someone else comfortable. thank you. [applause] >> thank you all for joining us. [inaudible conversations]

my books have been very recently about elections. there has been the 1920 election, 1932, united states and germany and 1948-1960 so this one centers in a way on 1960. people said that wasn't very interesting, the conventions not very interesting, republican convention was a snore.

hello? look beyond the surface, william f buckley junior, the republican delegates not knowing what they were supposed to do that year or who they were supposed to settle on and look at the machinations and circumstances of two conventions of major parties meeting at the same city in the same city at the same time and having to reconcile after a civil war. the civil war is the worst and the republicans had an incredible family feud in 1912. they wrecked their majority, given the election to woodrow wilson and have to put humpty dumpty back together in 1916 and conservative republicans versus progressives who used to be republicans who are madly in love with theodore roosevelt. it is a real personality called almost. how are you going to do this?

the republicans are not willing to forgive roosevelt. but he has veto power over who they can nominate. he would love to come back and be vindicated and get the presidency. how is he going to do that? he is realistic enough to know he made a bit of a hash of it in 1912. he is moving forward and toying with the support of his progressive party. will he take the nomination? he will take the republican nomination if he can get it. will he take the progressive nomination as the more radical members of that party want him to? know. he is stringing them along at

the convention and they want to instantly nominate him because that will put a gun to the head of the republican party. you want to split the republican vote again and reelect wilson? they don't. tr and his right-hand man, a wealthy wall street type is holding the progressives back, don't do it today or this hour. charles evan hughes, a new york boy from glen falls, he will become chief justice at some point of the supreme court. not yes. he's a sitting justice, governor of the state of new york, mildly progressive. tr does not like him. a classic case of fire and ice and tr is fire, fahrenheit 1912.

hughes is the bearded iceberg. aside from that tr has anointed a successor once before, william howard taft, that did not work out. he wants to do it again. they have wrangled over patronage and hughes was governor and tr is not sure where he stands against the war, preparedness, which is something we cover later. what will the republicans do? the republicans nominate hughes. nobody likes hughes but everyone is for him and because he's the sort of available man even though -- they nominate him and the progressive party folds into a big crack. hughes, this is interesting.

hughes was offered, how should we say it? consideration. if he does not run against woodrow wilson and that is to become chief justice of the supreme court. he says wilson will never support me and he is told by another supreme court justice he will, he wants you on the court. it is a very complex and interesting and machiavellian story. we don't have tapes like the nixon tapes but we have something remarkable, we have transcripts of conversations between the chicago conventions and tr's subordinates, lieutenants at sagamore hill where every word is taken down. so we really know what tr was saying to people, an unusual way in privacy. he's playing all sorts of crazy things. >> did he wants to be bagged by the republicans to get the nomination? it seemed like he really wanted

it but he wasn't going to say i wanted to be asked to please be our savior. >> one of his associates said people think tr had a tough hide and was impervious to criticism. people who really knew him, this was incorrect. he was very sensitive to criticism. he was sensitive to failure. when he finishes third for the new york city mayoral election in the 19th century he is really down in the dumps. he thinks he's going to lose the 1904 election which he wins by the largest popular margin in history up to that point. he was very down on himself and doesn't want to put himself forward again and be slapped down by the republicans. he's playing this game. they are not going to bag.

>> could he have won if he got the nomination? >> i was doing an interview last week with someone on the radio and the fellow was quite adamant that yes, he would have won. the more i thought about it, it did make sense. tr in that election, this is where the surrogate, you have people speaking for the candidate really overshadows the candidate more than any other instance. hughes is not that interesting and hands the paper over to differences within the party and has a tough job, a tremendously tough job because he is running against woodrow wilson who is running on a platform of peace and

prosperity. try to beat that. he comes very very close. with tr he is banging the drums for preparedness and very pro-ally, we are in the world war i period and republicans carry the electoral map of the united states, is completely backwards from what it is now. the south is all democratic. the northeast is solidly republican. hughes is going to carry new jersey, wilson's home state. the west is up for grabs. tr was very popular in the west. he was a conservationist. hughes does not do well in the west and california flips the electoral college for wilson in 1916.

