discusses court sessions past and present the best selling author and historian michael corpsdan is our guest and american institute end musician arthur brooks. in depth on c-span2's booktv, television for serious readers. .. >> to discuss marijuana legalizatin and exploration of the south

pole. you'll also see books about the u.s. border patrol, israel, fracking, the taliban in afghanistan and the american west in 1776. all this and much more, 48 hours of nonfiction books and authors on c-span2. booktv, television for serious readers. >> up next, a.j. baime appeared at "the chicago tribune" printers row lit fest to discuss "the arsenal of democracy" about the creation to have u.s. bomber force prior to america's entry in world war ii. this is about 40 minutes. >> thank you very much, john, and thank you to everyone who's here on a beautiful, sunny day.a it's good to see you, and welcome to lit fest. if this is your first time, this is one of the great festivals of chicago, and we're glad we're're getting a good turnout today and there is a lot to do. thank you for coming to this event. to there's another one right after, it. a friend of mine, rick kogan,

will be conducting a discussionr so there's a lot to do, so, please, stick armed. anything occurs to you, we'll give it at least ten minutes. this'll run very quickly, i think, because i've had a chance to meet a.j. baime, the author of "the arsenal of democracy." it's fantastic, and i highly recommend it to you. it's a topic that covers politics, business, there's even some art and design in there, there's incredible personalities, and i learned a lot there reading it. i'm sort of a world war ii buff. do we have any other world war ii buffs here? thin who's interested? i am, i'm a history buff for sure. a.j. looks very youthful, so how did you come to do it, a.j., and what does a young guy like you know about world war ii? >> firstly, i just want to say it's wonderful to be here. i want to thank my wife michelle is here, my son, clayton, who is

on chapter four, i'm proud to say. i was not alive, i was born in 1971. and my last book took place in the 1960s, and a lot of people said what do you know about this? when they asked me the question, i always answer that i have to work much harder than anybody else who had lived through this because i didn't. so i had to not just understand the characters and what was happening and why it was happening, but i had to understand their motivations which meant going through their personal belongings and their papers and their correspondence and reading newspapers of the day, not looking for anything, but just to try this any way that i could to get inside the heads of the people i was writing about so that i could understand the extremely difficult decisions that they were making. >> well, and we were talking earlier, and a.j. mentioned that this book is almost a prequel to the book that he wrote before, "go like hell," which is also available for sale and which talks about this incredible

drama on the racing circuit. this one, for me, was sort of a revelation because everybody's heard of the edsel and edsel ford and not in a good light. i really didn't know much about edsel ford can and the relationship between henry ford, his father, and edsel ford is really one of the main driving narrative forces of the book, and it was extremely interesting. so can you tell us a little bit about their relationship? >> sure. it's just by chance that the book comes out on father's day. it does make a great father's day gift. but when i was researching my last book, "go like hell," there was this character named edsel who was one of my main characters, henry ford ii. and i found myself just -- so i identified with this character, edsel, who died a tragic death in 1943. there's something about him that i just loved. he was somebody who was his understood his whole life. he was a person who was thrust into amazing amounts of power

and wealth at a very critical time in our nation's history, and people who live in detroit and people who though the story of the ford family think of edsel as this extremely flawed character. he was, his father who was this great pacifist refused to let edsel serve in world war i. so when edsel was at a young age, he was humiliated, he was e maas calculated. when all of the boys were going to fight in the war, he was not allowed to. his whole life was an uphill climb which seems strange for somebody who was born the only child, the only legitimate child of henry ford who was the richest and most powerful, you know, probably the most famous american through the entire first half of that century. so to me, there was this character, edsel, who his whole life he was trying to create honor for himself, and that's what happens in this book, but

it doesn't happen until the final days before he dies. it's very dramatic for me and somebody i identified with. the people in detroit who are reading this book are saying they're so pleased that edsel is getting his due. >> it's a little bit of a great gatsby-type story and really very interesting. just for starters, "the arsenal of democracy" is the title. what does that mean and where does that come from? >> historians have not agreed where the term comes from. some people say it goes back to woodrow wilson during world war i. in this case on december 29th, 1940, fdr, he's in the situation where he realizes that there's this war going on in europe, and we're not going to be able to escape it. it's coming our way, and there's nothing we can do about it. and he figured out something. he said this is a new kind of war, and he figured out something brilliant very early on. he might have taken a lesson from the nazis in this regard, but he realized that this was going to be a war fought with mass production.

