. not not to assume that i knew very i much. and to ask what were the influences on her life.i d i just worked through her life story, often from her own words because i did not want my voicea to be dominant in the book i wanted her voice and the people who knew her along the way.fe the thing that was so rewarding in many ways as there was dozens of people who knew her at different points in her life, who are able to reflect on her, to tell a story, to help me paint a picture that in some ways was a painting where there many data points in many points that add up to this one thing. while it would've been great to talk to mrs. obama from the book, at the certain point she and the president said were not really helping authors with books, it's not personal, will do our own books in due course. but in many ways i was also very fortunate because not only did i have interviews i did with her before i started working on the book, is able to drawn interviews that my colleagues and friends had done that had never been published, and due t the wonders of the public presidency in the white house, essentially every word mrs. obama has spoken in public is transcribed. so i read hundreds of thousands of her own words that i can assure you must people did not wait through.tly and i found great anecdotes and i worked hard to have her voicen be in there even though it's not directly her voice spoken to me. >> i don't want to say i learned a lot about michelle obama from reading your book and it made me a better social commentator and i want to thank you for doing that. so justice o'connor and justice ginsburg have a narrative that they have been expressing in essentially the same words forma decades. so and i know from having interviewed other powerful and famous people that when people get to a certain level they get a pad or it's almost impossible to break through that narrativet so i don't think that if i had and i've read writings who had both access and they didn't get different material different than the conventional there to they offered so i actually don't feel bad that i don't it to interview them because i don't know that i would've been able to break through that. being liberated from it enabled me to ask myself what i think about them and if you read the book you can see that i have a voice in it. i also got to ask exactly the people who live with them from the time they are really young because people live a long time now. i got to interview the man who hired ruth bader ginsburg for the aclu in 1970. so i got to find out from him b what did that 40-year-old, 38-year-old woman look 8-year-old woman look like to him in 1970 before she was anything.i it was a brilliant interview. so i feel fine about it. it's also the case exactly as you just said that their words are public and thanks to the miracle of the internet, there are 1 billion, billion hours of youtube videos of them speaking, and of course being justiceswith they do their most important work in the form of their written opinions and all of that was available to me as well as the the briefs that ruth would file with the court before she was a lawyer. so there is a tremendous amount of archival material. col i just read as i had heard in the great bird that ginsburg is going to write the forward for a collection of her speeches andi letters which is gathered together by her, authorized biographer of a someday featurew biography and i said to myself, i'm gonna make a bet. when it comes out i'm going to put it down next to the mountain of material in my little home office and i promise you, i will have had pretty much every single thing that is gathered in that mostly because it is been so widely covered. out wha >> there's a certain amount of rigor that i think is enforced when you don't have full access. you have have to work that much harder to figure out what has happened to at a particular moment or what a particular thought might be. whereas you might have the illusion in doing an interview that you know the answer because that's what the person told you. some of you know david was here at the festival who is a colleague of mine at the washington post, when i bumped into him in chicago in 2012 at brock obama's victory celebration in chicago we are chatting about the book, he had written up pulitzer-winning biography of bill clinton and the biography of brock obamaha that he and i will be talking about here tomorrow. he said said you know if you get ant be interview with michelle obama it will be the least important interview you do. because as linda linda said there is a certain degree of comment. i think one of the things that made the book possible was if you asked for a question she will give you an answer and often a direct answer but it was not the worst thing ever not to have her. >> so this may be a question question that answers itself but was there one guest that you wanted and could not convince epperson to talk to? >> in my case i would've loved to talk with michelle's closeste female friends. loyal she very much like hillary clinton has an array of intensely loyal, fascinating accomplished women with whom she spends time with and let down her hair. one in particular in miami and one in washington. if i had my wish list and it could not have been her mother was possibly the most interesting person the whole book i would have picked one of those friends to listen to, to hear a little more about how michelle this transition