Moderator: I am a little embarrassed, because is there anybody in the United States in the country who doesn't know that Carl Bernstein received the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 with Bob Woodward for their investigation of the Watergate scandal. And we have Redwood High School kids here in even they know. He was a copy boy from the Washington Star on November 22nd 1963 when he took dictation from the Washington journalist phoning in details of the assassination of John F Kennedy. At age 28 he was working a Saturday shift at the Washington Post when news came of the break-in at the Watergate hotel, the story that toppled the president. He cowrote two books about the Nixon administration with Bob Woodward, All the President's Men and Final Date. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and was a Washington bureau chief correspondent for ABC news. His new book of course is already a best selling auto- pardon me, not autobiography. I knew I'd blow it somewhere. A best selling biography. He worked on it for seven years, three years over his deadline, and he says it turned out my timing was pretty good. And says he used the same methods for the Hilary book as he did on the Watergate story, knocking on doors and being a good listener. So please welcome not only a good listener but a good speaker Carl Bernstein.
Carl Bernstein: This is such a wonderful book store
Moderator: He's already bought four books.
Carl Bernstein: Not my own. So let's have nice informal evening together. I want to tell you a little bit about this book about 'Life of Hilary Clinton' which might be very surprising in terms of what you know or don't know, we will talk a little bit about reporting, about journalism, and answer questions you might have and sign some books and I am really want you all to read this book. I am not worried about how many have sold, but I want you to read it, because Hilary Clinton is probably the best known woman in the world and yet as she says herself I am a mystery. And here she is on the verge perhaps of being the nominee of the democratic party for President, perhaps the first woman president in the history of this country and most of what we know about her is caricature, and that is the result largely of our knowledge coming from misinformation and disinformation and over of a period of some 20 years has been propagated on the one hand by Hilary and Bill Clinton's enemies and opponents, and on the other hand by her and Clinton's acolytes and true believers. You know the other night I used the word acolytes somewhere, and there was a news story written about it, it went out on one of the network wires and it was spelled ACK-O-LIGHT, You all who want to grow up and be journalists, you never fail to be surprised in this business. "Ack-o-lights." But so much of what we know has has been distorted by these accounts both from the true believers and the enemies and Hilary Clinton herself is contributed to some of these caricature by her own autobiographical attempts, one you she takes village to her memo or moving history not to those works are intentionally misleading but rather they are largely political documents with specific purposes especially Living History which is partly intended to make an easy transition into being a presidential candidate and leaving a lot of the past behind and and saying well now I have explained it all, but air brushed partly because she is a woman with a very guarded sense of her own privacy, who has been hurt and humiliated and does not like others to interpret her story and also that she very much is someone which is very surprising for someone as religious as she is and I will talk about her religious aspect in a minute. She is not someone really given to introspection and yet her story which we know from caricature perhaps, it is so compelling, so fascinating, and so different than this mythic version whether coming from enemies or acolytes. That its is really incredible that here after she has been in public life so long our picture of her is so distorted. And so what I set out to do, when I started on this book some seven seven and a half years ago, and my timing obviously turned out to be fortuitous not just in terms of when the book came out, but when I started. Because the book is largely based on interviewing couple of hundred people, many of them four, five, six, seven times, most of them are on the record and on the record because when I started talking to them it was just after the impeachment of Bill Clinton, just after Hillary Clinton had started had decided to run for the senate, and at the time people were much more candid than they would be now as she edges towards the presidency, and these are the people who know her best and in every period of her life from childhood to the present. And the reason that I decided to do the biography of Hilary Clinton was one the fact that I- I had an awareness that there really hadn't been the kind of reporting about her that deserved to be done. So my objective here was to do what good biography, good reporting always is and that's the best attainable version of truth, and the methodology for that is not much different you can see in All the President's Men and as that that lovely introduction of me indicated is about a kind of persistence and being a good listener. I'm somebody who believes that that too many journalists are lousy listeners. My experience has been over the course of some well I was 16 when I went to work at the Washington Star, so now - so I am 63 now, so it's a long time, but my experience is always been the people really want to tell you the truth if you give them a chance and that and most journalists are not very good listeners if they come in with a preconceived notion of what the story is and they