your 25th lecture. i will try to do him justice in describing this pedal for room you have chosen for your 25th lecture. you have chosen a remarkably historic room. i have to think the offices of the senate curator and historian who prepare and test histories alone -- of all of our art and all of our rooms. without them, this introduction would not be possible. begin, in the early 1900s, the house and senate decided they had outgrown their space. they commissioned two architects them aw york to build house and senate office building. thee buildings have become russell senate office building. they are mirror images of one another from about. those two individuals were educated in paris and a part of that education brought this beautiful art that you see around this room. they took great care to design this room. they spent over a year finding this marble that came from south dover, new jersey. which is very interesting. this was known as simply the caucus room. it was intended to be a room for political parties to meet and caucus and determine their leadership and priorities for their party. over time, it became a very popular and preferred place for congressional investigative hearings. among them, the 1912 hearing on andsinking of the titanic, the watergate hearings of 1973. stafferules committee so i find the following interesting facts far more interesting than that because there are no circumstances under which we would allow these things to happen in the united states senate today. nine united states senators announced her candidacy for the presidency -- announced their candidacy for the presidency. those political campaign activities would not be permitted here today. the second thing i find quite interesting, the 1961 film advise and consent was filmed in this room and it has to be a d.c. cold classic because it is one of the only commercial films ever film to hear -- ever filmed here. if you have not seen it, you should. today it is not used much as a committee hearing room. larger and more technologically advanced rooms. what we use this room for is primarily legislative seminars and educational seminars, like this one. we are happy you have chosen this room. it is my honor to introduce mr. .on carlson [applause] carlson: good evening to everyone who has joined us tonight. member of the executive committee at the u.s. capital historical society board. we were founded in 1962 and started by congress in 1978 -- chartered by congress and night 70 -- 1978. we communicate to the public the rich heritage of the capital and congress. i am please to welcome you to our lecture program. we are honored to work with the white house historical association and the u.s. supreme society torical enhance the knowledge appreciation of the american system of government. topic is a very unique look at the historians craft. i want to thank my fellow board member cokie roberts and the other distinguished panelists for sharing their personal insight into the work of telling american history. these are highly accomplished people who have received numerous prestigious awards, academy award, an emmy, and the national book critics circle award. we have a distinguished audience as well tonight. guests representing members of congress, the architect of the capital, the senate historian's office, universities, journalists, think tanks, museums, and others. i am sure the round of questions from the audience will be engaging. we are very pleased to welcome several speakers to share in the program tonight. we are honored that dr. curtis is here to add some words of welcome on behalf of the white house historical society. [applause] sandberg: good evening. i am very grateful to don because i have this long title and now i do not have to say it. i am delighted our association has a long-standing friendship with the historical society. i was thinking earlier, on a personal note, i began just a year ago directing the rubenstein center at the association and it was just at the time of the last lecture, the heritage lecture. this is going to be something like haley's comment -- haley's comet. it is the 25th and very near and dear to our hearts. history never goes away and all .f us are kindred spirits there is a cyclical quality to history. it is important to be an historian. tonight's panel, this is extremely important. last year, the lecture was calvin coolidge, in our coolidge -- in our carriage house. after the supreme court society gets it next year, we look forward to having it back. the association, we are a private nonprofit educational organization. we have a terrific mission to enhance the understanding and appreciation of the executive mansion and it is a lovely history. we were founded in 1961 by first lady jacqueline kennedy at time -- and at the time, she was in her early 30's and the goal then and today was to help the white house collect and exhibit the best artifacts of american history and culture and this grew and grew and continues to to include acquisition, preservation, research and education. we have a very robust education program at the rubenstein center. not to forget the white house ornament, and christmas is coming up. up, on behalf of the association, i am year with a -- i amf my colleagues here with a number of my colleagues. we have a new chief historian. it is a marvelous partnership. welcome to everybody, and thank you. [applause] >> i am honored to introduce dr. david pryde, executive director of the united states supreme court historical society and we are so pleased you could join us. [applause] >> thank you for being here. lectureonal heritage was instituted in 1991 as a consequence of meeting between staff members of the historical groups serving the three branches of government. i was privileged to be at that meeting, the agenda of which was to ascertain how three organizations of similar mission could work together. rotatingd upon a lecture series. each of the participants would take turns every third year as a principal sponsor for the program that would appeal with the member -- to the members and friends of the other collaborators. the first of these was a lecture at the supreme court by justice 1937.y on fdr's my apologies, of course, to the unrepentant new dealers. kennedy did a masterful weaving evening together the historical threads of three branches involvement in that legislative process. that has been a hallmark of many of the national heritage lectures ever sense. -- ever since. some have focused on the expertise of the primary host in any given year. each approach, i think, has been well received and hence the continuation of this important series. the board of trustees has asked me to convey its gratitude to tonight's principal sponsor, the u.s. capital historical society for putting together this latest installment in what has been a venerable tradition. i want to convey our thanks to the white house historical society -- historical association. the supreme court historical society is honored to partner with each of you and looks forward to many more years of cooperative programming and hosting again next year. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, david. it is my extreme honor to introduce my fellow member of the board of the capital historical society, cokie roberts, who constantly amazes me about her long service on the board and her inability to say no to any request we make of her. she is a political commentator for abc news on mpr with many years in broadcasting -- av news -- abc news and npr with many years in broadcasting. among her many honors -- long ago i was taught the greatest introduction in washington was a short one. i intend to honor her by doing that tonight. here is cokie roberts. ms. roberts: thank you for being here. i was thinking when we had that history of the room, when some of us were young, there was only one senate office building when we were kids. it was this building. there were two house office buildings. the senate office building had "s.o.b."hat said [laughter] societytal historical also has christmas ornaments. so. don't miss those. i have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life in this room, not only because it has these big events, like presidential announcements. i was here for ted kennedy and al gore. but also all of these hearings, including the endless iran contra hearings. -- i do complain -- today, i am complaining a lot because i did not get any sleep watching that edifying debate last night. the truth is, many of us have had the great privilege -- i have had the credentials were they give you a pass to make it easier -- of being eyewitnesses to history. we have been in this city, connected to these institutions where we have had a huge privilege. and that is one approach to history, is to live it and to record it as you go. aboutalways the saying journalism, the first draft of history. it has been an exhausting privilege to be able to write that first draft. it is also true the other drafts that are more thoughtful, the drafts that have some very, very note only interesting, but important and useful and we do have three approaches and i am going to stick with the idea of short introductions. you do have some biographical information in your programs and also misses google will be able to help you with anything you need to know. starting on the end, we have michael hill, who toiled in this venue working in government and politics, including as a press secretary of walter mondale when he was vice president. and had he got faith the serendipity of be -- of meeting david mccullough and started this wonderful ride. of working with david and ken burns and john meacham and evan thomas and lots of other people, writing books and movies and traveling the world, learning all kinds of wonderful things and he has also written and of washburn,ary the united states minister to mence, which fascinated because that is one of my approaches to history to read books like that. that is one way of writing and reading and producing history. grace guggenheim has taken another path where she has produced so many wonderful ,istorical documentaries including the academy award-winning johnstown flood. ,hey go on and on and on theaters, tv museums, presidential libraries. she has been the creator of so much visual information that we can absorb and have access to our history in a way that would not be true if she had not been doing the work she has been doing these many years. her most recent work is a treatment designed to cure cancer where she was the producer, director, and narrator. president of the productions, where she has been overseeing the preservation of her father's film legacy. house on nantucket -- martha's vineyard, my mother and lady bird would hang out there. honest to god, i was dying to be a fly on the wall. the best i ever got was to deliver my mother there and then i had to leave. and they always made me leave and it was not fair. did you get to stay? you got to stay. taken -- he does history's, the nonfiction ies and does these wonderful models and creates historical fiction. another way of making history more accessible. and having people actually read it in ways the rest of us don't. his 2013 novel watergate was a finalist for the faulkner award and he has won many other awards. he also had a guggenheim fellowship, so you can turn to grace and say thank you. in addition to his wonderful fiction and i am told i must read finale as soon as this dreadful election is over. he has also written two books of nonfiction that interest me. then 25f one's own and -- part of the reason that interests me is because that is how i do my history work. i need the diaries and letters in order to write the history. i am very eager to have other people help me find the letters and the diaries. jesse been fremont was an incredible -- when john fremont ran for president at the first republican candidate for nobody knew 1856, who the vice president joe candidate was because all of the -- she was the most famous women in politics for a very long time, and incredibly powerful. when he won the nomination in philadelphia, all of new york showed up at their house and said, show us jesse. times, shell on hard started writing. they also published grace .reenwood she was the first woman to write for the new york times in the 1850's. and she wrote from europe. things as hersuch admission to the house of lords where she went to hear queen victoria speak and she said the queen displayed more rosy regaltitude than attitude. and then she went to dinner at charles dickens house. i wonder how her american readers reacted to that. i know what she wrote because i and -- in the art times in the new york times. one of the wonderful things about writing history right now is you can read the newspapers be in the be able to moment where the people you are writing about were so you are reading what they were reading. it is fabulous because it is not just the stories, but all the ads, so you have a sense of society in a much broader sense because you know what they were buying and what it cost and what children's books people were reading and magazines and all of that. it is a fascinating way to come back around to that first draft of history helping you with the later dropped of history. -- later draft of history. you can waste days sitting there and reading the newspapers. it is way too much fun. thinking about the way i approaches street and writing my history books -- approach history and writing my history detective work, to some degree, it fascinated me to think about the different approaches. tom, i willnk -- start with you since i ended with you. when