Episode 28: Featured Event with Jonathan Alter

In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers Podcast, journalist and historian Jonathan Alter discusses his latest book, American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial--and My Own, recorded in-store at Watchung Booksellers.

Jonathan Alter is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, also one of the Times’ “Notable Books” of the year. Alter released His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life in 2020.

Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed the HBO documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists,” winning the 2020 Emmy for Best Historical Documentary.

In 2021, Alter launched a newsletter called “OLD GOATS, Ruminating with Friends” devoted to conversations with accomplished people of wisdom and experience.

Books:
A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available here.

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The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ.

The show is edited by Kathryn Counsell and Bree Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Kellenyi and Derek Mattheiss.

Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica.

Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff.

Thanks to all the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids’ Room!

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Transcript

Marni: Hi, welcome back to the Watchung Booksellers podcast, where we bring you conversations from our bookstore's rich community of book professionals who talk about a different aspect of the book world. And if you're new to our podcast, thanks for joining us. I'm Marni and I'm here with my co producer, Kathryn.

Kathryn: Hi, Kathryn. How are you? Hey, I'm great, Marni. Hey, everybody. What are you reading? I just started Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I had actually started the audio book earlier this summer but found there were too many words in French and, and too many things that I sort of needed to actually read. So I picked that back up because Rachel Kushner is coming to Montclair for an event with the Montclair Literary Festival on Thursday, November 21st.

Kathryn: So I'm hopefully going to have a little bit of that. Finished before I get to that event. 

Marni: How about you? I just got my copy for our book club that we have here at the store. It's the 100 best books of the 21st century from the New York Times, a list they published this past summer. And we are about to read book, I believe it's 97, Men We Reap.

Marni: It's a memoir by Jessamyn Ward. And we are going to discuss it on Monday, December 2nd at 7pm. And if you'd like to join us. We'd love to have you and you can register on our website. Fantastic. Excellent. 

Kathryn: Well, today is election day and this is our little reminder to you to go out and vote if you haven't already.

Kathryn: But we thought it would be a good time to bring back journalist Jonathan Alter, who just released a book after watching Trump become the first U. S. president convicted of felony. His book is called American Reckoning. Inside Trump's trial and my own. And he was just in store last week for an event to talk about the book.

Kathryn: And we thought it'd be a good time to share that event with you. 

Marni: Jonathan Alter is the author of three New York Times bestsellers. The Center Holds, Obama and His Enemies, The Promise, President Obama, Year One, and The Defining Moment. FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, also one of the Times Notable Books of the Year.

Marni: In 2020, Alter released his very best, Jimmy Carter, A Life. Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2019, he co produced and co directed the HBO documentary Breslin and Hamill, Deadline Artists. Winning the 2020 Emmy for Best Historical Documentary.

Marni: In 2021, Alter launched a newsletter called Old Goats, ruminating with friends, devoted to conversations with accomplished people of wisdom and experience. 

Kathryn: Enjoy the talk and we'll be back after to fill you in on what's coming up in the store. Thanks

Jonathan: to everybody for coming. It's nice to see old friends here and fellow Montclairians. And I thought I would start by saying I truly don't know. I'm not being coy. I truly don't know who will win. Anybody who tells you that they know is full of shit. It means that they don't know. They either have never actually covered politics or they're jumping to conclusions based on incomplete data.

Jonathan: It's very hard because there are no baselines that can be relied on and, you know, a lot of political analysis when you get into the, deep into the horse race weeds relates to assumptions that pollsters make. And that political analysts make about what happened four years ago. And four years ago we had an anomalous election.

Jonathan: And so most of the baselines that one would use, and are often used in these elections, are not any good. Does that mean the fact that, Republicans are doing better than some expected in early voting is irrelevant, no, but it's also not decisive or dispositive for a lot of reasons that I'm really not the best person to explain, but that I've been reading a lot about in the last few days, but, you know, I genuinely believe that The smartest people I know truly don't know.

Jonathan: And they're not saying that to keep morale up or anything like that. They just don't know. And the Republicans have a kind of a bandwagon effect strategy that they've applied in many prior elections where they think that it's not crazy that people like to be with the winner. And if they think that Their side's going to win, that people will get on the bandwagon.