and so he gave the speech on december 29, 1940, and he called it the arsenal of democracy fireside chat. and the idea was to inspire free interrise and government to join together -- enterprise and government to join together and create this arse that would with which we were going to have to fight this war. at a the time it was very controversial because a lot of people didn't want to be in this war, but i think he saw-inevitable. and the only way we were going to win was if free enterprise put all of their best judgment aside and created the tanks, airplanes -- specifically airplanes. but not just the tanks, the airplanes and the guns, but the tents, the jackets, the cigarettes, everything. everything was going to go toward this war, and that's what this arsenal was. >> and, you know, one thing that comes through in the early part of the book is just how strong the forces of isolationism were. and "the chicago tribune" was among the players in that era that were very strongly opposed

to any american involvement and wanted, in fact, our headline on september 1st of 1939 when the nazis invaded polander was -- poland was europe's war's on. not our war, their war. and that very much was a theme not just for the tribune or for german-americans, but really all the way through for most of the country. i think people wanted to stay out. we'd had a horrible time in the depression, and some of the central characters in a.j.'s book are very much of that thinking. starting with henry ford and also charles charles lindbergh who plays a big role in this. >> that's true. ford and lindbergh were the two most famous anti-war person at the time, very honored civic beings, and they were very much against us being in this war. lindbergh was not -- he didn't run it, but he was part of an organization called america first. has anybody heard of america first? anybody remember? okay.

so gerald ford was part of this group, e.e. cummings and i believe walt disney, i think? that i have to fact check. but it was the biggest anti-war group in the country, and lindbergh was touring the nation giving speeches saying, you know, we have to stay out of this war. if we get in this war, it's going to be the biggest catastrophe in the history of our nation, which in a way it was. but what i find most interesting -- oh, a picture in here, by the way, of lindbergh testifying before congress in a room much more crowded than this one in which he said i think that we need to stay out of this war because we can't win. and specifically, he was addressing the german luftwaffe. he said we cannot come up with air power that's going to be able to defeat this air force that germany has created that he had seen firsthand. so once the war starts after pearl harbor, it's very moving to me when i read through lindbergh's papers and how he came to join henry ford, these

two anti-war activists joined together to create the bombers that you see here on the cover of this book. >> well, it took them a while to get there, and one of the interesting facets leading up to the war was how the nazis were in some ways admired by some of the people in this book. and henry ford and lindbergh were both honored and took medals, i believe, from the nazis. can you fill us in on just where they were there and what was known about the anti-semitism and, you know, the terrible parts of the third reich that we know so well now? >> sure. if i speak slowly, it's because this is such sensitive material to me, and i don't want to get it wrong. [laughter] these were characters that were extremely misunderstood. lindbergh and henry ford. they were both anti-semites, i don't think there's any arguing that. but when you contextual -- i'm jewish, so i'm not making excuses for these people, but it's important to understand getting back to the whole idea of the kind of research i was trying to do. not just to understand these people, the decisions that they

make and -- but why they were making them. and anti-semitism was rife all over america. it wasn't just in germany. i quote one fact in the book that there's a gallup poll in 1938 that 25% of americans thought that there was going to be violence against jews here, mass violence against jews here in america. so these figures were not alone. so to understand, they were just the most powerful people in the country speaking what a lot of people felt, and i think that they wanted to be a spokesperson for that cause. i'm not making excuses for them, again. now, in terms of the war -- oh, in terms of, okay, yes. so both of these characters received a very important medal from hitler. it was a gift from hitler to both of these gentlemen for their service, and it was a brilliant propaganda move by hitler to give these guys this cross. both of them refused to give this gift back to the third reich. and i think that they were