you have done all of these, you have done 16 books now, you have done so many fiction and nonfiction books, why fiction? i came to fiction from nonfiction. i had written much more nonfiction before i started writing novels. i was interested -- i realized they were source material for so many of the stories i wanted to tell. most -- almost all of the fiction i have written has been historical. it has been set in the fairly distant past, and more --quently of late, books, id of the cannot remember if i made something up or in my file ms. roberts:. ms. roberts:for journalists, that is a problem. mr. mallon: it is a way into these subjects. historians do their work responsibly and well and very vividly. nonetheless, there is a restraint on them, a certain bridle on them that is not on the novelist. said, nancy reagan, for instance, do you -- how do you know that nancy reagan thought that at that moment? and i don't. i don't have to substantiate knowing it. even if the historian has some to say she may- have thought that, it has to be wrapped up in so many subjective's. novelist has her go ahead and think it. malpractice,of historical fiction, but the hope is that it will somehow illuminate history in a different way. ms. roberts: grace, in moving it from the page to the picture, do you feel any of that happens? does it stay straight on? is there some element of fiction? very interestingnheim: question because i struggle with it. with documentaries, they can come with different shapes and , it is still a story but the vision can change of that storyline based on the director or the interpreter or the producer. i will go backwards -- you mentioned my first film as an associate producer. i spent 18 years of mike are working with my father. the johnstown flood, we had a beautiful book written by david mccullough which was the premise of our historical fact. what survives?s, it was a difficult challenge for a flood that took place in 1889. usre were not diaries for except -- and the material did not survive either. anything after the flood existed but very little before. then what happens? this is one of the few docudrama's i have worked on and how do you show a dam breaking? in that film specifically, there were licenses taken, but we also have a disclaimer saying this is interpretive. it allows us to get away with it and allows us to use reenactment. the initial approach is to try and find what historically exists that we can use. that is where we begin. it is a process of elimination of we need to talk about something visually over something visually. ms. roberts: how do you feel about reenactment? ms. guggenheim: when i look back at the johnstown flood, it looks a little questionable. today, technology is so much more sophisticated. we will do -- we were dealing with technological challenges. i think it can work successfully but it can also be misleading. ms. roberts: in the videos in museums, they tend to have a lot of reenactment. i think they have gotten better. do you think they have gotten better? ms. guggenheim: technologically, i think it has become seamless. there was a film about rosa parks not needed for an academy award -- nominated for an academy award and they were criticized for doing reenactments but did not do a disclaimer so people could not tell the difference. typically in pbs films, anything that is reenacted is in color, historical is in black and white. we do not do that as much because we like to melt it and have a disclaimer. it has become experiential experience rather than factual. michael, you have worked with both film and with books, do you find yourself -- you have the best job. do you find yourself approaching the research in different ways? think it is great to talk about all the different forms of producing history because i remember when i was in school, i was interested in history despite the best efforts of every teacher i had. whether it is a straight nonfiction book, documentary, or historical novel, whatever gets people interested and excited about history is fabulous. -- when tom -- i was helping evan thomas with a book and evan was starting the research and he asked somebody, what is the best materials to read about question mark somebody said, one of the best -- he did the work and he did the research, which is what tom does. in looking at all the different media, there is similar approaches and attacks in producing a book as it is for a documentary as it is for an historical novel. obviously, diaries and letters and newspapers are just a fabulous source of material and the access you have to those now is wonderful. the other, which i think, and this i have to thank you folks , you make our work possible through the archival work that you do. you produce the material that lets us do what we do. in addition to diaries and letters and newspapers and so forth, i know david mccullough uses artwork a lot. if you look at a painting of john adams or thomas jefferson that was done, a lot of times paintings were done by artists who were sitting with the subject or knew them. from there, you can get descriptions of what the person looks like, what their dress was like. i remember when tom hanks and hbo did an update station -- adaptation of the john adams film and the set design people were trying to figure out what john adams and abigail looked like. they went back and looked at the paintings. how they dressed at certain particular times. artwork is another example. the other, and tom and i were talking a little bit about this and grace knows this because of the visual aspect, is to go to the place where the historical event happened. i cannot stress how important that is. all of the authors i have worked for, if there is a place that is still in existence of the subject matter you are dealing with, you have to go see it because even if you pick up one little thing, it was worth doing that. countless it -- countless instances i have had, david mccullough with the most -- with the right brothers book, the being in thisses, room. going there is such an important thing. story aa wonderful couple of weeks ago. i was in ohio and i was talking to one of the historians and he told us a wonderful story that when gore vidal was working on novel,rd historical there was a local wealthy person out there who put up a lot of build theto help boats and so forth. the mansion is still there and a lot of the furniture is still there. vidalory -- when gore went to the museum and he said to the curator, i wonder if i could ask you a favor. could you take two pieces of furniture in which we know aaron burr either sat in or touched, could you put them in a room and i could go in there and sit by myself and take it in? he pulled them out of the case and them in the room and close the door and gore vidal sat in there and it is a wonderful example -- anything that stimulates the author by feeling the real thing, saying the real thing, -- seeking the real thing, is so important. the archival work and the places and the artwork and so forth helps so much. ms. roberts: you can learn a lot about what they were wearing by reading the women's letters. they actually talk about it. those pictures you talk about leave at half of the human race -- leave out half of the human race. when you do find the letters, they are so much better than the men's letters because the men knew that they were important and they wrote with the idea that they would be published and preserved and their letters are edited and this. the women just wrote -- edited and pompous. the women just wrote letters. they were deeply political, but they also wrote about fashion and who was having babies and what the economic situation was and about human beings and they were frank and funny. offerson davis's wife rights wonderful letter -- writes a wonderful letter to her mother. she was furious and she said it is a good thing there is a new water system coming to -- you do notthat learn from the men's letters. that is part of the reason people do not know history as well because half of the human race feels like they are left out of it. grace, you happen coated in the washington times -- quoted in the washington times saying the state of historical ignorance makes you gritty about your craft. what does that mean? ms. guggenheim: i have always felt when i have been lucky an historicaln documentary. we all -- we only have so much time. of a year and a half or a year or two years, a majority of that time, you want to plan and hunt and gather. if you cannot find your material itty,e persuasive and gr you cannot tell your story. mind whenry comes to i worked on a film about harry truman for the truman library and there was literally no material i could find when he was senator and at the last minute, because of relationship with one of the historical societies, they notified us to say, we just inherited some home movies from a contractor who built the building. thing -- ifkind of you are thirsty enough, whether it is a family, or a historical society. my perspective is, my career has been built on the preservation of this material. itty, not everyone is able to have it easily accessible. ms. roberts: does it make it any easier in terms of trying to get to this stuff to have the moments where you can just make it up? [laughter] it is a great comfort not to have to go through the fact checking department as one does for an essay. it is very funny with source material, you can reach a point in fiction, you reach it more quickly, you reach a point where you almost wish you had less to work with. were the tapese of the hearings, the nixon tapes, which were one-of-a-kind, all of these memoirs that even the minor players wrote in order to pay their legal bills. a tremendous amount of stuff and i sometimes felt i was drowning in it and wanted to have less. with other stories, a much was aboutvel of mine, withouple in the balcony the lincolns. ms. roberts: after everybody else said no. veryallon: this is suspicious to the grassy knoll types. 18 years after the assassination, henry, who was married to clara, and they had three children, one of who became a congressman, he murdered clara when they were traveling abroad in germany. materials available to me for that story were pretty scarce. a lot ofies destroyed stuff because of and there is meant. -- because of embarrassment. i was grasping at tiny straws. i found a diary up in albany kept by one of the cousins. enjoyed clara's company at dinner tonight, she was not so sarcastic as usual. that was the minute she became real to me. sources, itory about was always craving more material for the two of them because i would find a great deal of detail for a period of their lives. ms. roberts: what was it about them that got you going? that they were there in the box? mr. mallon: when i knew he had murdered her. for all the things that have been done about lincoln, 14,000 , there had never been a full-length treatment of henry and clara. ms. roberts: how did you know he had murdered her? mr. mallon: it was documented but it was literally a footnote. this happened 18 years later. there was a time -- i traced every possible scrap of information. i was telling a gentleman before 20started, just last fall, plus years after that book came out, i got a call from a man across the river in virginia. he said, my late wife and i always thought about getting in touch with you. we both read your book but we never got around to it. i was married to clara's great-great granddaughter and we have four cartons of stuff related to her. would you be interested in seeing it? ms. roberts: not now. shows the: i think it two-edged sword. i looked at these boxes and there were things in them, objects that made me shake. ofra was a great collector photographic calling cards. cardsooked like business today. ms. roberts: some people collected them like baseball cards. mr. mallon: she liked the limelight and there was one card in there which was from dr. charles crane, one of the physicians that attended lincoln the night he died. noris.addressed to dr. i did not know who was -- who dr. noris was. he was attending secretary of state seward. it was a report from the houseen house to seward's as to what was going on and the card said in pencil, 6:00 a.m., the president is very low. one hour and 22 minutes before lincoln dies. i said to the gentleman, is this insured? this is one of the last written records of the lincoln and administration. -- lincoln administration. i looked through clara's voluminous scrapbooks which would have provided me with tremendous information and finally, where those things were concerned, i left the house with a certain relief. so much information, it would have been inhibiting. i had to have some kind of imaginative room to maneuver. grace, i see you nodding. ms. guggenheim: it reminded me of the story, when we finished the half hour of film, there was a woman who called the johnstown flood museum and said, i found this trunk in my mother's attic. inside were hundreds of photographs from her great grandfather who had been an amateur photographer and that allowed us to expand the film to an hour and for the first time, wealthyerial of the -- that that occupied had hidden the material for many years. it was liberating. when you see it, you know. ms. roberts: that gets to the truth.n of we have spent a lot of time -- i think a very useful amount of time -- doing fact checking. now we are doing it in real time. as we are talking, you can pull up what is true and what is not true. not a lot is true. but is there a difference between just checking the facts and telling the truth? are they the same thing? >> the fact is