Ron Liebman and Tim Baker are former assistant U.S. attorneys who were part of the prosecution team that brought down Vice President Spiro Agnew on October 10, 1973. On that day, Mr. Agnew appeared before the federal court in Baltimore and pleaded "no contest" to one felony charge for tax evasion in 1967. Messrs. Liebman and Baker talked about their role as the case unfolded. Agnew was fined $10,000 and placed on three years of unsupervised probation. This conversation was originally recorded in...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Terence Smith's media career went from the Stamford Advocate the New York Times, then to CBS News, and finally the PBS Newshour. In his short memoir of his working life, titled "Four Wars, Five Presidents," Terrence Smith writes: "There is a great deal of hand-wringing these days about the news business. Young people don’t read, don’t know anything beyond what they see on their screen, and don’t see the value of independent knowledge as long as they have Google and can look it up. The sky, we ar...
Aug 23, 2022•1 hr 2 min
David Kertzer has studied and written about Italy, the Catholic Church, Nazism, communism, and fascism for over 40 years. His latest of 13 books is about the secret history of Pope Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler. It's titled "The Pope at War." In 2020, Pius XII's archives were finally open in the Vatican. Brown University professor Kertzer, according to Random House, his publisher, "paints a new, dramatic portrait of what the pope did and did not do as war enveloped the continent and as the Naz...
Aug 16, 2022•1 hr 11 min
In the history of Pulitzer Prizes and the Oscars, very few winners have turned down these awards. One of those who did was a famous Armenian-American, a writer from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. His name was William Saroyan. He turned down the Pulitzer for the drama called "The Time of Your Life" in 1940. Saroyan said he was opposed in principle to awards in the arts and was quoted as saying "such arts awards vitiate and embarrass art at its very source." His son Aram, a well-known poet in his own ri...
Aug 09, 2022•1 hr 14 min
In the heart of Washington, DC, is a unique place for kids. It's called the Little Blue House. For 31 years, it's been the first love of its director, a man named Carl Foster. On the website of the Little Blue House, it says that there is a single core mission: "to foster the development of vulnerable and at-risk children and youth in the District in a safe, stable, and healthy environment." Carl Foster, a Vietnam War veteran, says that for over 30 years, the Little Blue House "has provided what...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 6 min
"Americans react to homeless with a mix of anger, compassion, perplexity, and frustration. Little progress ever seems to be made." Those are the thoughts of Stephen Eide, from his book "Homelessness in America." Mr. Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute with a PhD in political philosophy from Boston College. He focuses a good deal of the 151-page book on the housing issue. In Chapter 11 he suggests: "When housing is all that anyone debates, nothing winds up getting done about public...
Jul 26, 2022•1 hr 5 min
New York Times reporter David Gelles claims in his latest book that legendary General Electric CEO Jack Welch is the root of all that's wrong with capitalism today. The title of his book is "The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America – And How to Undo His Legacy." Mr. Gelles says while Welch made G.E. the most valuable company on Earth, his strategies ultimately destroyed what he loved so dearly. Learn more about your ad choices. V...
Jul 19, 2022•59 min
Lance Morrow is an author, writer, and essayist. He joined Time magazine in 1965. During his time there, Morrow covered the Detroit riots, the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration, and the Watergate scandal. In 1976 he became a regular writer of essays for Time magazine and wrote more "Man of the Year" cover articles than any other reporter. From 1996 to 2006, he was a professor at Boston University. His several books include "Evil: An Investigation," "God and Mammon," and his latest, "The Nois...
Jul 12, 2022•58 min
According to Beverley Driver Eddy, little has been written about Camp Ritchie, Maryland. Dickinson College retired professor Eddy says in her book "Ritchie Boy Secrets" that on June 19, 1942, the U.S. Army opened a secret military intelligence training center. Over the next four years, it produced some 20,000 graduates, intelligence and language specialists, for service in World War Two. Some of the famous names of men who were Ritchie Boys include J.D. Salinger, former senators John Chafee and ...