in life from the person who had gone to princeton and harvard and had a very successful career to being, for better or worse wife up and how she navigated that. >> that's interesting. >> i'm afraid that god intervened with my most desired subject which as i would've liked to interviewed martin ginsburg, ruth bader ginsburg's husband's husband and the best husband since the invention of monogamy. >> but only if he could've cook for you. >> corrects. he was a great cook and when he died the supreme courtd publishing a book called supreme shaft which have his recipes in it. he was a tax lawyer so his recipe for french bread ran 2000 pages. [laughter] of course along with my acquisition of every single solitary thing ever written by or about my subject i bought it copy of supreme shaft and his recipes are marty ginsburg telling you how to make the various things. it's as if he is there talking to you and his not only obviously a wonderful cook but a very funny, very smart, very loving man. i would have loved to heard his version of his wife and how early he recognized how valuable she was. she said he was the only boy she ever data. she was 17 when when she let all the other options go. so how much time did the rest of the male population have. her but she said he was the only boy she dated whoever valued her for her brains. >> all minority groups struggle with the tension betweenall ming assimilation and celebration of diversity. can you comment on your subject's handling of this tension in either their personal lives or their professionalave careers? >> so my subjects are an interesting contrast. sandra day o'connor always believed and said in a speech that i read that once she got in the door she never had any further problem at all. so when she got to the arizona state legislator nobody ever doubted that she was competentnt to be a state legislator and effect she became the majority leader the first female majority leader of a state legislator. sh her position was if you just let me and i can do any job just like a man could. she always said that a wise, female judge and a wise male judge would come to the same mae conclusion. read ruth bader ginsburg always said that she was agnostic on that question. act [laughter] when this is actually answering your question because it is ami historical continuum. in 2009 when blank was nominated for the supreme court -- they would come to a better decision than a man had not had that experience. when she set it and when they were pounding on her for saying it, ruth bader ginsburg spoke out from the supreme court and say he was right. then she had to eat her words to get on the supreme court of the united states, completely defensible behavior. when she got on, having life tenure, remember means never having to say you're sorry? what's the first thing she did? she wrote her story and she shared the fullness of her experience as a wise latina women with the rest of us and we have seen her doing it ever sense. so i think ginsburg project of america becoming more and more inclusive is beautifully rendered in this evolution of the answer to your question. >> with michelle obama she is walking its final line and is required to walk as final line as any black woman has been required to walk. she says i'm a statistical anomaly. i am not supposed to be here. race and racism is at the heart of her very existence. she is many other things than a black person and many other things than a black woman but there is ben and externa focus on that. she is very mindful of that experience. it comes from her earliest days in the examples she had in her life, the people she touched of the way she thought about race as she went to first to a charter public magnet school then to princeton, then to harvard where as you remember from her college thesis she said, i felt on campus and many people saw me as a black person first and as a student second. you have seen in the campaign, you have seen what she is had to deal with, even as she has that very clearly to be a first lady for all americans, not just for african-americans. it is required her to do a verye delicate dance. i think it's interesting, the issue she has chosen often have to do with inequality, often racial inequality and gender inequality. her efforts now on pushing, urging and encouraging, hugging young girls to get to collegece here and around the country is indicative of that. i think the talk she gives run the country and the places she gives them shows how much this i perception of race and gender and economic and class inequality are central to who she is and to her message. >> what you think was key, you mentioned earlier experiences, what you what you think was key about the early experiences that each of your subjects have had and how do they influence heric development of a personal power and power in the officeday overtime? >> so sandra day o'connor was raised on a remote ranch in southeast arizona. there was exactly as my mother told me, it happened to her but i never believed it, no electricity. no running water. honest honest to god there was not. she was in only child until her sister was born when justice o'connor was eight.emote so i always think of her as a wild child. she was growing up in thish, remote place where everybody has to pull their weight or the whole thing will crash its very dry and it's economically very marginal. she did not have siblings in her -- she was alone with her