alarmed by what would have happened if they did that. but here these guys were with their faces in the newspaper and probably on the cover of "the chicago tribune." as a matter of fact, hitler was quoted in 1933 saying, you know, honoring henry ford, saying that henry ford was his hero. so there was a connection between these people that was written a lot about at the time that makes them so incredibly controversial. however, once the war started i think it was very clear that these two gentlemen that were is is -- that were so controversial and had received these medals had their hearts in the right laces, and they wanted to serve, and they wanted to win the war. >> well, and we sort of got to that point slow hi which is illustrated in the book where henry ford and charles lindbergh were no fans of president roosevelt, and it was a struggle, i think, for roosevelt to turn this arsenal of democracy from, you know, sort of dormancy and reluctance into

something that turned out to be war-winning. so how did he pull that off, a.j.? >> it was difficult. the new deal was very controversial. roosevelt d when we think of roos related to, we think, well, here's this character who was so gloved and who really represented americanism all over the world. but a lot of people in this country didn't like him. a lot of people. and specifically, when he needed, when fdr needed to create the arsenal of democracy, one of the things -- well, the people he really needed were the people in charge of the big assembly lines. and these were all his enemies because they did not like the way that the new deal encroached upon their way of doing business, whether it was functioning during the great depression or not. so a lot of these leaders, henry ford first and foremost among them, thought that roosevelt was -- henry ford said i don't think that the government has too much, is having enough success running itself, so why do they want to come and run my

business? that's what he said. i'm trying to get the quote right. but there were a lot of people who felt the way he did. the first thing he had to do when he had to create this arsenal was to find people who were going to help him, and that was not an easy task. the first person he called upon was the president of general motors, william knudsen. does anybody remember william need seven? anybody? so he was extremely famous at the time. came through ellis island, and he was the first person that roosevelt called. brought him down to west virginia and said hey, you know -- him down to washington and said, hey, we need to create an arsenal. >> another really prominent character is the b-24 liberator bomber. this is this gigantic plane that at the time it was made was the fastest, most powerful, it carried the most bombs. it's a four-engine plane. and it really got off on the wrong foot, and the ford people who rused it started from -- who

produced it started from scratch literally. can you tell us the story of willow run and how that got started? >> willow run at the time was created theory overnight. the fords tried to create the biggest factory under one roof anywhere in the world. and one fascinating fact is if you drive to detroit today, you'll go through a little is right outside detroit, and you can pull off the highway, and you can see it, and it's there. now, if you do that today, what you're going to see is these giant wrecking balls that are destroying this factory right now. at the time the fords built this factory as quickly as they could in an open fear field. they had to clear an orchard and build the biggest factory under one roof anywhere in the world and try to take the biggest, fastest, most destructive four-engine bomber and make it the most mass produced of all time. i'm giving away the ending, but it is still today the host

mass-produced military -- mostç mass-produced military aircraft of all time. we writers love narrative arc. we love it when everything goes wrong before everything goes right, which is exactly what happens in this book. so everything did go wrong, and i found a lot of diaries of the people who worked on and inside this factory. to hear what they were saying and thinking about it inm#u 1941 when everything was going wrong is really incredible. >> yeah. i mean, among other things the state of the art for the aviation industry in the u.s. was more or less handmadeç planes. nobody had a system for mass producing a plane. and in some ways it was in keeping with the state of the technology, because you could build a plane by hand and make changes on the next one if it didn't work out whereas in the case of ford they tried to make it like a model t where they would have, you know, steel diecast machine tools to make it, and then when it didn't