then try to move their questioning in that direction. Very often they are in a hurry to get the answers they think they want, it will fit this preconceived notion of story and then they are out of there. My experience has been almost every story I have ever done, that my preconcieved notion has turned out to be wrong. I mean look at Watergate I mean in the first day of the break-in of in Watergate I got on the phone, I talked to to wives of some of the burglars down in Florida their wives I learned that almost all of them all of them that I talk to, their husbands had some kind of CIA connections they had done some work with CIA's so my immediate thought was, and I started looking to see how this could be connected to CIA. It could probably this was going to be a CIA operation of some kind, I couldn't understand why would this probably - of course it wasn't. But my methodology were simply to see where when I talk to the people the information will take me and and what they would say. And by being open minded I have always been surprised no matter what the story. Its one of the first surprises in my reporting on this book, I was sitting and having breakfast in a in a hotel restaurant with Donna Shalala who had been hand picked by Hilary Clinton to be Bill Clinton's secretary of Health and Human Services, and Shalala said to me, you know, I begged Bill Clinton not to appoint Hilary to be the head of healthcare. I told him that she didn't have enough experience and that if she screwed it up he couldn't fire her. And Lloyd Bensen felt the same way, the secretary and the treasury. So I went and talked to Lloyed Bensen and Bensen said yes all of economic advisers, Bob Reuben, all of us thought this was a really bad idea. So right way here has been, you know, for years nobody has known that the people most concerned in the Clinton presidency with the health care dilemma in terms of its funding, in terms of it application including Donna Shalala who was hand hand picked by Hilary for her job who had been Hilary's friend for all these years who served on boards and neighborhood league services program, and all kinds of things. Here was this great secret and a great surprise if there had not been confidence in her in the first place. For this huge task that she undertaken, but Bill Clinton have more trust in her than anyone else and also what she wanted to do. And she of course was probably more responsible for the election of Bill Clinton if you remember back in what happened in 92 campaigns which she really took over at a certain point, and ran, than any other person. So what I am suggesting to you is that you go where these facts take you and so I decided I wanted to do a book about Hilary Clinton right after the impeachment, because everybody involved in in this crazy tale of the impeachment which is have been diminished in measure the president of United States Office. The Supreme Court which will allow the Paula Jones case to go forward on the spurious grounds that the sitting president had plenty of time to deal with a civil lawsuit, you know, outrageous decision. The special prosecutor who would be appointed in one of the things you see in this book is the pernicious influence of the Chief Justice in United States, William Rehnquist. And appointing this special prosecutor in picking Ken Starr for the job through his surrogate which is to say that Rehnquist appointed the so called special delegation on Court of appeals that pick the special prosecutor, his attitudes towards the Clintons and of course he is rather giddy presiding over Bill Clinton's trial in the senate, where the Chief Justice design his own robes for the occasion with gold flourishes on his on on the arms and he had taken his design appropriately enough from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. But everybody was diminished, the congress in the United States, the republicans in congress who persuade enrichment and initiated it, most of those who were those who pushed and initiated it the hardest now gone from the congress because of their own sexual hypocrisy. The press diminished because of its coverage of the Clinton years in particularly of the Lewinsky story with little or almost no attention into very with in the game on the investigation on the special prosecutor which in itself was a travesty - what are we got here somebody is stealing books, arrest that person, especially if it's my book. So but what are really interesting me was Hilary because Hilary Clinton was the only person involved whose stature was enhanced by what happened in the impeachment, what happened in the Lewinsky period in the White House. And that she had decided that the only way that the Clinton presidency and Clintons legacy and her own contributions and her own life really that she had spent in service to this joint enterprise that she and Bill had embarked on for all these years together since they met at Yale Law school with the only way that that could be redeemed was if she sought office herself something she had never wanted to do despite all the mythology and all talk you hear about and ambition in the in a pejorative way that he might never hear about a male politician. And I think that that one of the reasons that the reviews for this book have been so extraordinary really humbling I must say, is because of this notion of the best attainable version and the truth and and that if it is balanced and judicious and fair and I think most of the reviewers many of them had said it's sympathetic to Hilary Clinton and at its same time pulls no punches, I think I would prefer the word empathic in the sense that after you get through the narrative you tend I think you understand this woman. I had wonderful experience on the plane the other day, a guy came up to me and said