parents basically.e in so no one ever told her that she deserved to be inferior because she was female. so by the time she herded which what of course you heard it if nora also when you can get a job at a stanford lawful, it's too, it's too late, she was ruined, she cannot internalize it and because she cannot internalize that she did not believe it. should enacted and it made her the perfect first.ld. justice ginsburg was also an only child. her sister died when she was very, very young. she grew up at the only child. here's a wonderful jewish immigrant story, her mother,hen cecelia bader went to work when she was a teenager to put herll brother through college. when ruth bader ginsburg died not died, when she graduated from high school, her mother died the day before ruth bader ginsburg red trade from high school and she found out that even in those very lean times of the depression, her mother had set aside money for her to go to cornell. so so i believe in for infamous sex that her mother placed all of her own ambitions as immigrants often do on her brilliant, beautiful, musical child. >> i think with michelle obama she grew up with electricity and water you'll be glad to know. chicago has was things.ngs. [laughter]ngalow anyway.ys all i she grew up in a bungalow andnto she says all that i became come all that i am now be happened inside this house and her brother told me once that if you said it was more than 1100 square feet i said you were lying. michelle's heroes were people she could touch. they were not astronauts nor were they singers or performers of any kind. there were her relatives. some she knew in the neighborhood, in particular they were people who stories she heard at home. her parents and grandparents, three of her fourth grandparents came north of the great migration. they came at a time in chicago that was not easy for black people. it was the depression so is not easy for many people.e.r, in particular her paternal grandfather came from georgetown, south carolina to seek his fortune. fortunes were pretty hard to hav find. a she once said if my grandfather were bron white he would have been a banker. in fact, he left he left the payment one point went into the army, he became a postal worker which was a path to the middle class as you knowi yet, this father, this grandfather had so much to say about how the deck was stacked. he also said your destiny is not written before you are born. you can make it. she heard this lesson in a world that her brother called the shangri-la of upbringing in this working-class neighborhood on the south side because her parents were so close and the family did so many different things together. those lessons of the south side of the ones that have stayed with her most powerfully and you'll see the hear them in the speeches. she will say, the voice i hear inside my head when i am wondering if i am i am making a good decision is my father's voice. the father who did not get to go to college, who ended up workint shift work at a city waterr plant, the father who taught her how to box. she can throw a mean punch. these are the stories, the, the lessons, the people who were surrounding her. i also found a number of relatives who fought the good fight, great-aunt to actually sued northwestern university for discrimination back in the earle 1940s for example. a great aunt who was integral ta integrating the catalog store and department store and in the 60s spoke to lyndon johnson labor department.e these were the people who populated michelle obama's ati youth and are with her and many ways and what she is doing now.i >> if you have not read the book one of the things i would commend to you is this very rich description of the history of the life in the south side of chicago which i was not as familiar with as i should have been. it's a wonderful aspect of the book. also 6 degrees of separation.s thank you for your research on that. i'm going to buy those of you have questions to make your way to the microphone now. that we are that we are going to cover a couple other areas and open up to your questions. i want to start with ms. hirschman. why do why do you think it is that justice s ginsburg has been forming friendships with people who are so ideologically different than she? >> people ask me that's a lot. justice scalia do you have in mind? laughmac. >> i would put justice o'connor in that category. >> okay. so let's talk about the more interesting thing which is her friendship and her relationship with justice o'connor. i thought when i started writing the book i would find they went out to lunch together and sneaked off to a story, i wanter the them to go to the shoe store to talk about. but but in facty it's not true.ee job they never sneaked out to lunch together. t i asked everybody in their vicinity. they were not bfs. they had an affectionate alliance. one of the lessons i hope that that people in general and women in particular take for my book is that you can have an affectionate alliance and make more change than either one of you can make a loan. you do not have to be best friends. when justice ginsburg got to the supreme court there was no justice on that court who mattered more to her, not even the cheap who had a lot of power then justice o'connor because she revered o'connor for being the successful pioneer that she had been. she knew that o'connor's she knew that o'connor's life was going to change when she, the second woman