work, you'd have to redo all the machine tools. what sort of problems did they run into it, a.j.? >> this was a new airplane. they were trying to maas produce a -- a mass airplane. by 1940 the fords were trying to make it, build one an hour. okay? this thing weighed 56,000 pounds fully loaded, it could go 303 miles per hour and carry 8,000 pounds of bombs. nobody at the time had ever mass produced an airplane, certainly not one this size. so basically, everything went wrong. one of my personal favorite parts of the book is there's this guy named harry truman, you've probably heard of im. he has his own arc in the book which is incredible because at the beginning of the war truman was, couldn't get the president's secretaries to return his phone calls. and by the end of the war, he's the president president of the united states of america. but in the middle of this book he has this committee called the

truman committee, and they come into willow run and say what is going on here? this place is a disaster. this is supposed to be the most famous p factory in the arsenal of democracy, and it's a disaster. so truman goes, and he goes through the assembly lines with these engineers, and he's walking through and seeing the way they're building these bombers, and he walks out and realizes that the tasks that these people have, it was just a little too difficult, they were too optimistic. of course, by the time truman becomes president, you know, the fords were heroes once again, and they achieved their goal of building this 56,000 bomber at one an hour. >> it is interesting to think about some of the problems they had because one of their test pilots, the one who's featured prominently in the book, is charles lindbergh. and there's a great anecdote where he takes one of these big bombers up, and he's luck key he got away with his life from the sound of it. can you tell us?

>> he called it the worst piece of aircraft construction i've ever flown, and that's a quote. [laughter] so that's in 1943, early when the first bomb withers are coming off the assembly line. they had to fix this thing, and they had to figure out how to do it. one of my favorite things about lindbergh flying these things, there's a lot of interpersonal drama in this book between the characters. so lindbergh's vision, for me, in his diaries wasn't just a way to understand how they were trying to take this bomber and fix it and make it the way it was supposed to be, but also he had -- his interactions with all the different characters. so he, basically he was a window into all of these important people like henry ford. he had so much to say about henry. so his contribution to the book if not -- wasn't just the airplane, but his visions of all these characters and the way he wrote about them. and i have quotes in the book. it was just, it was a great pleasure of mine to be able to read his papers.

>> so you have henry ford and charles lindbergh working together on this thing, but i think really the unsung hero in the book is edsel ford. and can you tell us what his role was in getting willow run, which was nicknamed will it run with a question mark and what he had to do to get this thing moving? it was really edsel, more than anyone else i think, that got it where it needed to be. >> there was a guy named cast iron charlie sorenson. he was this hero in detroit, an engineer and also an ellis island person who came to this country with nothing and ended up, you know, he was this production genius. he was a genius engineer. so i think really these two people teamed up, and they knew each other all their lives. this guy, sorenson, knew edsel when he was my daughter's age, 6 years old, 7 years old. so when edsel was president of ford motor company for half his life, from 1919 until he died in 1943. and they formed this bond which was really incredible. sorenson was the guy on the

assembly line making things happen, and edsel was in the corner office trying to figure out how to make this whole thing work. and not just, not just the divisions of ford in this country, but also in nazi-occupied europe. so there's a lot in the book about how edsel was trying to figure out as the president of ford motor company what are we going to do not just willow run, what do we do about our factories that are in europe that are in nazi-occupied territory building tanks and trucks for the nazis? >> like many large american companies, ford had operations in germany and france which were expropose rated by the -- expropriated by the nazis and turned into nazi tools. and very awkward situation for ford. can you tell us how they handled that? >> the very contra parts of that relationship happened, i think, before the war started for the americans.