hughes loses by 3400 votes, the republican governor or the progressive governor, the owner roosevelt's running mate in 1912. johnson carries the state by 300,000 votes because jumping off, away from hughes. tr would have retained those votes. who does hiram johnson beat for senator? george s patton's father. >> what was i going to ask about? one of the things, comparing how politics hasn't changed that much, when i was reading this i looked at the bullmoose of the progressives in 1916 and they reminded me of the bernie

or bust people in 2016. >> in love with their candidate. >> they were not going to easily support who got the nomination. >> many of them were very famous people, successful people, not rank-and-file people and they take up a collection. there's a lot of big multi-thousand dollar checks being handed to the platform and george w perkins, who was tr's supporter, a representative -- tr makes his piece, william howard taft busts more trusts then tr every does compared to the roosevelt's 7. one of the trusts taft busts is us steel. tr regards this as an affront to himself because he allowed some things to go on mergers in

1907 in us steel. he regards that as an affront to himself. the progressives, people like gifford pinchot or hiram johnson, the big newspaper editor of kansas or william allen white, these guys are hell-bent for theodore roosevelt and when theodore roosevelt throws them overboard as he does the independent reform wing of new york politics, he makes his piece with thomas platt, there's a certain pattern to what roosevelt will do. is tr really believe all this stuff? when he fights you, when he

fights you, a great friend of his helped save his bacon in 1898 when all of a sudden they produce the smoking gun against him. against tr. he is ready to be nominated by the republicans and someone produces tammany hall and his opponents produced letters from tr, the district of columbia, saying i am not a resident of sagamore hill or of the city of new york. i'm a resident of the district of columbia who wants to get out of taxes and i disqualified him from the governorship, but there is this mumbo-jumbo speech to the convention and they go nothing to see here and we will nominate him and the public elects theodore roosevelt narrowly to the governorship and ruth is described by roosevelt when he is in roosevelt as cabinet as the ablest candidate or cabinet members and alexander hamilton.

the hamilton -- the federalists and the whigs to the republican, tariffs, protection, all that. ruth angers tr because he supports taft and ruth says tr believes this stuff. works himself up to believing it and he will grab any weapon like a stick or club or chair leg or table leg and beat his opponents to death when he sees this. all these issues are moral issues to him and he will work himself up. the greatest friends he will work himself up to is in 1912 he is so busy hating william howard taft he forgets how much he hates woodrow wilson and he is going to find that out very very quickly. >> does he regret making that promise of not running for a third term?

>> he makes the promise, election night he won this massive landslide, this is it, i am not going to run for a third term. there is no third term tradition which franklin roosevelt is going to break and he doesn't have two full terms. he has only been elected to one. he almost has two terms because mckinley is shot so early. so he almost does have two terms. makes this pledge and his second wife edith who is a very strong, silent partner in this marriage, it is face palm time. why would you say that? after a while he comes to that, in 1912 he breaks that pledge

and the explanation has to go like the explanation in 1898 where tr and his apologists and supporters say when a man says in the morning he doesn't want another cup of coffee it just means he doesn't want another cup of coffee now. it doesn't mean he's never going to have another cup of coffee for the rest of his life. it doesn't mean he's never going to have a third term and that is how they get around his running in 1912, sort of running in 1916 and in 1920, had he lived he would have run then and been nominated then. >> what was it that turned him off of taft? he was so supportive of him to take over in 1908? >> roosevelt goes off to

africa, disappears into the jungle for the longest time where he barely receives reports of what is going on in the country but then the grand tour of europe and his former supporters are bargaining with him with attacks on taft, one of which is a busting of us steel. that is a problem. the way taft handles environmental issues largely when he fires gifford pinchot, chief forrester of theodore roosevelt and it was one of tr's top -- holding the job of chief forrester being in the president's in her circle and he certainly was and with the environment, conservation being a big issue with tr, that is going to be an issue and the

courts, the courts are always an issue. the courts are always with us and depending whose ox is being bored you are either supporting the courts or living in them. at this place in time the conservatives are very supportive of the courts, they had a whole bunch of decisions or labor legislation primarily knocked out by the various courts in the country. taft is as we know he loves the courts, respect the courts, he doesn't want to be president. he wants to be on the supreme court eventually. his wife wants him to be president. when people like the progressives attack the courts and say we should overrule a ruling, maybe the people should be able to have a referendum on them or be able to recall

judges, this is an attack on the separation of powers in the constitution, the constitution is vague on what the powers of the court are but through tradition and precedent it has evolved into this triangle, taft is supportive of this and when roosevelt gives a speech laying into the courts in 1910, that tears it with the conservatives and he wraps it up again, a speech in kansas defining the square deal becomes a new nationalism which is of full-blown almost socialist door new deal program almost radical at that time, the lines are quite drawn. >> most people would think