change. she wanted it er way.1993- be in a good that relationship seems to me to be subtle and productive and interesting. in the 22 cases involving women's issues that they heard when they sat together from 1993 until 2005, they disagreed on two of them.fh 120 second of the number everybody asked about scalia so let me give you the summary. it represents an interesting past in america when people have different political views could still go out to dinner. i think it's interesting because that seems to be an era that is now god. the second is that you know what they say, they shared a common love of the language and so forth.he they always said they shared a common love of the constitution but i'm here to tell you that the constitution she loved and the constitution he loved were only the slightest resemblance to one another and therefore it's a little weird. but finally he was sort of like marty. he was funny and gregarious and when they went on places together that he that role for the rather inward looking ruth bader ginsburg. i think the better question is about the two women. >> one of the things that struck me earlier this week was michelle obama's very gracious comments and condolence of nanco reagan about the really effective mentoring that she had received from mrs. reagan which i suspect may be a lot of peopli do not know about. can you comment on the fraternity of the first ladies and how michelle obama has been able to use the benefits of that advice and her service as well? >> she said she spoke with every single first lady who was living when she got to the white house and 2009. she was particularly interested and advice on how to raise melia and sasha in the public eye. it seems like such a long time ago but in 2007 when they started running sasha was e turning five, melia was turning nine. it was one of her greatess worries as she tried to figurein out which he say to brock obama, okay we are going to do this and yes you can run for thecomple presidency. so she sought advice on that and for living in a completely bizarre world. you have have to admit it is the strangest world an ever. you walk into the white house and you live in the bubble as it is called.d h have you seen what it is she would most like to do when she leaves the white house. she wants to drive in a car with the windows down. barack obama has said he would like to sit alone on a park bench. this is the world they inhabit. each one of the first ladiesinti were unanimous in giving her one particular piece of advice and that his escape to camp david, the presidential retreat, as often as you can. get out into your own world as much as you can.there's it's interesting to that she was mentor then had relationships with these first ladies because mentoring is such a central part of who she is. there's always the sense that she too is going to reach back, get back, want to to be part of that sorority. >> what is your question?'s >> i stay awake at night wondering about ruth bader ginsburg's health. how is she? and i think michelle obama has stated that she would never run for the office, but you think there is any hope? >> well on that one, i would defer to one barack obama on that question. he was asked not long ago, if you woke up after ten years a long sleep and you learned that michelle was running for president, what would you think, and she said i would think shehe had been at abducted by aliens. [laughter] she said there are three things in life that are certain, depth, taxes and michelle not running. he made it clear in every possible way imaginable that really, really she does not want to do it. her can you pitcher her in a room with mitch mcconnell? that would be intriguing but she has made it clear that this is not herhes work. >> i have no insight information. when i saw ginsburg when i started the book four years ago she looked fine. sa her friend nina was quoted today is saying that she was still doing push-ups and had just h recently been parasailing. someone told me she had gone horseback riding. so i have no reason to believe that she is in any eminent hope danger. but women live a long time. so i hope that will be true of her as well. >> i have a request from linda that she speak to justice o'connor's first job in law after she graduated and what she had to do to get that job. i'm sure you know the story. >> so justice o'connor was determined she would get a law job. when the fancy california firm said to her we can give you a job in law, you can be a legal secretary, she said she said no thank you.ea footnote, many years later theyn invited her to invited her to speak at the 100th anniversaryt of the founding of their law firm.. she went and she reminded themem of their first encounter. [laughter] she later told david letterman that it was the most fun speech she has ever given. [laughter] so she had heard that a district attorney in california had where they had been living had once hired a woman. so she went to him and asked if she could work for him. he said he said he had no money in his budget to hire her and she said she would work for nothing until he got his next appropriation. she said he had no room to put her at a desk in she said he she thought her secretary would share her desk and the secretary said okay. so sandra day o'connor started working with for nothing sharing an office with the secretary, so determined what she to earn her living as she expressed it, with a trainee and i had gotten.egre she always looked out at the world and did not say, i am a woman named why am i going to w have trouble. she said i have a law degree i should get a law job and did whatever was necessary to make it happen. it it was one of her great strengths. >> i like test the panelists if they have questions for each other?