look I got to tell you my wife read your book, she hated Hilary Clinton and she says she still would never vote for her, but now she think she understands, that's about all you can hope for it seems to me as an author. And and that that if there is ever been someone who is been difficult to understand and has given us very little help in understanding her is Hilary Hilary Clinton. So I was fascinated by his notion that in seeking to redeem her herself, her husband's presidency, or their presidency because it was a co- presidency to a large extent, that she single handedly has brought about as we can now see in something that could not have been imagined can you imagine if I had said the day that I decided to do this book, that I would be in Marin county in 2007 and Hilary Clinton after you know, having started on this book in a period where it looked like the Clinton's presidency would be regarded in ignominy, perhaps in perpetuity, and it now both of them are on the way back to the White House perhaps in a kind of restoration that George W Bush who was going to campaign against Al-Gore who would win the presidency partly by saying he was going to end the sleaze as he put it, of the Clintons plural and it now we would be here having this discussion about this book, about a woman for the first time in charge of her own life to a degree that she never has been since she had gone to Arkansas and decided to be with Bill Clinton. So it's a remarkable tale. And one of the first people I went to talk to was a mutual friend, and the Clintons and I have many mutual friends. And I should add that I didn't come to this project with antipathy and I didn't come to it with anything but open mindedness, but among the people who answered Hillary's mail at the white house for eight years there's a group of senior citizens that did it, was my mother, who told me not a damn thing. And, but we have a lot of friends in common, the Clintons and myself. And I went to one of them and I said I want to do this biography on Hillary Clinton. And this friend said, you know if you're going to really do this you have to start with her Methodism. And I said what! And I knew she was Methodist, the person said look, religion is really the beginning of understanding Hillary Clinton. And it turns out that the keys, the foundations of Hillary Clinton's life are family and religion. And beginning and in terms of family it takes a weird course because her father was a sour, unfulfilled man, a martinet who verbally abused and demeaned and humiliated his wife, one of the people I spent the most time with was Betsy Johnson Evelyn, who is Hillary's closest friend from childhood, remains a terribly close friend, spent a lot of time at the White House visiting, and she is, when they were in the sixth and seventh and eighth grades together, Betsy would be one of the few friends that Hillary would bring home to dinner and they'd be sitting around the dinner table, Hillary and her two brothers and her father and her mother. And her father who was extremely provocative as well as misanthropic, would throw out a topic for conversation kind of like a glove on a table, usually provocative, and discussion would begin and the brothers and father and Hillary would participate, and her mother would try to say something and her father would say, what do you know miss smarty-pants? What are you talking about? Who ever thought that you would know something about this kind of thing? And it was really ugly. And I talked to Hillary's first boyfriend from college, Jeff Shields, who gave me some incredible letters that Hillary had written to him and you really see a kind of romantic Hillary that you would never expect to see, writing about a field of daffodils that she imagined as a cathedral. Young woman in love, remarkable letters that are quoted in the book. Jeff shields said, you know I went home to visit Hillary's parents with her and the first thing that occurred to me was how did this woman, her mother, and why did her mother stay with this man who demeaned her so often and who was such a tough customer. So, right away in reviews have all said that this is not a psychobiography, it's not. And one of the wonderful things that you get to do as a biographer is you lay out the story on the page and do the narrative based on all this reporting that you've done, best attainable version of the truth, and when you do you start to see streams and themes and continuity in a life that you might not have even known were there when you first did the interviews. I mean it's sort of like what John said about writing. That writers write to find out what they really think. And when I write and when I get it down on a page, whether it's a story that Bob and I did about finally said Watergate break-in was just part of a vast campaign of political espionage and sabotage conducted by the Nixon apparatus against their democratic opponents, for the first time Watergate made sense, it wasn't just a little break-in. How you get to that point, you've got all this information, but as you're writing it it becomes, it's like, now of course it's all done digitally, but it's like a picture used to be built. You put in, we used to call it, a developer, and it would come up and it would come in, start light and come into focus, and it would have all these surprising elements that you didn't know were there. And you see this, and you don't have to be a Soprano family shrink to start to see how some of the things in Hillary's childhood would figure into her later life. Including her mother telling her children over and over and one of the people I talked to at great length is a woman named Nicole Boxer who is daughter of your senator who was married to Hillary's brother Tony. And Nicole and tony lived in the White House