a point of departure. what one needs to do in a nonfiction context is take a fact that you are presented with and attack it from every possible way you can. the other day, i was doing a little research about dwight eisenhower and civil rights and i was looking at the chapter in his memoir about civil rights and he mentions at the outset, he talks about some of the advances and he mentioned a fellow named frederick mauro that he appointed to as a administration and said he was the first black appointed to a personal position in a white house administration -- so no position in a white house administration. i did some poking around and found out, yes, he was, but the back story that came out of that, once he was appointed, his treatment inside the administration was horrible. some people would not deal with them. friends of eisenhower's were just appalled. i take that as an example -- that is a fact of what eisenhower did and that is terrific. it then you have to start looking at what are the other stories. , the other story angles of the story, and that is where a lot of this methodology comes in. what did somebody else say about this particular event? in oral histories, you have to be a little bit careful, too. oral histories, at a particular time, can have a particular benefit. what if you do the interview with somebody later on? they may be much more open, much more willing to talk. ms. roberts: after everybody is dead. mr. hill: oral histories -- taking the fact and checking it against other things, interviews with people, checking what the newspaper said. looking at diaries or letters of people who did not like the person you are researching. what did they say? what were their motives? taking the fact and testing it along the way and trying to get to some kind of truth. gracestances that tom and mentioned about the great fear of anybody who does this is working on a project and either at the 11th hour or after you have released your product, finding something that has a huge impact upon the credibility of what you do and one thing i have learned over 30 years ago authors, onceme they get going, they do not want to have a lot of people know doing.hat they are david is very open. he wants everybody to know what he is doing because inevitably, something comes out of the woodwork. one of the things david always says to me, go talk to jeff flanery and see what he has. several years ago, when i was helping evan thomas on his robert kennedy book. i was coming into the manuscript reading room and jeff said, have you looked at the martin papers and the campaign diary he kept of being with bobby kennedy? it is an absolute gold mine. the only really inside the campaign diary that was ever produced and it was wonderful. about wasat came talking to archivists, making them to the partnership. help produce the best product that you can. it is a long way of saying if the facts -- the facts are there, but you have to sample and try to reach -- you have to push and pull and try to reach the best conclusion that you can. ms. roberts: how true are the memoirs? my mother said about her own, think about what a great book i would have written if i had been willing to tell the truth. [laughter] woman who was married to a confederate senator from alabama. he was imprisoned, seen as a conspirator. which was not true. and she writes this wonderful breezy memoir. she was very clever and everybody loved her. is --moir about herself in reading what she writes for publication, it is all how well she handled everything and how she told andy johnson off, which she did. but she was terrified and you learn that through her diary. take the diary at exactly the same period from the memoir and see that she was scared to death. he was going to be in jail forever or killed. you would never have that if you memoir. the the terrible thing that happened to me was that davis, her diary was discovered after my book. thing we have found is with 18th-century memoirs,r 19th century it was accepted to delete things -- to leave things out. ms. roberts: you were not expected to embarrass yourself. mr. hill: one thing on the washburn diary that we found at the library of congress, washburn later published two volumes he called his diary and correspondence to the minister of france and he quotes from the diary. we started comparing the diary against the original and there were many instances where he -- and it was all personal things, talking about his health. adams left out all the good stuff. grace, you have had the experience about writing about recent things. how does that differ? ms. guggenheim: it is an interesting question. there are advantages and disadvantages. filmmaker, -- for a there has to be a lot of trust with a lot -- with a live subject. i am sure you find that, too, with journalism. without that confidence in relationship, the reveal does not succeed. so both you can cradle that it can be successful and it feels risky. there is a concept to do but you do not know what the outcome is going to be. ms. roberts: working on the and young -- andy young, tell us about that. ms. guggenheim: the two films that were mentioned, my father did not work on these two films. they relate to the history here. my father produced two films on andrew young when he ran he was the first african-american to win and post in postuction -- to win reconstruction. i wanted to preserve this am, so i was curious about how they made it and why and i was trying to obtain the copyright, which was owned by quaker oats, of all things. now quaker oats has been purchased by pepsi, i believe. question mark in my mind, so through preserving this film, i found out through a living member who had worked on the film with quaker oats that they really wanted to take a position of showing that they were an integrated corporation. so if they created a new factory somewhere in united states, they would have open housing. i think they saw this as an opportunity to do a film -- ms. roberts: promote themselves. ms. guggenheim: exactly. films in 1974 were mostly shown in the kennedy center, they were not shown on pbs, though this one was. risk with the storyline like tot was, you are going follow this campaign but not know if it is going to be successful and if it is going to have any history to it. in the end, it did. ms. roberts: bringing things up to the present, you have just written a fictional piece about the election of 2016. tell us -- [laughter] mr. mallon: it is a piece that will be in the new yorker, called presumptive. i imagine a beginning on the day that trump became the presumptive nominee of the republican party. because it has echoes of presumption and consumption, things that politics does to people. sort of not too long, but a longish essay about the things that one might do, and it did, in writing it, aside from the