without knowing, wouldn't realize woodrow wilson was against going to war because he was so involved with the postwar, the league of nations and trying to be involved in foreign policy in that regard. roosevelt got to hate him so much. >> it starts before the war where a dynamite fuse is but over the pan-american now. wilson gets into office and proposes a treaty with columbia to essentially apologize for what the united states, tr, had done to colombia in prying panama loose from it and securing the canal zone, and

this just sets tr off, off the charts. he went to testify before congress about this. added insult to injury when they had a ceremony dedicating the panama canal under wilson's tenure, they don't invite taft and they don't invite roosevelt. let's have a little bipartisanship here. tr, even before world war i kicks off. again, his road back to powers blocked. not only has he lost in 1912, but they elected tween 9 congressman, the house of representatives, senator, a bunch of people in the new york state assembly and they had a lot of name candidates running in 1912. they get wiped out almost to a man in 1914. the party is hanging by a

thread. he's just about finished but world war i comes in and when it starts, roosevelt is very wilsonian, we have to be neutral. germany invaded belgium, but big parties or big powers do what they have to do and little powers like belgium get in the way, big powers must survive. then he says we must support the administration. with the sinking of the lusitania, where so many women and children are killed when a british passenger liner is torpedoed off the coast of ireland, american citizens are killed, tr becomes livid, called piracy on the high seas and declares war not so much on germany, woodrow wilson is

sending only these notes to germany and doing nothing to prepare for war, or to make the germans set up and say maybe we should pay attention to these americans. when america has an army of 83,000. i saw a stat in the last 24 hours, when war was declared our army was smaller than the british casualties, the casualties, the french casualties or the german casualties so very small army and it is like who is afraid of america? if you are not prepared maybe germany can do the knockout blow before we get in and about a year before we take the first land casualty. tr is right on this issue. we are not prepared. we are fighting with british

tanks, french airplanes and governors island in new york harbor. our recruits are training with broomsticks. it is quite a mess and where wilson, wilson is so obsessed with neutrality that when he finds out in a little squib in the newspaper the war college is making war plans for war against various countries that is not neutral. can't do that, stop, he told the assistant secretary of war. the assistant secretary of war says that is what war colleges do. we make plans and put them in the drawer and hope there's not a war, never do that again. when wilson gets a new secretary of war who is milton baker, a confirmed pacifist,

wilson exfoliates him for having these warplanes being drawn up and he will throw every general out of washington if he hears about it again and new baker knows this is what defense departments or war departments do but wilson is so opposed to this he can't even make the necessary presentation. >> what changed his mind? >> he said in the 1916 campaign or before that the people look at me, he is very realistic about his own powers, people look at me like i am a god or something but any little german u-boat lieutenant by launching a submarine can push this nation into war and this almost happened with the lusitania. they think the sussex and the germans make a pledge, they

make a pledge around 1916 to halt unrestricted submarine warfare and this is why he was able to win in 1916, but the germans, look at our map of europe in world war i at the end and there is a big blob of german occupied territory but they are exhausted and running out of food starving, they have no reserves anymore and even when occupying a great but of northern france and bits of russia, there war machine is held together by scotch tape and they know this. in 1917 they say we have to make the big push and gamble the americans don't get in as early as they do so they lift the restriction on unrestricted submarine warfare and start sinking not only british ships

but american ships in the war zone which has always been a red flag to the americans. but beyond that, the german board office is so heartless and stupid that they send a message to the mexican government and there is big trouble on the mexican border even before world war i. poncho via rating columbus and john purging going down into mexico, into the hills of the deserts to capture poncho via, george patton junior is part of that detachment, he brings back via's second in command dead on the hood of a car. it is pretty ugly and we send marines into occupy veracruz. wilson is noninterventionist in

europe but interventionist, with things so inflamed with mexico, the germans send a note to the mexicans saying in the event of war, they are not saying attack the united states but they are saying if the americans declare war on us, why don't you guys come in and we will help you out and you can get your lost territory back. the british intercept this and they wait for just the right moment to let this drop. they leak it to a couple american newspapers and america, which went from singing i didn't raise my boy to be a soldier is going to learn the words to over there. >> when i came to wartime, teddy roosevelt wanted to fight in the war. what happened?