Jonathan: So, they say that, and you know, my most vivid memory of that was from 2012 when, um, Paul Ryan, the Republican vice presidential candidate on election day, I have this in my second Obama book, The Senate Holds. Bad title, because the Senate didn't hold. Um, Paul Ryan is literally talking about, um, When he should resign his house seat and, you know, to become vice president.

Jonathan: And he's talking like a good chunk of election day was spent talking about that. That's how confident Romney campaign was that they were going to win. And they lost by four points, four or five points. It wasn't, it really wasn't close. And so anyway, I just say that that's not what my book is about, though.

Jonathan: I do have. In a section I call Black Swan Summer, I have the most complete details of how Nancy Pelosi maneuvered Joe Biden off the ticket. The full details Nancy Pelosi told Joe Biden. My source was very close to her. She would take to her grave. She hasn't told anybody. But she, she made this secret trip to the White House around the, uh, about three days after the disastrous June 27th debate and opened a channel to Joe Biden.

Jonathan: And she didn't say, you know, you need to leave or anything like that. She just said, I'm here for you. Your friend, I want to listen to what you're going through. I know this is a hard period. Publicly, she's expressing a lot of support, but then she kind of maneuvered him. And, as her friend told me, she could cut off your head and you wouldn't even know it.

Jonathan: Um, she was, at that time, she was annoyed at the men who she considered to be MIA. The men being Obama, Clinton, Jeffries, and Schumer. And, you know, as we've seen in other cases like, somebody like Liz Cheney, the women often have a lot more balls than the men do when it comes to doing tough things. And this shouldn't have been as tough as it was.

Jonathan: Political parties are meant to win, that's what they were established for in the 1790s, not to respect the decision of the president or, you know, respect his decision to make. Not really. I mean, it was literally his decision to make. But all the pressure, which I in a very small way took part in, I stayed up on the night of the debate, most of the night, writing a pretty fierce New York Times opinion piece saying, okay, let's, let's get this new process going.

Jonathan: He's got to go. It wasn't the first time I'd written that, and it wasn't the last time I'd written that. So there were a lot of people who were doing this, but it almost didn't happen, and in For a while the men were MIA and he wasn't just getting, he just wasn't getting enough pressure. Then Pelosi applied what I call her outside game.

Jonathan: She's playing an inside outside game. And on July 10th, she went on Morning Joe and she said she was waiting for the president's decision about whether he would run again. He'd already made his decision. You know, he said that only God Almighty, you know, could get him to change his mind. But she made it seem as if, like he had, which was a rather brilliant thing for her to say.

Jonathan: And that kind of opened the floodgates, the donors started getting nervous. You saw the George Clooney article. Um, donors were already nervous, but people started to go more public, uh, including on Capitol Hill, with their feeling that he would be a disastrous candidate. But what I learned, because I also had, Very close to the president is that if it wasn't for COVID, he probably would have toughed it out, run out the clock.

Jonathan: They were less than two weeks away from a virtual vote with the delegates, which they needed to do for reasons that related to Ohio election law. And they, um, DNC, the White House, They were all for Lambs to Slaughter. And he would be ten points behind now. Maybe eight, eight points behind if he was on it.

Jonathan: All he had to do was look at this stupid thing he said yesterday, you know, which interrupted Harris momentum. He's just too old. He's a good man. He's But, uh, as Jimmy Carter wrote that earlier book about, said, You should not be president if you're over 80 years old. And he would have been 86 at the end of his second term.

Jonathan: So, anyway, that's a Small portion of the book, but I just wanted to tell you that it is part of it, and I call that section Black Swan Summer, because the conviction of an American president, which starts the story, is a black swan event. Black swan events are rare, seemingly unexpected. But according to Nicholas Taleb, the author of this brilliant book, Black Swan, in retrospect they seem logical.

Jonathan: So in retrospect, Biden being too old to run and as shocking as it was, as much of a Black Swan event as it was, was in some ways should have been predictable. The two classic Black Swan events were 9 11 and Google. So, 9 11 You know, in retrospect, people said we should have been able to connect the dots.