>> in wo accompter] trying to get a clean getaway. >> and working on the michelle obama book i became something on the theme of work, life, balance and how to make those choices between living a fulfilling satisfying home life. you remember how many people in certain groups found their teeth grinding what she described herself as mom in chief. she said will look, i actually think my most important role on this planet is to raise rounded, happy girl. this is this is what i do, i believe feminism is about the right to make choices. i'm really curious what younor n found in justice ginsburg and justice o'connor and how they balance those two worlds? >> it's interesting, justice ginsburg and justice o'connor are only two years apart with ginsburg the younger. but ginsburg spent a little time something around oklahoma walmart he was in the national guard. so she graduated from law school in 1959 whereas o'connor whereas o'connor graduated from law school in 1952. that's a big gap. by 1959 the world was starting to change. fr you had poets in san francisco, you had brown v board ofen education in topeka, in between o'connor entering the world and ginsburg enter the world. i believe that although thereor close in age their social history are very different. so their attitude toward the role of raising and having a fulfilling career are very agree different. o'connor think would agree with michelle obama that bittman and a feminist is about having choices and therefore -- ruth bader ginsburg would never say that she thought the choices you make matter. she thought for a woman woman to be able to use their capacity in the public world was part of a fulfilling life. hear th so she was very different from o'connor. it's interesting to hearng o'connor point of view from the mouth of someone who is young enough to be her daughter or younger. so mary chad o'connor who she met in law school and had three children. i will point her nanny left and she quit her job and stayed home for five years. having justice o'connor is your stay-at-home mom was probably not the best experience. [laughter] because she had such on the believable energy never sleeps. so she decided in order to running the junior league and be in the core chair of the republican party organization that she would cook a different meal every single night. even marty ginsburg did to that. and finally she says in her classic o'connor way, to get away for the rigor of the president of the junior league she went back to work. laughmac michelle was born in 1964, different generation, 30 years after justice o'connor and she actually did say that she had the choice to stay home when she was working at the university of chicago she actually said it would drive hee crazy.been she clearly has worked very hard to balance things. she has a drive to make a difference. she has she has a drive to succeed along the way. it has been intriguing how it has played out and how manyrent different groups have perceived her choices in many different ways. an example of how the first lady without pure power still has influence and still has inevitably, forever under the spotlight.ot >> is so first ladies are under the spotlight not because of who they are, is the rare first lad who are in object of such interest. eleanor roosevelt comes to mind. why is eleanor was felt light, partly expressing, clinton and obama? the answer is roosevelt herself and clinton and obama, part of a social movement. so that woman became important. what they thought and it became important. that. that is what shown the spotlight on them. so i don't ever remember anybody arguing about laura bush decision of whether to be the mom in chief. we didn't actually, when when i say we i mean me. we didn't actually care about laura bush.s a librar [laughter] she seemed like an nice person and she was a librarian but id think these stand for social change and that's what made it so hard for michelle obama. >> i think that's right because she felt that on this would not come as a surprise to any prominent african-american womao either that you are meant too represent. that is one of the great challenges but it is a role that she has really thrown herself into. when one thinks of her legacy think it will be about her message. about what she what she has tried to do in terms of inequality in the stacked deck. i think it will be about how she got that message out. she flew groups on the white house lawn, she does every kind of social media there is. i think it i think it will be a while before first lady feel feeds kale chips to someone dressed in drag on late-night television. she will say i will make a fool of myself to get the message out if that is what i have to do.o s i think she has made extraordinary strides in figuring out this job that when she came and made no sense to anybody. >> i give her enormous credit for doing this on unbelievably difficult job. there is no question that she had the finest line toe walk that any first lady had to walk. it's astonishing how hard it was and i give her enormous credit for doing it. i think at the end of the day the question is,