during the Lewinsky period and were undergoing their own troubles. And Dorothy Rodham, Hillary's mother was also living a good deal of the time at the White House. And as she had done with Hillary when Hillary was younger and she did with Nicole Boxer and her husband Tony Rodham, Dorothy Rodham says you don't get divorced in this family. You work on it, you get counseling. You do whatever you can. And then said Dorothy Rodham had been abandoned by her own parents as a child, her parents were both teenagers, her mother was about 16 or 17 when she was born. She'd been abandoned and sent to live kind of with these draconian set of grandparents out in California who regarded her and her sister as sort of indentured servants, and had a really terrible life until she met Hugh Rodham, and Dorothy has said and Hillary has since written herself, children are like little boats, and when you divorce they get swamped in turbulent seas. And there were all these hints that you see early on through Hillary's parents once the narrative is laid out as it is in A Woman In Charge of what this life is, and we also get this first sense that I didn't realize, even until I had read the book through after it was written, of how stunning the Hillary's fear of embarrassment and humiliation is at many key points in her life beginning in childhood. And to the point where friends aren't brought home sometimes because of what the domestic situation was like in her house and her father was somebody who kind of, he had been a drill instructor in world war two and he ran the house like boot camp. He'd sit in the recliner and give orders to the kids and he was penurious to the extreme, though he made a good deal of money, upper class, upper middle class non-professional in a suburb of Chicago, not a fancy north shore suburb, Park Ridge, but upper middle class he had a drapery and wallpaper business. He manufactured and sewed himself drapes, liked to buy Cadillacs and Lincolns and show the progress, the economic progress he had made, chew tobacco and spit it out the open window, he was a rock-rib Goldwater-Taft republican, and Hillary was a Goldwater girl, up until, even as she went to Wellesley, she still had her copy of Conscience of a Conservative and her, along with her Peter Pan skirts when she arrived at Wellesley. But this theme of humiliation and secrets and uh, secrets, is through her life. And one of the great secrets Hillary finally revealed, and I think if there's a rosebud moment in her life this might be it, she revealed, and there are lots of hints in Living History, and the one that I took away more than anything as a giveaway was a throwaway sentence in there saying that she had failed the District of Columbia bar exam, one sentence, and taken the Arkansas exam and passed, and that that perhaps was telling her something, and that was when she left Washington after the impeachment of Richard Nixon, she had been on a really up and coming lawyer on the impeachment committee staff, she left Washington where she had been interviewing for jobs in Washington law firms and followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, her closest friends from law school, women particularly told her don't do it, couldn't understand why she was doing it, and she would say I'm loving it. And this is also a story of a love affair, anybody who tells you the Clinton marriage is some kind of marriage of convenience, and that it's about all power, some such nonsense, clearly knows none of the reality of the story because these are two people who fell in love in law school, he has been a constant of her process for some 30 years, she has been a constant of his process for 30 years, each looks at the other as the brightest star in their constellation. And even though, I guess the headlines about my book a lot of them were about the fact that the book reveals that Bill had wanted to leave the marriage in 1989 because he thought he had fallen in love with another woman, a business woman in Arkansas, and Hillary Clinton and Betsy Wright, his chief of staff in the Arkansas years, keeper of the secrets of the presidential campaigns, Hillary wouldn't give him a pass out of the marriage. She wanted him to stay in the marriage and they'd work at it. And eventually he decided that's what they would do. But, so this has never been some kind of marriage of convenience. But Hillary Clinton has been throughout her life knocked down, picked herself up, moved forward, evolved, somebody said to me that on January 20th 2001 the day that the Bushes, George W and Laura moved into the White House as the Clintons were leaving, somebody said to me who had worked with the Clintons, you know, Bill Clinton emotionally is still the same guy that got off the boat after Oxford. You wouldn't say that about Hillary. She's somebody that has always evolved. She's had more real life experience than Bill Clinton. She worked up in Alaska sliming fish, taking salmon guts out of fish in a canning factory one summer in college. She played Martha in Virginia Woolf. And another very interesting thing is, there's always been this talk of, Hillary Clinton is not easily identifiable in terms of ideology, she's always rejected radicalism, and yet she's always been fascinated by radicalism. She did her senior thesis at Wellesley on Saul Alinsky, the great Chicago community radical organizer. It had been under lock and key and I was able to get one out of lock and key and read it. And amazingly, given what had always been said about there being some evidence of her radicalism or supposed radicalism, what she said in the thesis was that Alinsky's methodology didn't work. And just as she had said to her boyfriend Jeff Shields in college, you can't get anywhere politically unless you win. She thought that Alinsky's