Jonathan: As shocking as it was, we should have known that this could happen. Google, if somebody said to you afterwards, if somebody had said to you earlier, you know, if you could create something, you could ask it any question, it would give you an answer. Will that make a lot of money? You know, should have been yes.

Jonathan: It shouldn't have been that surprising the development of search engines. And I think the same thing goes not just for Biden leaving the ticket, but for the felony conviction of Donald Trump on May 30th, which is one of the most dramatic events I've covered in 40 years of journalism, just sitting as far away as you and I are from this jury foreman going guilty, guilty, guilty.

Jonathan: And then Donald Trump, as he stands up to leave the courtroom, and I can see him just a few feet away, he looks like he took a shot to the solar plexus. He's got pain on his face, which you've never seen before. It's the first time he's been held accountable since his father died. First time anybody could do anything since his father died to make him answer for it.

Jonathan: But in retrospect, We shouldn't have been that surprised at the conviction of Donald Trump, since he's been a one man crime spree for most of his adult life. If you actually go back and look at the record, which I do in this book, um, you know, I sort of toed up some of the other things, even though I'm focused on this trial.

Jonathan: But, The shocking nature of it, which is still, I think, we've become accustomed to the fact and, you know, apparently focus groups don't seem to care that much about his being a convicted felon, or you would, you would hear more about it from Kamala Harris, and it falls into the category of Shocking but not surprising, which has been the way a lot of Trump's actions have been defined.

Jonathan: What struck me, what I write about is, so in all of American history, in 230 Five years. We had, uh, you know, people think of Richard Nixon. He didn't actually have any contact with the criminal justice system because he was, he was pardoned. In 1872, Ulysses Grant got a ticket because he was driving his carriage Too fast on 13th Street in Washington.

Jonathan: And in 1952, Harry Truman got a ticket because he was driving his car too slow on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And that's it. That's it. In terms of precedence. So, Vice Pre Former Vice President Aaron Burr was acquitted of treason, but he was a Vice President. Spiro Agnew had to resign as Vice President.

Jonathan: We've had demagogues before in American history. Hugh Long. Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, they didn't get close to the presidency. Wallace ran three times, he was shot the second time he ran, but even if he hadn't been shot, he wouldn't have been elected president, he wouldn't have gotten a democratic nomination, and he'd already shown that he couldn't win as an independent.

Jonathan: So what's different about this, and many of the grandchildren of Wallace supporters are our MAGA people, is that it is so at war. The center of our politics and that we actually are, it's almost unimaginable, we are quite likely, if Trump wins, if Trump wins I'd say more than quite likely. If Trump wins, we will have an authoritarian form of government instead of a democratic form of government.

Jonathan: He will, um, be emboldened by the Supreme Court decision that says he can't be held responsible for anything that he does. And, um, he's indicated if you Listen to him, not just saying he would suspend the Constitution, quote unquote. Not just saying that he would use the National Guard and even the military against the enemy from within, which he considers to be more dangerous than China or Russia.

Jonathan: So he, he spelled it all out and a lot of voters, I think, are going to vote for him thinking he's not going to do it. But he tried to do it in his first term. And, you know, he was restrained by these guys who now call him a fascist. They heard him say not just that our veterans were suckers and losers, and that Hitler did a lot of good things, but when there were peaceful protesters after George Floyd, he wanted them to shoot him in the legs.

Jonathan: Why can't we shoot him in the legs? And that's just one of many, many reasons. Strongman. Ideas that he had that he could not impose when he was president, but would this time around by all accounts, including that dozens of his former aides were now against it. So we all know it shouldn't be this close, you know, we can have a conversation.

Jonathan: Why it's this close. Honestly, I finished the book in early August and at that time I thought that Harris had such a flawless rollout that I didn't expect it to be this close. It's disappointing to me that it's this close. Disillusioning to me that it's this close and it goes to the title of the book.

Jonathan: So I, I say in the book that there, I basically, there are three reckonings. The first was the reckoning that I mentioned that Donald Trump had on May 30th, and he was called to account actually the judge. It's a very wise judge, Ron Mershon, and it held him accountable earlier. It held him in contempt of court.