so, basically, we -- the nazi -- this is a very difficult piece to explain. i have been careful how i word it because it's very controversial. so in the 1930s you had general hotters and ford, two massive companies that were expanding at really what was the dawn of globalism. now, it was the great depression, 1930s. they had to figure out where they were going to put their money, and the one place abroad where you were pretty much assured you were going to turn profits was nazi germany because it was the only economy that was really thriving overseas. so these executives -- ed -- edsel ford, charlie sorenson, they couldn't take any of the profits out of the country. now, there was no way these people had crystal balls, they didn't have modern media, they didn't really understand what was happening. and even up until 1938, you know, less than a year before the war started in europe, these people didn't think there was

going to be a war. and here they had this great big investment, these american companies inside nazi germany. they couldn't get their money out, and hitler and his cronies came to these executives and said you're going to start building aircraft engines for us. you're going to build trucks for us. and they had to decide what to do. so when i was writing about these people, i really wanted to put myself in their shoes and say, well, you know, jeez, what would i do in that situation? and really there was no answer. and if they said, no, they would lose their investment just like that during the great depression when every penny counted. they would lose these millions and millions of dollars that they pumped into these foreign arms there in germany. then you have crystal -- [inaudible] andering. in 1938 they basically start to understand who hitler was. even without modern media, it became pretty clear. and they were stuck. now, these people when i talk about edsel ford in the book

trying the figure out what to do here, he has trusted confidants at these factories, so he's communicating with these people in germany, and these letters exist be. and he's communicating with these people in france while france is occupied before we're in the war and these letters exist. so you can go back and look at them and really get inside his head and figure out what was he going to do? years after -- every now and then you'll see an article in the newspaper where they talk about ford and general motors, you know, serving the nazi effort, and i think it's very unfair. nevertheless, in 1943 the treasury department sent in all these investigators and confiscated edsel ford's files. and they were looking into whether he had violated the trading with the enemy act. and the idea was, the reason why was he continued to communicate with these people inside nazi-occupied territory after the united states had entered the war. he had some permission from the state department. nevertheless, to this day that treasury investigation, all those files exist at the national archives, and you can

go through them and say, hmm, you know, where did this guy's allegiance lay? for me, then conclusion i came to was this guy was trying to save his empire in the best way he could, and he knew there was nothing he could do. the nazis were using all the tanks that they could produce and all the airplane engines that they could produce, and there was nothing that he could do about it. so -- >> what a position. and, you know, one of the incredible things about edsel was that while all this was going on, he was dying of terminal stomach cancer. and this came up well before some of the real achievements of ford in producing our arsenal of democracy. when did he find out he was ill, and how did that affect what happened later? >> he found out he was ill in the 1930s, but it wasn't like it is today where they go to the doctor and they get all these computers out and figure out what the problem was. edsel's life was extremely

difficult for such an extraordinary, extraordinarily wealthy, well known man. president of ford motor company for most of his life. it was an extremely difficult life that he lived. he had stomach problems his whole life, so all this time he's trying to run this company he was very ill. and during the war he was working, you know, 20 hours a day like everybody else, but, you know, his health was really declining. and for me, it was so dramatic when i was trying to portray his character to understand that this was a man because of what had happened to him in world war i, he was not allowed to serve, his whole life was a quest for honor. and it seems to strange, well, why would somebody who was so envied at the time, everybody wanted to be edsel ford. in fact, one of the things i found in my research is how many people actually named their kids edsel ford in the 1920s and 1930s and everything would think that's the person they would want to be.

he always wanted to be, and this is something i cover early in the book, his father was this motor car magnate, and edsel in the 1920s thought that the rise of the airplane, that was going to be his future. he wanted to get into aviation. his father wouldn't allow it. then there was the great depression, and all of his aviation experiments went out the door. so as he was dying, the war gave him an opportunity to secure honor before his death by building this factory, by serving the war effort and by serving his good friend, fdr, who he loved, who his father loathed. so he died in 1943 in may before -- he did not live long enough to see his work achieve its goal and, basically, the destruction of the third reich. >> and there was another cross for him to bear by the name of harry bennett who was a confidant of his father and a notorious figure this some ways for his role in breaking strikes and being in charge of ford's