methodology was not sufficiently funded. It didn't have sufficient funding to really give power to the poor and that government funding was needed for real progress in cities if we were going to eliminate and deal with the problems of endemic poverty in this country. Though later she said while the thesis was still under wraps, that she had actually argued the opposite, that she was against Alinsky's campaign and that she had always been against government funding, big government funding programs, and this gets to another aspect of her life that I say in the last chapter that Hillary Clinton has had a difficult relationship to the truth. But again when you see the story of her life in context you begin to see a particularly these problems of truth telling, you begin to see things in a little bit different context. You being to see it in the context of an out of control prosecutor for instance who her lawyer told me you know, for two years Hillary got up and she was terrified that she was going to be indicted. She had come to Washington, her husband was elected president, she was trying to do good works, and she thought she was going to be indicted. And as the lawyer said, she was not forthcoming in many ways. But you begin to see this in different context. And also, almost always, the stretching or hiding of truth or context is about embarrassment. And if you go back to and particularly something like the commodities trades, I talked to Jim Blair, Diane Blair was the closest friend of Hillary's life. I talked to her, she died in 2000, wonderful woman, and I talked to her at great length and I talked to her husband Jim Blair at great length, great friend of Bill Clinton and Hillary's, Hillary was best person at their marriage, wore a tuxedo. But Jim Blair did the commodities trading for Hillary and of course in the '92 campaign Hillary had refused to allow the release of her tax returns to the press. And usually candidates do release it, well why was that? Well I suppose it would have shown, in all likelihood, it would have shown this 100,000 dollar profit she had made on a thousand dollar investment less than a year trading cattle futures, livestock futures on little cows yet born, to which she claimed afterwards that she had expertise. That her father taught her to read stock tables in the Chicago Tribune. Well her father had taught her to read stock tables in the Chicago Tribune, but he hadn't taught her a damn thing about cattle futures. And what Jim Blair explained to me had happened was, and it's a hilarious tale, especially after he explained it to me through his own words, is that he, an amazing man, had gone to divinity school and refused to be ordained as a southern Baptist preacher because the church didn't want black people. Had become the state's most successful lawyer, represented the poultry interest in the state of Arkansas, but had moved away from the law because he had been so successful in the stock market making tens of millions of dollars and then came this futures bonanza that he got into and he opened accounts for his friends, for his wife, for his stepchildren, for his law partners, and as he said to me, and then I did the dumbest damn thing I ever did in my life, I opened an account for Hillary. And what happened with this was he was trading in huge amounts of money, and his broker was a guy named Red bone, and Red Bone was a character who had had troubles with the SEC over the years and but Red Bone also knew that Jim Blair was good for any money that might be lost on the table on day because he had so much money in play so he didn't subject him to margin costs. Now that meant Hillary wasn't subjected to margin costs. Now you or I would have been wiped out in a day about 16 times, as would Hillary if you looked at her account, but there were no margin costs. So again, fear of embarrassment, but in this case the embarrassment also has political implications because Bill Clinton was running for governor, moving toward the presidency. Hillary who has given up her own career in terms of to move to Arkansas, she had hoped that Bill would win a seat in congress and they would go to Washington where she could pursue a career as a child advocate lawyer, but instead she ended up practicing small time law in Little rock which is another embarrassment. If you look at the billing records, those instruments that moved around town in Washington as if by poltergeist, what they show is that she was doing a kind of small time lawyering that you would see in a state capital with some conflicts of interest, uh, and a lot of the work was being done by a young associate. She was clearly there because she could bring in accounts because her husband was the governor, it was embarrassing. And yet she also was doing great things on behalf of children, she had saved herself, she had been appointed by Jimmy Carter to head the neighborhood legal service program in this country which provides legal aid for poor people and the republicans had tried to decimate, but again fear of embarrassment. And what's so important about the other women, Bill Clinton's other women is Hillary's role. And the book doesn't talk about who they are and sex, but what it does talk about is what it did to Hillary. Because many of us in the seventies, the early seventies and even the late sixties knew about Bill Clinton was that he was perhaps the greatest most dazzling young politician of our generation. But Hillary who had married him knew about as she called it, his sexual compulsions, and those compulsions if not contained, and if they became known and their effect became known and the spread of them became known and not contained would render him politically unviable, untenable. So through Betsy Wright, who is probably the person I spent the most time talking