Jonathan: Can you imagine another president being held in contempt of court? What a huge story that would be. This wasn't even the biggest story of the day when he was held in contempt of court on 10 counts. It's very dramatic in the courtroom though, when the judge said to him, I will jail you, Mr. Trump, if you, if you do this again, if you violate the protective order, the gag order.

Jonathan: And none of this came through. So people like me, I was writing. Longer pieces for my Substack newsletter and the Washington Monthly, which got me the credential to get in. And short takes in the New York Times opinion section. I write one or two short takes a day. I couldn't begin to convey. The drama of what was taking place in the trial of the century so far, um, which is much more significant than any murder trial or, you know, O.

Jonathan: J. Simpson trial might be more fun, you know, more dramatic in some ways, but certainly not more important. And this had its elements of fun, um, you know, watching Stormy Daniels diss Trump for three straight days and he can't change the channel or, you know, do anything about it. But I think the first reckoning is Trump's reckoning.

Jonathan: Which is a provisional reckoning. If he wins, he'll probably be able to, you know, Glenn, writer in the audience, is a lawyer, he might know this better, but a judge, who I became very friendly with in the trial, who was along with Stephen Colberis, one of the people who blurbed the book, he told me that he thought that if Trump won, they could go into federal court and get an injunction.

Jonathan: Basically, the federal judge would say, you can't have a president of the United States who has this case hanging over him. If he loses, then on November 26th, when I'm going to be in the courtroom again, most people who I trust believe that there's a better than 50 percent chance that Judge Marchand will sentence him to a short time in a country club jail.

Jonathan: And that's what people who have, on these fraud charges, the falsification of business records, which was the charge. If they had, um, if it had been bumped up to a felony, which contrary to a lot of the punditry, it is in many falsification of business records cases. A lot of them got jail time if they didn't cooperate afterward.

Jonathan: And we know that Trump, even though he was the first offender, didn't cooperate, right? And actually went out of his way to raise stupid, trivial objections, just further pissing off the judge. That's what I think would happen if he won. So then we would be lost. We would get A true reckoning when he's sentenced.

Jonathan: The second reckoning is my own reckoning. And the reason I call it Inside Trump's Trial and my own is that I, I think I share the trial that many of you had, the ordeal that many of you have been through over the last seven years, nine years. And so I'm, I, I wrestle with my vision of myself. Um, and I, uh, for many years, I, I, Borrowed John F.

Jonathan: Kennedy's description of himself and adopted it, and JFK described himself as an idealist without illusions. And that's the way I thought of myself, as a skeptical, but not cynical, American journalist who believed in our system of government, believed in the greatness of the presidency. And if any of you, you know, ever want to come by my house on Upper Mountain, it's full of I've got everything about the presidents.

Jonathan: I've got Hez dispenser presidents. I've got busts of a bunch of presidents. I have presidential spoons. I have bottle heads. There's only one president whose likeness is not in our home, which was built in the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, by the way. There's only one. Person I think you can ask who's like, this is not in our home.

Jonathan: So I was sort of wrestling with my reverence for the office, even though I've, I've interviewed nine American presidents either before, during, or after they left office, including Trump many years ago. And in all of those cases, I, as I explained with some of my interactions with, uh, people like Bill Clinton, you know, I've been skeptical.

Jonathan: Journalists who try to ask appropriately challenging questions. But I've revered the office, and what I realized in the last few years is that I had more illusions about the common sense of the American people than I thought I did. And this goes to a point. Story that I tell in the book. In 1998, we were already living in Montclair.

Jonathan: We moved 30 years ago. Our older daughter, Charlotte, who's now a senior correspondent for Time Magazine, and I was at that time working at Newsweek, and she reminded me of this story this year. I'd forgotten to tell her about it. She said, during the Lewinsky scandal, She asked me, can an evil man, can a bad man ever be president?

Jonathan: And I said, well, yes, like Nixon was corrupt and we've had really bad presidents like Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, but, um, there's a kind of a native common sense that the American people have that is part of our heritage. The Tocqueville notice when we came into this country in the 1840s. And so it's not.

Jonathan: really likely. The founders warned that Washington even warned of it in his farewell address, a lesser known part of his farewell address, that a con man would become president and threaten our liberties. But it didn't really seem likely. And it was interesting that she asked me that question in 1998.