security which at the time was the largest private police force in the country. and edsel and bennett didn't get along, did they? >> no. in my last book, i wrote one of the haven characters was a guy namedmen sow ferrari, pretty much the perfect character because he is just so fascinating, basically darkness, just this dark human being. and harry bennett serves that role in this book. if you could come up with a character, a fictional character who was, you know, the powerful tough guy, gangster-type person who would have become henry ford's best friend in the 1930s during the great depression, harry bennett was it. a fiction writer couldn't come up with this guy, and yet he existed. and what happened inside the empire was this dark figure who amassed the -- how did you phrase it? i wrote the book, but i forget. the largest private police force in the world, and it was called the service d., worked at fort -- service department. they were anti-union, and they

just went around beating people up literally. and harry bennett became edsel ford's nemesis. it was as if they were two children in this empire, these two sons fighting over henry ford's love, quite literally. and that was one of the things, i think, that served to kill edsel ford. but i can tell you this, harry bennett was fun to write about. >> well, he's a character. and edsel ford's character blamed harry bennett for edsel's death because of all the pressure he put on him. harry bennett was, essentially, trying to take over the company, and he was like a second son to henry ford. it was ahazing to me to read about some of the tactics that he used because this guy was a former boxer, really a thug. he fought dirty, and he fought all the way to the end. edsel never got rid of this guy. he was running ford sort of in a parallel universe weed sell ford right up -- with edsel ford.

what ever happened to harry men net. >> after edsel dies, henry ford ii who, a lot of people know, eventually became one of the most powerful chief executives in the country, but at the time he was just a kid. he was serving in the military, and his father dieed, and he had to come back to dearborn, try to singularly wrestle this empire singularly wrestle this empire away from this shakespe2$g# and the drama, it still strikes me as amazing that it actually happened. but it did. after edselq#r died, all the newspapers and all the magazines wrote here was this company, and there was this internal battle for power in this very important, not only was it the third largest military contractor in the country, but it was the most famous of all american companies. and harry bennett after the death of edsel ford stood to be, usurp it. he had never gone to college. he was a boxer and a navy guy and a thug. and his friends were -- when i list in the book the people that were in his service department,

they were people like joe "legs" he man. he was a serial kidnapper, and he would evade the law by running away. there was another guy who was called the dope king. they were basically, literally, murderers. and those were the people that harry, you know, surrounded himself with. and it's amazing to think that at that time they could actually take over the most american of all companies, and they came this close. one of the climactic things that happens, you know, when i started to write this book i started to realize, because i knew all the research about edsel ford, and i realized this battle and empire happened at the exact same time as the battle in world world war world war ii. and when you put their stories together along with building this weapon, it became a very rich narrative for me. >> the other thing that really changed in 1943 at that point of the war was that tensions had bubbled to the in both race and gender -- to the surface in both

race and gender. tell us how willow run brought together this incredible collection of people. they had to sort of form their own city to provide the manpower to produce this thing. i shouldn't say manpower because a lot of women worked there, something new for the u.s. really. and maybe you can tell me a little bit about how that developed and what the intentions were. >> if i were to ask anybody in this room imagine what would you do if i asked you to build the biggest factory in the history of the world under one roof and staff it with 100,000 people during a war when everybody was going into the military? there was no one to work there. they didn't have the materials to build the place. because every, literally, every piece of copper, every piece of aluminum, every piece of fabric, every piece of rubber, every drop of gasoline, everything was needed for the military effort. now, one of the things, of course, is the labor issue. they didn't, they couldn't find people to work at the plant.

they needed 100,000 people to work there, and they couldn't find them. so what they did was they centre cuters through the -- sent recruiters through the south, and they gave out bus tickets, and they brought tens of thousands of people from these mountain communities. people who had never had jobs before, people who didn't have shoes, literally, were showing up at this factory to build these bombers. and, of course, one of the things that happened was early in the war they a began to staff the assembly lines with women. now, everybody in this room has heard of rosie. there are many sources for the rosie story, but -- and i can't remember her name right now, but there was a rosie. she was a widowed woman who drove from the south with two kids, and she got a job at willow run, and she worked there. that's why when you go to see, you'll see people actually outside the willow run plant