fact that it took my mind off the real election, which was not such a bad thing -- my main occupation right now is i'm writing a novel set during the george w. bush years. it seems like such high-minded relief to go back to the iraq insurgency and hurricane katrina, the good old days. [laughter] mr. mallon: that is one i think function of history, that you escape the current affairs. ,ut there is this question again, i think there are moral questions that the novel has to cope with that the historian, whose task is much more difficult, given the level of accuracy -- does not always have to cope with. your mission is to tell the youh, but in terms of -- mentioned about the truth and also that recent people. there is the literal truth and then there is what you might call the poetic truth, the higher truth, the truer truth. that is one of the things that fiction tries to get into. in the novel i wrote about watergate, probably the most trouble i ever got into as a novelist was mrs. nixon is a big character in the novel. -- i'm trying to think about what nixon called the wilderness years, the years he was out of office after he lost the governorship of california. he was living in new york until he won the presidency five years later. this was by almost all accounts the happiest. period in pat nixon's life. she went to museums, bookstores, most people did not recognize her. she got along extremely well with most of her teenage daughters, even though it was the 1960's -- both of her teenage daughters. this was the life she should have had in a place like pasadena and the 1940's and 1950's, the wife of a prosperous republican lawyer. i tried to imagine what would have completed her happiness. i imagine for a very brief period in those years that she had a very short-lived tender retired state's lawyer. [laughter] mr. mallon: who is this silver haired irishman. somebody pointed this out to me and said, what is that about? [laughter] mr. mallon: i didn't want to think too much about that. [laughter] mr. mallon: there was one reviewer who worked in the nixon administration and had lines of dialogue in the novel. overall quite friendly review of the book in "the wall street journal." but he was very bothered by this. and he said mrs. next has living children and grandchildren -- mrs. nixon has living children and grandchildren. i thought was, is this the worst they have to endure? why did i have to do it? , gentlech a low-key thing in the book. but i did it, quite honestly, because when i was writing scenes between the two of them, they remain in touch in a very distant, civilized way in the years to follow -- when i rose scenes for the two of them, even though i was aware i was lying about the fact that there was no literal truth to any of this, i had a certainty that i was getting closer to the real mrs. nixon, as she really was. i think there were dimensions of warmth to her and so forth that were terribly suppressed by the culture. i felt, in a sense, as pompous as it sounds, that i was getting to be true worth truth of her by bending the facts, and that was the only way i could do it. ms. roberts: it is time for questions from you guys. i think we have some microphones moving around. who has got microphones? there's one over here. just one microphone? why don't you come toward the middle, then. don't it -- go ahead. sprint. >> is this working? all of you talked about the usefulness of diaries or letters of the subject, but yes or no question for each of you -- in the absence of diaries and letters, would you entertain the idea of writing or documenting a subject? ms. roberts: this is something that comes up all the time. what will happen in the future with no diaries and no letters? what will our history be? does anybody want to take that? >> well, there is a lot of tweeting going on. [laughter] >> that is not crazy. my fries on this is always, save everything -- my advice on this is save everything. particularly with e-mails around big events, marriages, people going off to school, deaths, there is a lot of e-mailing that tells a lot of stories. print them out. even the tweets. in one book that we wrote about marriage, i wrote a chapter about pioneer marriages. there was a woman, mary richardson, who went to oregon in the early 19th century. she knew she was doing something absolutely extraordinary and got out there, and she wrote letters, which were really a diary. there was one she wrote that said, i was up at 5:00, baked nine loaves of bread, taught school, was delivered of a son. [laughter] ms. roberts: that is a tweet. [laughter] ms. roberts: but you get the picture, big-time. i really do think saving these things makes a big difference. the other thing that i would story core.out is you hear it on npr on friday mornings. created something wonderful where people all over the country interview other people, and lasting skipping, something like 300,000 kids interviewed their grandparents, and it is all archived in the library of congress. the problem is going to be, the technology changes, and being able to listen to things -- grazes knotting, because once the technology -- grace is nodding, because once the technology changes, it becomes difficult. you have to preserve it with the next generation of whatever it is. anything you can do like that really does make a difference. i highly recommend it. anybody else want to add to that? i think if you find any family letters, you should consciously think about where you can donate them to, or photographs. here withre -- i am sort of a st. louis mafia right here. my mother's first cousin died, who is from st. louis, and she had all these letters. i could not read them, but i sent them to the missouri historical society. they came back breathless, because in there were letters from the former mayor of st. , who my his mother mother is related to. without that, they don't learn about the influence in st. louis and things like that. i think if we can, we should, but it is scary. digital technology, particularly for my industry, though it is easy -- the problem is with film , it lasts 100 years. with digital technology, you have to be proactive about migrating it forward. >> the web is making accessible a lot of documentation. it is cheaper to do scholarship today. you do not have to do as much travel. but never underestimate how evocative what at first appears to be some dry document is going to turn out to be. when i was in the late 1980's writing a novel about the early 1960's, the days of the first spaceflight, i was a little boy in the novel. >> here you are again. [laughter] mr. mallon: i went back and found my school records, the day i was registered for school in the 1950's by my father. i can dimly remember being brought to the office. i was trying to re-create that era and understand its differences from