Jonathan: And I think one of the reasons I answered it, I didn't connect these until I was writing the book this summer, is that In September of 1998, I had an interesting experience with Bill Clinton, and it was the single most embarrassing day of the American presidency until Trump, um, all day, the The videotape of his grand jury testimony was playing on television.

Jonathan: It had been released, and it was, you know, it did not have sexual intercourse with Monica Lewinsky. There was no, you know, unbelievably explicit details. And I spent the morning analyzing it. For the Today Show, and then NBC had special coverage, and I was there for that. And I'd gotten up early that morning, so when I went up out of downtown to this forum that Clinton was having with Tony Blair, I fell asleep in the forum, I remember.

Jonathan: And then after it, it was about third way politics, you know, in Britain and the United States. Sidney Blumenthal, who was a, a writer who was working for Clinton at the time, and was involved in certain ways in the, in the Lewinsky matter. I ran into him, and he invited me, he said, just tag along, I'm going to a reception now, you know.

Jonathan: And this was pre 9 11, so there wasn't very much security. And when the Secret Service saw that I was talking to Sidney, who they knew on the way in, they didn't like look to see if I had a staff badge, a Clinton staff badge. They just assumed I was staff. And suddenly I'm in this room and there are about 25 people there, none of them journalists.

Jonathan: And it's the Clintons, and Blair actually wasn't there, uh, a bunch of diplomats and a couple of heads of state. And I see Hillary first. She's very unhappy to see me. They hadn't given interviews all year long, right? And, you know, I knew her. Newsweek was a magazine that was torturing the Clintons at the time.

Jonathan: And I had a brief conversation with her where she was polite, but hurt. And we talked about some international issue, I can't remember. And then I see that Clinton is, Bill Clinton is kind of like, giving me like, you know, come on over here, big smile on his face. So I go over to him and I say, uh, so, I say, uh, so, How are you holding up, Mr.

Jonathan: President? And he says, I am doing just fine. This morning at the UN, one of the Latin American presidents came up and whispered to me, Bill, you're lucky. In our country, when they stage a coup d'etat, they use real bullets.

Jonathan: He's kind of unnaturally up. And he says, you know 

what? 

Jonathan: You know what? We're going to do just fine this fall. We're going to do just fine. We're going to do great in midterms. He was right. I mean, normally in the sixth year of a presidency, you, uh, lose seats. In fact, in almost all of them. Every sixth year of a two term president in American history, the party in the White House lost seats.

Jonathan: They didn't in 1998. I guess the public thought that Republicans were going too far. And so he said, you know, if you give the American people enough time and information, they always get it right. I remember I wrote a column about it, and I said, I don't think they always get it right. But they usually get it right.

Jonathan: The thing to remember, though, is the caveat that he said. He's talking about the American people as if it's a woman that he loves or something. Just this enormous reverence for the good sense of the public. And the caveat was with enough information. So that's what's changed. In 1998, I'm not just complaining about this because it was a power loss for people like me.

Jonathan: You know. There were very few national news organizations. The internet was brand new and people weren't really using it for news. And so gatekeepers like me, we had power would be too strong. We had a lot, maybe too much influence. It was good for me, but maybe not so good for the country. We've gone to the other extreme and now everybody has their own information, their own reality, their own siloed sources.

Jonathan: And this was really driven home for me a few days ago when I saw a guy named Maga Cat go up to Senator Mark Kelly and start sort of harassing him, very aggressive and, you know, how can you as a veteran, why aren't you for Trump? Like he says to a Senator in Arizona. And Kelly. Goes on a tear about suckers and losers and, and how Trump is disrespected or war dead, and the guy didn't know any of it.

Jonathan: And he was like, I never heard that. Because he was listening to Right Wing Talk Radio and watching Fox. He had a silo, and I think he was telling the truth. He just literally, never. And at the end of the conversation, this guy in the MAGA hat says very sincerely, you know, Thank you, Senator. I learned some things from this conversation.

Jonathan: And so that I think helps explain why we are where we are right now. And it's not going to be easy to get out of it, even if Harris wins the election. It's, go back to JFK, the way he described the Cold War, it's a long twilight struggle. Over information, over ai, over how we go, how we are going to survive as a, a democratic society.