Jul 05, 2022•1 hr 3 min
At least 6 U.S. Presidents recorded conversations while in office. Hear those conversations on this C-SPAN podcast. Season 2 focuses on President Richard Nixon's secretly-recorded private telephone conversations. Through eight episodes, hear Richard Nixon talk with key aides about Watergate strategy, potential Supreme Court Nominees, and hear his reaction to the leaked publication of the Pentagon Papers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 01, 2022•2 min
Historian Thomas Kidd, a professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in St. Louis, opens his newest book, "Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh," this way: "This is a biography of a brilliant but troubled person. Thomas Jefferson would seem to need no introduction, yet among the Founding Fathers he is the greatest enigma – and the greatest source of controversy." Professor Kidd also writes that "Jefferson left a massive collection of carefully curated papers, but he seems v...
Jun 28, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Elizabethtown College professor David S. Brown is the author of a new book on former president Andrew Jackson. Professor Brown writes that Jackson was the first president to be born in a log cabin, to live beyond the Appalachians, and to rule, so he swore, in the name of the people. The title of the book is "The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson." He was president for two terms, eight years, from 1829-1837. Jackson, in his lifetime, was a jurist, a general, a congressman, a sena...
Jun 21, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Booknotes the television program started in April of 1989. Our third guest was journalist Bruce Oudes. His book was titled "From: The President-Richard Nixon's Secret Files." Because the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in is on June 17th, Booknotes+ is revisiting Mr. Oudes' book, which contains over 600 pages of previously unreleased memoranda from Richard Nixon and aides during the six years of his presidency. Bruce Oudes took a deep dive into over 3.5 million pages of material that wer...
Jun 14, 2022•55 min
Any follower of C-SPAN knows the name Harold Holzer, a lifelong aficionado and chronicler of Abraham Lincoln. He has either written or edited fifty-four books on America's 16th president. President Lincoln has been Mr. Holzer's avocation over these many years while he maintained full-time work and responsibilities for twenty-three of those years as senior vice president for public affairs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He currently serves as director of Hunter College's Roos...
Jun 07, 2022•1 hr 25 min
Not a day goes by that Russia is not in the news, especially since the February 24th invasion of Ukraine. In the history of Russia, one of the most familiar figures, especially in the world of writing and writers, is Leo Tolstoy. He's best known for two novels, "War & Peace" (1869) and "Anna Karenina" (1878). He lived for 82 years, had 13 children, was married for 48 years, and left his wife just before he died in 1910. We asked University of Virginia professor Andrew Kaufman, author of two ...
May 31, 2022•59 min
Professor Olivier Zunz has been a professor of history at the University of Virginia since 1979. He was born and raised in France and received his Ph.D. from Pantheon Sorbonne University in Paris in 1977. Alexis de Tocqueville (TOKE-vihl) was also a Frenchman. At 25, Tocqueville traveled throughout the United States for nine months and recorded his experiences in the well-known 1835 book "Democracy in America." Professor Zunz has just published the newest book on Tocqueville titled "The Man Who ...
May 24, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Joe Madison has hosted a radio talk show for over 40 years. He's known to his audience as the "Black Eagle" and can be heard daily on SiriusXM radio. A native of Dayton, Ohio, and a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Mr. Madison started his professional life as an activist. One of his first jobs was working for the NAACP as political director under the leadership of Ben Hooks. Joe Madison angered both his allies and adversaries when he organized a boycott against Dearborn, Michigan,...
May 17, 2022•1 hr 22 min
Megan McArdle has been a columnist for the Washington Post since 2018. She has described herself as a right-leaning libertarian. At the same time, she says she's actually a social liberal. Megan McArdle graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in English literature in 1994 and worked for several start-ups before getting an MBA from the University of Chicago. She started her professional writing career as a blogger in November 2001. Since then, Ms. McArdle has written for the E...
May 10, 2022•1 hr 6 min
The book is called "Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War." The author is Deborah Cohen, a professor at Northwestern University. Prof. Cohen primarily focuses on four American journalists who traveled the world in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s: H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent "Jimmy" Sheean, Dorothy Thompson, and John Gunther. These reporters landed exclusive interviews with Hitler, Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi and helped shape what Americans at the time knew about the w...
May 03, 2022•1 hr 7 min
For the past twenty years, Dr. Thomas Fisher has worked in the emergency department at the University of Chicago Medical Center, serving the same South Side community in which he was raised. During the past two years of COVID-19, he decided to write about his experience in a large urban hospital emergency room. He says that at the end of a shift he was haunted by the confusion in the eyes of his patients. He asks a couple of questions that they probably are thinking: Who is this man treating the...