the error i was living in. , aside one-page form from all of these things that you would expect to find like parents' phone number, all of those things, the person taking the information from the parent had to record whether the child came from a broken home or not. that was the official printed category -- a broken home, and whether or not the child was unkempt. i thought, it sounds like oliver twist. the fact is, when i grew up in my catholic town, i did not know anybody who came from a broken home. nobody was divorced. it was a much more exotic thing. there were all of these things, including what was the most forward-looking from the 1970's and not from the 1950's. there was a spot that asked, activities, hobbies, and interest of parent. that seems modern and touchy-feely to me. the one word answer imparted by my father was "non-." e." [laughter] mr. mallon: that brought him back to me, because my father detested itty-bitty bodies -- my soccer detested busybodies -- my father detested busybodies. they did not have any interest outside their kids, and i was on one page that was a government form. ms. roberts: my catholic school report card had on one side academic grades and on the other side cooperation with the school discipline order and intercourse with companions. [laughter] it was an all girls school. [laughter] ms. roberts: other questions? >> i have another question for tom. among writers of fictional history, is there some kind of a code of ethics that you will not go beyond in making history fictional? you touched on this a little bit in talking about morals, but just wondering if you could elaborate. what would be acceptable, completely changing facts or introducing new characters, and what would be unacceptable? there is a kind of sub john wright within historical fiction -- kind of a sub genre within historical fiction called alternate history fiction. in alternate history novels, big changes -- the south wins the civil war, things like that. the reader of those books knows that as part of the entertainment, to see just how many things will have been changed. whereas with standard historical fiction, the reader is looking for a fidelity, especially to the small facts. they want the world to be replicated, and then maybe to have some interesting things happen that happened behind the scenes were between the cracks. i do think there are moral questions involved. i never considered what i did with mrs. nixon to be so terrible. i thought she was entitled. [laughter] mr. mallon: as i say, and the book portrays her as being very loyal and portrays a much warmer marriage between the nixons then many histories and biographies to. do. in fact, the reviewer who said , asade them uncomfortable reviews will sometimes do, he went back to an essay i had written before and turned it against me and said, member you are at this. and he was right. the example he cited from the essay, which was about truth telling and what the limits were, i had objected -- i had written a novel "dewey defeats truman" set in the 1940's, and i had objected in this essay to something which appeared not long after that, which was a movie which portrayed the young thomas e dewey, the tough new york prosecutor, as having been corrupt and in league with the gangsters. this, i thought, was, aside from being preposterous -- which all historical fiction is legitimately and entertainingly -- but this i thought was morally beyond the pale. thomas e dewey lived until 1970, dating kitty carlisle in his last years. to the end of his life, he never sat with his back to the door of the restaurant, because he thought somebody with long memories from the 1930's might try to settle a score, a gangster. wrongght that that was and foolish. i did not think that added anything to anybody's understanding of history, whereas i rather grandios ely thought the adventure i was giving mrs. nixon did get me closer to the real person. tom,have a question for but if you will indulge me, i would like to go off topic and congratulate cokie roberts on being awarded a lifetime achievement award by the new england historic genealogical society. [applause] >> tom, i am actually struck and moved by your comments on the nixon marriage. died,mber when pat nixon seeing a photograph of president nixon crushed. his face was broken. this is a man who had achieved so much, for good and for other purposes. and he was absolutely broken by the passing of pat. of course, he himself would be gone within 12 months. i was wondering, if in your examination of the nixon's marriage, did you find something about him that was lovable, something about her that was lovable? did you get a sense that they love each other and that that is why they -- that is why she stayed with him is so much -- stayed with him through so much? mr. mallon: i don't think anybody can understand the nixons unless they realize that when he first met pat, he was wildly in love with her. she was his wild irish rose. they met at an amateur theatrical, doing and i and ran rand play.ng an ayn she did not want to do it, he was doing it increases confidence. she was told by the principal of the school she was teaching at that it would be a good thing if she got involved in commuting theater. he was absolutely crazy about her, and she was not interested. nixon was working all the angles , and she said, besides, i am dating another guy. nixon says, this fellow, does he have a car? [laughter] as shelon: and pat ryan, was then, said no, he doesn't. i will drive you on your date. and he did. he drove her and her date around, and she was so impressed by the weirdness of this that it kind of worker down. -- kind of wore her down. also within the last couple of years, the love letters that nixon wrote to her when they recording and married and he was often service in the pacific has been released. they are very ardent. i think nixon knew he put her through some terrible things that she stuck with him through. i think they were very competent very very, located -- complicated and very shy people. nixon once said he was an introvert and a next records position. ms. roberts: we are out of time for this very interesting conversation. i want to thank all of you. there is a reception so you can talk privately with these fabulous people. i do want to say, one of the things i was still about history is that it makes me feel better. we have lived through some awful times and come out the other side. as i was looking at the jack kennedy announcement in his room, you have to remember, he was young. everybody in the senate thought it was ridiculous that he was running for president. there were a lot of people they thought were far more qualified for the presidency. and it is a pretty short statement. it is saying, i have developed an image of america as fulfilling a noble and historic