right now, they dress up like rosie the riveter and they carry these signs saying save the bomber plant. rosie really worked there. >> it wasn't easy to put together this whole group of people from the south, with african-americans, with women. it was -- you'd like to think of it as a melting pot opportunity for, you know, the west to come through -- the best to come through, but really it caused problems, didn't it? >> somebody asked me yesterday, actually it was friday at the kick-off luncheon for this literary festival, if anything in this foreshadows anything detroit has become with. the biggest city ever to file for bankruptcy in our nation's history. and i said for the most part, the book about the most important, greatest collective achievement of any american city ever. but the answer was, i said to her, yes. the seeds for the darkness that detroit became are in this book and specifically in one chapter

in which i discover cover the detroit race riot of 1943. pretty brutal riot. i think 32 or 29 killed. it was basically black versus white. and in my research, i was able to find diaries of people who actually fought in the riot and what their descriptions were. and you would think that these people who were surrounded by, you know, an urban riot with this much p death and gore, that they would have been frightened, but they weren't. what struck me about it most was that these people, what they wrote down, what they remembered about it was i don't think joy was quite the word i'm looking for, but how much they wanted to kill whitey. [laughter] and how much white people wanted to kill black people. so that's what happened. so, yes, i guess, you know, we all know what happened to detroit after that. >> well, and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that in spite of all the tension, in spite of everything we've talked about that this is ripping the glossy

cover off of it, this was a huge success. and the b-24, almost 9,000 produced. by the end of the war, this was a war-winning weapon, and it really did help to put nazis in duress forever and to help america and its allies prevail. and in spite of it all, it actually happened. >> one of the themes in the book is definitely the rise of american air power. early in the war before we entered the war when the war started in europe -- september 1, 1939 -- the airplane really became the game-changing weapon on the very first day of the war. now, hitler had been building this air force for years n. 1938 fdr got wind of this, and he's like we've got to start building airplanes. but it was the great depression, and it just didn't happen. we didn't start building our air power. so the bomber really became an obsession. and when you read churchill's papers, you know, the ping-pong

of communication going back and forth, they thought that the bomber was going to be the weapon that a would win the war. in fact, you know, when you get and so the fact is this book is full of darkness, and it's full of tough characters, but i agree, it is a success story in the end. and i was or very nervous because of all the anti-semitism and the treasury investigation into whether the boards had colluded with the nazis. i was very nervous, as you can imagine, to send it to the forbes family. of course, all the characters i was writing about, they're no longer with us. but it is a success story in the end, and they saw that.

but, believe me, that was a relief, and i was thrilled. >> we have time for questions if anyone has any. i'm happy to allow people to step up to the mic. >> well, i was fascinated by what you're saying about the anti-semitism in the ford family. i'm jewish also, so it resonates with me. my question is since ed sell ford didn't -- edsel ford didn't want to give up his factories in france and germany, he actually didn't have a choice if i understood you correctly. but did the allies bomb those plants? >> yes. >> when? >> they did, and, jeez, i think most of it was in 1944. now, a lot -- you may be alluding to there's a controversy about the cologne plant that i don't address in the book because i couldn't address it with any concrete

evidence.vide but a lot of people have said, well, the ford plant didn't get bombed. all the otherbo plants got bomb, but the ford plant didn't. in fact, it did, but it was pretty much all f in one pieceas when the allies showed up.ne and i don't have an answer forhe that, i really don't. we did bomb the french plant quite a bit, and the fords would get news of it from the statemet department, and those documents exist saying, you know, this isn what happened, and this is who. was hurt.and, and, of course, i don't reallyt know at what point they learned that these ford factories were filled with slave labor. lled wi. so, you know, when we were bombing them, who were we killing? but specifically, the french plant got hit. and, of course, the germans hit the ford plants in britain. >> yes. >> i was wondering what the economics of this were. i assume that the u.s. tax dollar paid for all this production of bombers, although i don't know that for sure. and then did the ford company