Apr 26, 2022•1 hr 7 min
In Jeffrey Frank's recent book titled "The Trials of Harry S. Truman," he reports that at his low point in his time as president, Truman's popularity rating was at 16 percent. However, seventy years later, according to the latest C-SPAN survey, he was ranked sixth most effective of 44 U.S. presidents. Jeffrey Frank, whose career includes professional years at the Washington Post and the New Yorker magazine, has written the first full account of the Truman presidency in nearly 30 years. The book'...
Apr 19, 2022•1 hr 5 min
The book is titled "The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy." The author is Christopher Leonard, the current director of the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. On the dust jacket of the book it says: "If you ask most people what forces led to today's income inequality and financial crashes, no one would say the Federal Reserve." Christopher Leonard explains why so few people understand the language or inner workings of h...
Apr 12, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Emma Camp is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, home of Thomas Jefferson. She calls herself a liberal and has written opinion pieces for the school newspaper, The Cavalier Daily. Back in October of 2020, Ms. Camp had some strong things to say about the First Amendment. She wrote that: "The first amendment does not exist to protect reasonable opinions — it exists to protect the unreasonable, the offensive, and the unpopular." In March of 2022, she moved her opi...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr
The list is long and, to a lot of people, confusing. We're talking about the language of money. How would you do if you had to define the following: stocks, bonds, private equity, index funds, leveraged buyouts, venture capital, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds, just to name a few. We asked Jeffrey Hooke, author of "The Myth of Private Equity," to give us some help in understanding the world of investment and finance. Mr. Hooke is a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins Business School and has ...
Mar 29, 2022•1 hr 6 min
During his 40 years in the political science department at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer has not avoided controversy. His article and subsequent book about the Israel lobby, for example, written with Harvard University's Stephen Walt, caused a stir in 2006 and 2007. More recently, at the beginning of March 2022, the New Yorker ran a headline that read: "Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine." We asked Prof. Mearsheimer to explain that and talked to him abou...
Mar 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min
In the dedication of his book, "The Heart of Caring," Dr. Mark Vonnegut tells his patients, teachers, and parents everywhere, "Thank you for letting me have such a good time when I go to work." Dr. Vonnegut is a pediatrician who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1979. This was after he had been diagnosed, at age 25, with severe schizophrenia. He's had four psychotic breakdowns in his life, but has managed to successfully practice pediatrics for close to forty years. Mark Vonnegut, in his ...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 6 min
What is the financial history of the Founding Fathers? How did their personal finances affect the Constitution and the new United States? Historian and Champlain College professor emeritus Willard Sterne Randall puts the focus on how money shaped the birth of America in his book "The Founders' Fortunes." Prof. Randall has written books about Benjamin Franklin, Benedict Arnold, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Ethan Allen. He has now turned his attention on these and ot...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 1 min
The book "Hitler's American Gamble" recounts the five days in 1941 that upended everything. Starting with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th and ending with Hitler's declaration of war on the United States on December 11th, British historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman trace the developments during the five days in real-time and reveal how America's engagement in World War Two was far from inevitable. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 01, 2022•1 hr 5 min
July 23rd of this year will mark the 55th anniversary of the Detroit Race Riot. Forty-three people died and more than 1000 were injured during that chaotic week in 1967. Our guest, Professor Clarence Lusane was there. His mother and sister were shot. We talked to him about that experience and about his academic career and activism, which has taken him around the world. Clarence Lusane is currently a professor of political science at Howard University in Washington, DC. Learn more about your ad c...
Feb 22, 2022•1 hr 6 min
"I knew Richard Nixon well." At age 81, Dwight Chapin has decided, for the first time, to write about his years in politics and the Nixon White House. His book is called "The President's Man: The Memoirs of Nixon's Trusted Aide." In the first chapter, he writes: "I started working for him as an organizational field man during his 1962 California gubernatorial campaign….I became an advance man at the beginning of the 1966 off-year election cycle and then his personal aide in 1967. In the White Ho...
Feb 15, 2022•56 min