role as the defender of freedom in a time of maximum peril, and of the american people as confident, courageous, and persevering. that is the image i would like our leaders to be seeing today. thank you. [applause] >> thank you to ms. roberts and our distinguished panel. i want to thank them on behalf of our three societies for being with us tonight and giving us their unique insights in the whole field of history. i look forward to seeing all of you at her next event next year at the 26th national heritage lecture, hosted by the u.s. supreme court historical society. ourou don't already receive historical society magazine, please pick up a copy on your way out. in addition, when you are ready to leave, please check with our people by the exit. there are a number of exits to the building that are now closed , so to expedite your getting home, you sure to check with our people about which exits you can use. beyond that, thank you again for coming. please stay and enjoy our dessert reception and thank you very much. [applause] announcer: interested in american history tv? visit c-span.org/history. you can see our upcoming schedule or watch a recent program. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2016] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] with the next u.s. president, melania trump becomes our nation's second foreign-born first lady since louisa catherine adams. about the influence of presidential spouses from the book "first ladies." it is a companion to c-span's well-regarded biography tv series that features interviews leadingof the nation's first lady historians, biographies of 45 first lady ladies, and archival photos from their lives. byrst lady's," published public affairs is available wherever you buy books and available in paperback. tonight, authors should bastion melamine talks about the life of federal reserve chair in his book "the man who knew, the life and times of alan greenspan." greenspan had an unusual upbringing in the sense that they were raised in the 1930's, the child of a single mother. 's father left his mother when allen was only three and was a distant figure, unreliable. he would sometimes say he would calm and not show up. i think that probably reinforced a tendency that alan had to live inside his own head. announcer: go to book tv ductwork for the complete weekend schedule -- book tv.org for the complete schedule. announcer: american history tv is joining our comcast partners to showcase the history of pittsburgh, pennsylvania. to learn more about the city is on our current tour, visit www.c-span.org/citiestour. atcontinue now with our look the history of pittsburgh. mayor peduto: we are in pittsburgh, pennsylvania. this town was a frontier town with a fort that was settled by the french. along came a long -- along came a young major in the virginia militia, with a mission of saying, this is land that great britain wants. does begin the french and indian war, the seven-year work, over who would control the confluence of pittsburgh. that major's name was george washington. it is the history of meriwether lewis, taking off down at heinz field in a boat to make up with his -- to meet up with his buddy clark and in the process discovering america and the idea that it would be a country from sea to sea. it is the idea of them looking over their shoulder and saying, who is going to build this country? and it was pittsburgh. at first it was glass, then iron, then steal, then aluminum. in the process, we built this country. if you were to ask what has made pittsburgh pittsburgh, i would answer it has been resilience. back in the day, like a lot of cities, we burnt to the ground. during the 1920's and 1930's, our city was flooded. we also created a disparity between people like my grandfathers, who worked in the mills, and the people who own them. we were able to overcome that and build a city that became the third corporate center in the united states in the 1970's -- new york, chicago, pittsburgh. in 1979, we died, and we had to come back again and re-identify ourselves again. during the 1980's, steele died. i watched as some of my friends and family left. we lost more people than new orleans lost after katrina, and they never came back. even our city government, operating with a debt that was greater than new york city's when it went bankrupt. but just like all those other times in all the challenges that we had, we know how to do two things really well in pittsburgh -- one is to work hard, and the other is to innovate. we ended up with some forward thinking people who said back in the late 1970's, let's create a robotics center. lets create the first phd in robotics and start working to make it an industry that can help advance manufacturing to be able to maintain some of the manufacturing here. those seeds that were planted back in the 1980's as we were going through that depression have now taken hold, and they have taken us into a brand-new economy, an economy that is based on engineering and technology. and we stand here today as a new city, again. announcer: this weekend, we are featuring the history of pittsburgh, pennsylvania, together with our comcast partners. learn more about pittsburgh, and other stops on our cities tour, at www.c-span.org/citiestour. you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend, on c-span3. >> we have a special webpage at c-span.org to help you follow the supreme court. to go to c-span.org and select supreme court near the right-hand top of the page. once there, you will see four of the most recent oral arguments heard the storm -- heard this form -- term. in addition, you can find recent appearances by many of the justices were watched justices in their own words, including one-on-one interviews with justices taken, thomas, and ginsburg. there is also a calendar for the term, a list of current justices with links to quickly see all their appearances on c-span, as well as many other supreme court videos available on demand. follow the supreme court at c-span.org. >> we are asking students to participate in this year is a video documentary competition by telling us, what is the most urgent issue for the next president and congress to address in 2017? it is open to all middle school and high school students grades six through 12. students can work alone or in a group of up to three to make a documentary on the issue selected. a grand prize of $5,000 will go to the student with the best entry. $100,000 in cash prizes will be shared between 150 students and 53 teachers. the deadline is january 20, 2017, inauguration day. for more information, go to our website. announcer: the richard nixon presidential library and museum in yorba linda, california recently completed a major renovation. up next, exhibit and website designers discuss the museum and how the revised