>> what happened, he thought in cuba, spanish-american war, was leader for officer with the roughriders. he wants to get the medal of honor. he has been volunteering for action. he wanted to go to mexico went have to is president and his refused and he want to go in again in mexico when things are heating up under wilson so with the declaration of war he starts putting together this incredible plan for a volunteer regimen to fight in france and saying they won't be draft age, they would be beyond the draft

and i need all these guns and submachine guns and all these people and i name these officers who are almost as old as he is and he even goes so far as to request of the new york city police department two horses to ride in battle from the mountain cops and they have to be good horses because he keeps falling off of them. when war is declared he is in florida on this expedition where he is killing giant manta rays. he has never done this before and even though he is getting up in years, he goes down and is harpoon in these giant creatures like captain ahab, blood all over the water and telling them for a mile or two and on the way back up war has been declared and he stopped at the white house to ask wilson personally to grant him this wish because he's been denied

by secretary of war baker, best to call it, wilson left 10 minutes early for a meeting, don't just drop in on the president of the united states. later on, tr comes back down again and is unannounced but you can't keep a secret in washington. wilson knows he's coming, he's prepared for him, tr makes his pitch. one of his pitches to baker is i lead this force in cuba in the spanish-american war and we took the highest number of casualties. doesn't he realize this is not a selling point that he took the highest number of casualties? should try to inflict more casualties on the other guy. but tr had a bloodlust going on, a real warmonger, real imperial list, can't be denied, wilson is very calm.

and gave tr silent treatment, tr is thinking, and tr blasted wilson for reza words. and and tr is been said he went into that again. and he says theodore, did you

make that clear to the president? >> he doesn't go but is that one reason all four of his sons went? >> they were gone anyway. most of them were in some form of training, and a big camp in plattsburgh, roosevelt's friend general leonard wood was running, ted junior, and harvard club sort of young men. and and he goes to plattsburgh as well. and recruits another thousand undergraduates. in this.

and initially that wilson is going to blackball him from service in france but also all four sons and that brings him down but ted and archie immediately go overseas and serve on general purging's staff. ted is heard fairly bad and not only did sons go over but one of his daughters goes over as a nurse and ted's wife, a red cross type volunteer. it leads to frustration. he had been in argentina as a banker. he goes with the british army

to the middle east, mesopotamia, he meets lawrence of arabia. kermit is a great linguist, he learns arabic. as one point he is in mesopotamia and comes across a bunch of turkish soldiers, ottoman empire guys and with the british army, he has a swagger stick. and going to surrender and they do surrender to him. he gets a rather high british metal and goes to france, but the main story of the youngest son, quentin, 20-year-old sophomore at harvard, he lists in the first week of the war. he's very mechanically inclined. he can put together a motorcycle or a car. early on he loves airplanes. he wants to be in the service, he trains on long island, he

commutes to his training, goes to france and 11 months later goes into combat. 11 months later he tells you the state of preparedness of the american air corps in the army itself and on his first real combat mission he gets a kill, shoots down a german but on the second one, bastille day, july 4, 1918, he takes two bullets to the head. his plane crashes down. after that a message sent to a reporter of the new york sun. it says watch sagamore hill. he goes up knocking on tr app store and tr says trouble. i think it is not ted and archie, they should be okay.

kermit is in transit, it is clinton. then they find out clinton has been shot down. he has crashed planes before in training and walked away. people walk away. as he captured? is he wounded? is he dead? and they find out the word comes in from the germans that he has died. tr, it is stiff upper lip time, we are glad our son was able to make the sacrifice and tr rights about how he had this great shining moment, two which which exceeded anything he could have in life, this is tr the warmonger still speaking but yet behind that mask, and i think it is more of a masculine

it was before, is the father and there is this moment where after getting the news he walked to the big house at sagamore hill to the stables where quentin's old miniature shetland pony algonquin who he brought up the white house elevator to cheer a partially when they were boys, tr goes, that is quentin's pony and puts his arms, flings his arms around that horse, reminds him of his dead son and sergeant substance arms. it is said by one of tr's closest friends that the boy. >> in 1920, he wasn't going --

and other people die very quickly. >> other people die like harding. and you see help -- how health issues book ended both ends of theodore roosevelt where he starts as this sickly kid who is unable to breathe he is so asthmatic and is a weakling and has to build his body up and he becomes almost superman, the cowboy, the soldier, the african, the amazonian explorer. but then he starts to slow down the amazon thing did hurt him a great deal. he is operated on for an abscess in a sensitive spot in february 1918. without anesthesia it is sagamore hill.