Jonathan: You know, Lincoln said, um, I'm paraphrasing it without public opinion, you can do nothing with public opinion. You can do everything and you, you have to be able to. Persuade the public. And it's very hard to do that if you're, if you don't have one public. If the public is as fragmented as it is. So that's my own reckoning.

Jonathan: Reckoning with all of that. Reckoning with my disillusionment. And the third reckoning is what's going on right now. The jury, the big, what I call the big jury, is deliberating with early voting. And they will decide, we will decide, and we will decide. Not just who wins, but what kind of people we are, what kind of society we are.

Jonathan: Whether we still believe in the ideals of the founders or not, or we'll, you know, are perfectly willing to give immense power to a man who quite obviously wants to be an American Putin. And we can talk about some of the consequences of that, but this is not a drill. And I think the The question comes back to something that I wrote about in my first book, which was on Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days, and I return to in this book.

Jonathan: In June of 1933, Roosevelt signed the National Recovery Act, and as part of that, um, to build support for it, They distributed millions of decals that were hung in the window of almost every shop in the United States. And a lot of people hung them in their homes. And, um, there was a united effort to try to get out of the Depression.

Jonathan: And the decal had a blue eagle on it, and then underneath it said, We do our part. So the question that we all have is, We do our part. And this is something that I explored in the book, my coming to understand what my part was. And this explains why I wanted to cover this historic trial. So, another president story, in 1988, I really wanted to meet Nixon before he cracked down.

Jonathan: So I made elaborate arrangements for him to come to Newsweek. It was very difficult. He finally came. The Washington Post company was on Newsweek. It drew him out of office, basically. But we were in a rapprochement with Nixon, and I happened to know his aide. Anyway, I got him there. And I asked him, How will history remember Ronald Reagan, who was leaving Columbus?

Jonathan: And he said, I don't know. Well, you have to distinguish between history and the historians. Because the historians are like you. If you're a conservative, you go into business. If you're a liberal, you go into journalism or history. And, thinking back on this, This year, I felt seen by Nixon. A section of the book, of my book, is called Nixon Had My Number.

Jonathan: All that I bring to the party is bearing witness. And that's why I, you know, got up at 5 o'clock in the morning to get in New Jersey Transit in order to get to the courthouse in time and like I, you know, I, Hardly got any sleep and just my family was wondering why do you want to sit in a courtroom with that guy for a month like every day you have to look at him and see if he passes by you eight times a day in and out of the courtroom.

Jonathan: Why do you want to do that? And it was, that's all I got was bearing witness. Other people they can get money, they can go on call tools, which is what I think you all should be doing when you get home tonight. Maybe too late tonight, but tomorrow night, you know, we use. Call tools, you call into battleground states.

Jonathan: Everybody has to figure out what they can do. And I think in the early part of the book, I want to end by trying to explain why I feel so passionate about that. Where my drive to do that comes from. It's not just The agitation that every Democrat feels right now, the intense anxiety. Most Democrats I know aren't sleeping.

Jonathan: It's not just that. It's my whole life experience. And I'm kind of reversing the narrative here because this stuff I'm ending on is the beginning of the book. But my own story. Really starts 10 years, 11 years before I was born. Got my math wrong, 9 years before I was born. Uh, in 1948, when my mother was a student at Mount Holyoke College, and she got the prized assignment of taking Eleanor Roosevelt around campus, the most famous woman in the world, who that year was the author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Jimmy Carter told me he considered to be the second most important.

Jonathan: of the last 250 years, second only to the Constitution. And when the tour was over, Eleanor said, Now where do you live, Joanne? My mother's name was Joanne. Oh, over on the other side of the campus. She said, No, I want to see your dormitory. And so they go over to my mother's dorm, and the most famous woman in the world plops down on her bed and says, Now Joanne, you tell me about yourself and What you're interested in.

Jonathan: Tell me more about the town you're from. She's the first woman in her family to go to college. And what do you want to do to make a better world? And this had a transformative effect on my mother's life. And then she infected my father. Me, with her interest, and my siblings, with her, uh, interest in politics and curiosity that Eleanor had shown toward her, I think is the foundation of why I went into journalism.