to on this book who had been the chief of staff put in the job by Hillary, Uh, Hillary began to be the one who insisted that lawyers be hired, detectives be hired, women investigated, and that these sexual compulsions and their effect be contained and covered. Fear of embarrassment. And it became more and more consuming task as we know. The point where I was sitting one day with Web Hubbell, there were three law partners who called themselves the three musketeers, Hillary, Vince Foster who as Web Hubbell told me, Hillary and Vince Foster were closer than lovers. There's been a lot of talk if they had an affair. I know of no one who knows, but they were closer than lovers. And when a lawsuit was filed by the Clintons enemies in Arkansas, alleging that there was a slush fund in the governor's office used to entertain women, and it inferred to five particular women had been entertained by the government, Hillary had the Rose law firm hired to represent the five women. And she and Vince foster and Webb Hubbell, as Hubbell told me, sat and interrogated the five women, got their affidavits that they had not had sexual relations with Bill Clinton, uh, imagine at a certain point what this might do emotionally to Hillary Clinton. And that's the important thing. And you go back to this moment that I call the Rosebud moment where she reveals in her book that she failed the D.C. bar exam. So I went back and I got the records from the District of Columbia bar and about 700 people had taken the bar that day, and she was the only Yale law school graduate, whoa, lock him up! She was the only Yale law graduate who had failed the bar that day out of 700. Here she is, she had gone off to Wellesley, gone to Yale law school, had been fabulously successful as a student to the point where she was celebrated in Life magazine, gave the commencement address, was on television, had been chosen by the league of women voters as the spokeswoman for her generation, had gone to Yale law school and started a law review that was a counter law review about men using the law as a social instrument in the tradition of Thurgood Marshall and other great lawyers, and she failed the bar exam. Now lots of great lawyers have failed the bar exam the first time and gone on to become judges and perhaps justices of the supreme court, but she never took it again. And she never told anybody. So I read this and I went to Webb Hubbell and I said did you know Hillary failed the bar exam in D.C.? He said no, that's impossible. I said no she did. She wrote it herself in her book. And I went to Nancy Beckoveck who was the Clintons closest friend in Yale law school and remains their closest friend from Yale Law School. Nancy, did you know Hillary failed the bar exam? Come on, that couldn't have happened. I went, no, she told nobody as far as I can tell except Bill Clinton that she failed the bar exam. Fear of embarrassment. But that decision she never went back to take it again and she said she wanted to be in Washington and she wanted to be in a Washington law firm, that that was what she wanted to do perhaps, but she never pursued it. So, there are all these surprises in this amazing life and where you really see her as a woman in charge is at Wellesley, where she becomes the student body president. But you don't see her in charge of much when she goes to Arkansas. And then in the senate when she is elected, she no longer is pulling the Clinton train for both of them, then you see again her becoming a woman in charge. And I'm leaving out huge parts of the story, but Doris Goodwin told me how the election of the Newt Gingrich congress in 1994 is largely the result of the failure of health care and the perception of some people in this country of ethical pall in the Clinton White House that Hillary was responsible for they believe, and this is a tectonic shift in our politics. So here you have her then becoming damaged goods really for the next four years in the White House. Yet she emerges from the impeachment runs for the senate and for the first time in her life since Wellesley her friends see a kind of self confidence and contentedness that I think you see in her life now. Her self assurance, sense of humor, somebody who is one of the top three or four aides to both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House said to me in the White House years that you know, she was, he thought that she had always been an angry person. Never content. You wouldn't say that today. How did that happen? And the tale these last years had also a fascinating one. So what I'm trying to get at is I want you to read this book! You don't like it, I'll give you your money back. Serious. You know why, we need to know who this person is. You need to know, if we had had a real biography of George Bush in the year 2000 I don't think he'd be president. If we are going to knowingly and meaningfully debate who this woman is and whether she should be president, and if you are going to vote for or against her, you ought to have, it ought to be about your values weighed against who she is and what her life has been and what's real and what's not, and that's what this book is and that's what the best attainable version of the truth is about. So I really want you to read this book, I'm going to answer some questions for a few minutes, then I gather the drill here is I'll sit up here and sign your books, and I hope each of you comes up here and also you might take a look at my website, carlbernstein.com, there's some pieces I've written on it about the Bush and the Nixon administrations, and the true catastrophe of this presidency and how the system has failed in the Bush years the way it did not do in the Nixon years. But take a look at it, but get this book and what questions might you have, thank you.