when he goes into new york and is working on a meeting and talking to everything and dictating letters and all of a sudden why don't you stop mister roosevelt, and kind of sits down and there's blood all over the sofa. and he is there for a good 6 weeks and he's on deaths door. there are rumors around the country that he has died. it is the effects of the jungle fever and there is something wrong with my ears, operate on them and clear apprentices in the ears and if they are clearing out the abscesses in one year can now, and tr who

had been blind in one eye from a boxing match in the white house is deaf in one year. and he has to learn, comes out of the hospital to learn, how to walk again. >> gentleman of the jury, the standard tr pose when speaking is palm out and slamming it repeatedly. that seems september 30th in columbus, and grabbing onto the podium, holding up a roof in back of him for dear life. that is very indicative that he is still having to not quite have his balance as late that

-- helpful to the war effort giving war bond drives around the country, more helpful than when he was a 60-year-old guy in the trenches in france. that september, in november, armistice day was taken back to roosevelt hospital at sagamore hill. what happened then is not abscesses but his older sister crippled by rheumatism, almost hunchbacked and he has tremendous pains. what they are i can't tell you and the doctor can't tell you, the diagnoses changed. as it rheumatism? sciatica, arthritis?

it hurts like hell. he is still active in the hospital, dictating letters and newspapers and magazine articles and seeing visitors and talking about how they will sink the league of nations and how to get the republican party back in power in 1920 and he comes out christmas eve, probably too early. 's doctors would have wanted him to stay, he wants to be with his family in sagamore hill. >> and you mention he possibly overdosed or took something. >> as i was wrapping the book up two weeks ago before i handed the manuscript in, i was coasting. i'm looking at a little footnote or end note and it

says a couple chicago businessmen who were big progressive supporters killed themselves. weight a minute. you got to add his son killed himself in 1943 in alaska, shot himself in the head. kermit was with tr in the amazon when tr said i am too sick to go on. you, i am going to take this morphine and end it and you just go on and kermit says to him no. we are bringing your carcass back that are alive and it will be a lot easier for us if you are alive so why don't you knock this talk off and he does but tr told the secretary of the progressive party, oscar k davis, he always carried a bottle of morphine with him on

such trips to end it all, if it got to be a burden to people. he has in his family aside from kermit a pretty big streak of suicide, suicide tends to run in families. if your aunt has diabetes you will have diabetes, it does increase the chances. he is also prone to depression and he is, he has the morphine in his medicine kit or his medicine kit is at sagamore hill. only jars are empty now. when i heard the word morphine that made me jump because he was administering morphine that night, a nurse heated his request.

recent diagnoses by modern doctors said the breathing of tr at the end of his life was consistent with a morphine overdose. was he accidentally overdosed? or did he, to avoid any scandal, to avoid any negative -- you could now, there would be reason if morphine shows up in your autopsy, no reason to question that or less reason if it went that far. did tr then decide to end it or not? i end the book by saying if you decide not to believe he did this, that is fine with me. if you decide to believe that you are fine with me. if you come to no conclusion at

all, i have no problem with that because the evidence is not conclusive. what it is is a troubling string of facts. if tr did in fact become to that temptation at the end, and dark forces which you always had to run far ahead of. he did not believe, it is difficult. a student of his years ago. people questioned his religion. he is a great churchgoer but it is difficult to see if he believes in an afterlife. he speaks about going into the darkness. he never talks about being in front of god and once about seeing his father. that is about it. that was a long time ago. would that have kept him from suicide or whatever?

if it doesn't it tells you the price he had to pay for his glory. the demons which drove him forward and forward and faster and faster pace all the time to where he was not able at the end even to sign his name. what future did he face, not able to receive visitors or give speeches. he might have had people fooled in 1920 but was he falling himself? if he did resist that temptation, if he did see life through to its natural end, i would argue that in fact was tr's greatest victory in his greatest last war. >> the more surprising thing you learned about tr? >> i think about he could be so down on things because he is

such a dynamo. i was surprised how re-strained wilson was. i knew this from history before. it clicked with me later on. the way he could very callously throw his supporters overboard in 1898, and 1916, that was pretty startling. >> why don't we open up to questions? anyone have a question? >> what influenced you to start writing? >> i don't know. it just sort of happened.

i started out actually i used to do reviews and articles for magazines but in terms of books i actually started out writing books on baseball so it is apt i am here in cooperstown. and then slid into a couple of books which were halfway houses i guess where a book on the first commissioner of baseball which takes you his career in world war i, takes you into that area as he is trying, the first edition at that point, a book on the gambler, arnold rothstein, in new york city. those were transition books he was charged with fixing the 1919 world series. that was the subtitle of the book.