Jonathan: But she went on to be the first woman elected in Cook County, which is the Chicago area. They were very involved in the Civil Rights Movement. I, Martin Luther King was in our home when I was eight years old. I got an autograph on, you know, Lyons School third grade paper. Yeah. That, in retrospect, is kind of what set me on my course in life and in my career, but it was an experience my father had, a very common experience, that really drove me in this year.

Jonathan: And that was that in, in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, he was a student at Purdue University And he was having a good time in college. He was, he had a girlfriend who was my mother. He had a convertible, a swell convertible, as they'd say in the 40s. And, uh, yet he went off and he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

Jonathan: And he flew 31 combat missions over Nazi Germany and he was shot down. And I realized that George H. W. Bush Had had the same experience, he enlisted on his 18th birthday, and he was shot down in the Pacific. And I realized to my shame, that in 1988 when I was covering that campaign, and Bush was asked, you know, what were you thinking about when you were in the rescue boat, waiting for the, what eventually became a submarine, picked him up.

Jonathan: Um, and he was trying to make light of it a little bit, you know, he said, Well, I was, I was wondering where my next meal was going to come from. I'm sure what he was really wondering was, am I going to live or die? And I was thinking about Barbara, his fiancée, and I was thinking about the separation of church and state.

Jonathan: And so at that time, I snickered at that, and a lot of other reporters did. Really, he's just trying to say that just because he's going for the evangelical vote doesn't mean that he doesn't still believe in the separation of church and state. Just a political thing. And now I realize, no, it wasn't. That was, maybe, a little bit of that was, but This is a guy who on his 18th birthday went off to fight for democracy.

Jonathan: My father went off to fight to defend democracy. And that raised the question, what am I doing? You know, I don't have to risk my life to fight for democracy. I just have to do what I can to prevent a dictator from taking control. And then pledging that even though this is not the way I want to spend my late 60s and early 70s, I'm not going to be one of those people who goes, okay, I'm going to Canada.

Jonathan: I'm going to France. I'll stay and fight, fight for it after the election if Trump wins. And so You know, I, I end on a hopeful note, because I think there are a lot of other Americans who agree. And that, um, it's true that John McCain, who I got too close to, who's the one politician I got too close to, and he used to like to say, it's, it's always darkest, Just before it's pitch black.

But, 

Jonathan: but then, you know, and with Lincoln. And Lincoln, Lincoln is, is about hope. And, you know, surviving, Troubles that were even worse than our own. And so the American Republic does have an ability to renew itself. And I don't think that Trump, if he is elected, will destroy American democracy, but I think he will deal a serious blow to it that will take us years to recover from.

Jonathan: And I'm not cheering you up, actually I hope not. Hope contains some hope. Thank you so much for your attention.

Marni: Jonathan, for sharing your book with us and for being a part of the podcast again. Listeners, you can find this and any other book Jonathan mentioned in our show notes or at watchungbooksellers. com. 

Kathryn: We've got more events you'll want to join us for in November. Tomorrow, November 6th, we welcome legal expert, Kim Well, to discuss her book, Pardon Power, How the Pardon System Works and Why.

Kathryn: She'll be in conversation with the author. Jessica Henry, author, podcaster, and professor of justice studies at 

Marni: Montclair State. And next Wednesday, November 13th, we're hosting Juliette Grahams, author of The Lost Boy of Santa Chiona, in conversation with our former guest, Mark Rotala, director of the Cochia Institute.

Kathryn: We've got something for everyone this fall, so please check out all of our events in our newsletter, show notes, or at watchungbooksellers. com. 

Marni: The Watchung Booksellers podcast is produced by Kathryn Council and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, New Jersey. The show is edited by Kathryn Council and Bri Testa.

Marni: Special thanks to Timmy Colenny and Derek Mathias. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica. Art and Design and Social Media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and Show Notes by Caroline Schuertleff. Thank you to the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids Room for all their hard work and love of books.

Kathryn: And thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please like, follow, and share it. You can follow us on social media at Watchung Booksellers, and if you have any questions or ideas, you can reach us at wbpodcast at watchungbooksellers. com. 

Marni: We'll see you next time. Until then, for the love of books, keep reading!