make a huge profit there this production, or did they do it sort of like at a cut rate for the u.s. government? how did the economics of it work? >> everything in the arsenal of democracy was military contract, and there was a standard military contract that said all the companies that signed these contracts would get 8% profit. and the idea was, the idea from inside the white house was if business doesn't get paid, business won't work. that was the cynical way of looking at it, but the other way to look at it was if things, if these companies were paid at a fixed rate, the idea was that they'd get paid a fixed rate. say i ask you to build me an airplane, and i'm going to give you $200. then you know that, you know, some people are going to say, well, if i cut that corner and this corner and that corner, i'm going to make this much money. so they didn't want that to happen. they wanted the best that it could be. these were the contracts they set out for everybody, it was an 8% profit that was standard.

there was another part of your question i'm trying to remember. >> just whether they made a big profit out of it. >> well, yes, i mean, everybody did. but look at what happened to our economy between when the war began and when the war ended. that was all art -- part of it. i would have loved to have been an economist at the time. >> where yes, sir. >> so, dad -- [laughter] hi, dad. so my question is why did you choose the airplane for the front cover? >> that was an excellent question, excellent question. we really struggled with this because, you know, the book -- this is a business, so we had to decide what's going to make people want to go out and buy it. and there was a lot of decision about whether there should be faces on the cover, would people be more interested in the subject matter if they saw faces and could identify there'd be

characters in the book. but we just thought that the cover was so dramatic, and i don't know, we just -- we all just loved it. my editors and i, we loved it, and that's what we ended up with. >> well, there are some treats inside. there are photos, there are blue prints, there's a lot going on in this book. it's really an amazing read, and i'm so glad i got a chance to talk to you, a.j.. he's going to stay and address further questions because i think our time is up. so i want to thank you for taking all this time. >> yes, sir. i'd just like to thank you, greg of course, and thank you, everybody, for being here. [applause] >> thanks, everyone, for attending this program. thanks to our had rater, greg burns, thanks, a.j., for coming out. "the arsenal for democracy," is on sale in the lobby. we also are selling his previously-published week, "go like hell," and they will be

available for signing right outside the auditorium here. thanks, everyone, enjoy the rest of your day at lit fest. [applause] >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv, television for serious readers. >> this week booktv takes a look at some of barnes & noble's best selling nonfiction books. first on the list is laura hillenbrand's "unbroken" which recounts the travails of limb pick runner louie samp runny who sur siveed 47 days adrift in the ocean after his plane crashed in 1943. next is edward klein's "blood feud" that examines the personal and political relationships

between the clintons and obamas. dr. ben carson, retired head of neurosurgery at johns hopkins is third with his thoughts on the current problems facing the country and how to solve them in "one nation," followed by hillary clinton's account of her tenure as secretary of state, "hard choices." both ben carson and hillary clinton have recently discussed their books on booktv. you can watch the programs anytime at our web site, booktv.org. at number five on barnes & noble's list is tom rath's "strengths finder 2.0." and sixth is malcolm gladwell's look at advantages and disadvantages in "david and goliath." next on the list is beth macy's "factory man," a look at the bassett purposeture company's efforts to keep their operations in virginia. sophia amaruso, founder of nasty gal is eighth with

hashtaggigboss followed by t.d. jakes' "instinct." wrapping up the list is stephen leavitt and stephen dubner's new book on how to use unconventional thinking to solve problems, "think like a freak." that's this week's nonfiction bestsellers according to barnes & noble. >> mary ruwart and jeff waddoups talk about the minimum wage law and discuss whether it's beneficial. the two spoke at freedomfest for about 50 minutes. [applause] ♪ ♪ >> and thank you very much, chip. i appreciate this conference so much. mac and joanne formed it a long time ago. i've been speaking here or helping out since 2002. i find this is one of the greatest meetings of the minds ever conceived. when you can go from a session on confucius to a