from there, i move into these books on political elections, presidential elections which is what i was trained to do. i sort of felt like a baseball reference, i was trained to be a historian historian and not a baseball historian or anything else and had a ba and a masters and life intervened and years, decades later, why -- what are you going to do? the inspiration was absolute trivia, something called the year of the 6 presidents that became 1920 and subtitle the year of the 6 presidents which talked about how six presidents were in play in 1920 and how tr would have won and fdr, harding who wins, wilson who won the

nomination and sent his secretary of state to arrange it and harding, coolidge and hoover so you have an immense cast of characters and issues and from then on, i was back to my first real love which was presidential history. other kids were playing cowboys and indians in little bottles and stuff and i have these little white statuettes of presidents and you collected them all at the 5 and dime store and i memorized all the facts about them. how i learned to write i haven't a clue. i will say about writing, i will say i told people i am not a very good writer but what i am is a hell of an editor. i edit the hell out of my own material and don't fall in love with your own stuff. my first book was after i wrote

it. what have i done. and and all those words aren't wonderful. i am sure it was more than 25% better. it taught me a lesson. you learn lessons along the way but the more you do it you get better at it. that is all there. >> would you say tr is the first modern president, changed the nature of the presidency in the second half and he is more tuned to what we see in the last 50 years and he was the one who changed the model.

>> i think he is able to do it because his personality in part because he is this patrician hero superhuman figure and he could lead more people to say this is more the way we can do it then william jennings bryan or eugene debs. he issued 1007 executive orders which is the second highest number until franklin roosevelt, a depression and a world war and the dustbowl, all kinds of things. when you get back down to it, tr, and great presidents. and and one of tr's big supporters in the progressive

party, official in connecticut and later a big to buy in the ku klux klan is dustin borglum, the guy who carves mount rushmore. tr is one of his heroes and personal friends. maybe he doesn't fit. but he always wants to carve something of roosevelt's and wants to carve him in a relief. and crossing the george washington bridge, tr on a big horse going out every day. and 1007 executive orders. and and it was about the bridge

falling down. with tr, 1006, he is a fellow who says the constitution doesn't say i can't do it. i can do it which is a radical thought even now but certainly back then these guys, the executive order officer and congress was the most powerful branch for 100 years almost before tr and he really changes it and enables woodrow wilson to carry on and fdr and truman etc. etc.. >> in this time frame did tr have any relationship with owen

d young? >> know. 01d young would be later. and president of general electric. a big industrialist in the 1920s, when that was a big deal. and was mentioned as a dark horse, very near to cooperstown as many of you know. he is from ames, vanhorn's bill. henry j kaiser, a lot of industrialists coming out of the woods. young is mentioned as a dark horse, compromise candidate in 1932, a contemporary of franklin roosevelt more than

tr. probably working -- >> post-world war i european -- >> the young plan helps trigger the rise of adolf hitler. the germans want to restructure debt payment. not only reparations, a lot of money into germany. it has got to be restructured. and very controversial among the german right. and it is the german national people's party.

it was like a german hurst. he has newspapers, he is a big deal. he came out of steel and one of those. the german right is opposed to the young plan and he is really hated. his original name is yung. the nationalists wanted to not only get a reaction to the young plan in their newspapers and movies but they want muscle on the street. who has muscle on the street on the right? it is hitler. this is where some money starts coming in to hitler from the industrialists.

there will be an awkward dance between them. depression gives hitler that bump back to power after he has been in the doldrums. i think we have gone astray from theodore roosevelt but a good a stray. going once, going twice. >> how was the book chosen? besides having a big fan with carver how was it done? how were they chosen? >> i imagine it was boredom. i don't think there was a committee. i'm not that familiar with it. tr certainly, sort of like

janis joplin or jimi hendrix dying, james dean. tr dies almost at the right moment to be selected for rushmore. he is sort of an add-on, because he has been proven right, preparedness. and is wildly popular in that wildly patriotic period of post armistice day. in terms of the selection process for rushmore, that is beyond the scope of my expertise. okay. >> thank you very much for coming. [applause]

>> thank you. we have some books for sale if anyone is interested, no extra charge for autographs. we charge for the autograph, no extra charge for the book. .. >> which part of that phrase matters to them the most. is it angry or black or woman? look for coverage of michelle obama's book tour in the near future on booktv. [inaudible conversations] [applause]