♪ mr. lozada: i don't cover wars. i don't interview politicians. i don't pick up classified documents or meet sources and parking garages in arlington virginia. i've never been a reporter myself. instead i read. i read many books about politics and i read many books by

politicians. i read tell-alls by former white house aides. i read campaign biographies every politician writes when they aspire h office, and then i read the revisionist memoir they write when they leave office trying to justify all that they did. i read books by presidents, vice president, senators, fbi directors, chiefs of staff. sometimes when people hear i read political books rather than discovering the next great american novel, i get a few recurring reactions. there's something like this. wow, you read that book so we don't have to. host: carlos lozada, author of "the washington book." we don't need to read "the washington book?" mr. lozada: i think you. -- you should. what is a washington book? mr. lozada: that is a good question because i define it very expansively. the obvious washington books are

political memoirs and manifestoes and campaign biographies and the like that i often think of special counsel investigations, commission reports, supreme court opinions as being vital washington texts. and of course there are books you may not think of as overtly political books. but they land in a moment where they become highly politicized so i included those as well in the canon of washington books. host: you say even in the bad ones, there is something to glean. mr. lozada: oh yeah often especially in the bad ones. a lot of these books get pored over by political reporters who will give you the dreaded takeaways. the sort of five things you need to know from mitt romney's book or whatever the latest volume is. i tried to come after that and i try to find some insight in the

little things. it could be just a throwaway line that they used with a low-level aid. it could be something in the acknowledgment section of the book. it could be a recurring phrase that is sort of a rhetorical crutch. those all give you insight into politicians. host: and one of those little items that you mentioned in your new book is reggie bush talking about president obama saying john kennedy carried his own bags. mr. lozada: that's right, reggie love. reggie bush, the wonderful running back who gave my running game fighting irish fits. but yes reggie love who wrote a memoir called, "power forward." he was obama's body man, his personal aid. in his first presidential campaign in obama's first presidential campaign love forgot to bring obama's briefcase on thethat is a huge no-no

that is one of your main jobs. he was afraid he was going to get fired. annoyed and reggie love explains one of the reasons obama was annoyed, he liked to be seen carrying his bags off of the plane. and he said to him, jfk carried his own bags. to me, that little moment captured so much about how carefully obama felt he had to curate and manage his public image. to the extent that he would've rely on our most mythologized past president to try and shape the way people saw him. host: do so-called washington books become bestsellers, and are they read outside of d.c.? mr. lozada: a lot of them do not. i think that publishers sometimes are sort of gambling. every election season there is a bunch of candidates, and one of them will become the nominee of

one party or the other. so they all have campaign books. most of them come and go. but the one by the eventual winner might become a big deal, it might be something people really focus on to try and understand that person better. so i think that those do become read. my feeling on, especially books by presidents, is thate removed they are from that person's time in the white house, the better they are. obama's three books, dreams for my father, audacity of hope, and his first presidential memoir, our promised land, personal feeling is the first one which he wrote in the 1990's is by far the most compelling of the three. host: in fact, you note that pr obama could have made a living as a writer based on dreams from my father. mr. lozada: he is a good writer. biographers have come later on and looked at that book and found that he compressed a lot of characters, he wasn't exactly

faithful to all the facts. but it is a memorable book. among books by presidents, i would say it is one of my three favorite. host: chris matthews coined a phrase the washington read. what does that mean? mr. lozada: he is the first time i heard someone use it. i don't know if he coined it. but he referred to the washington read as a way that even washingtonians read these political books. and that is, they don't often just it down and read them from beginning to end. chapter. they may ask around to find out what the key chapter is. they may skim it. they may read the first and last chapter. if they are real washington power brokers they will not read it at all, they will just look for their names in the index see how they are treated and depending on that, decide if they like the book or not. peter: one washington book did not have an index, this town. mr. lozada: yes.

he did that very much on purpose, to avoid the washington read. he wanted people to have to read the book to find out if they were in there. i reviewed that book for the washington post at the time. i was not a nonfiction critic, i was just an editor there, but i really wanted to read it. i had our intern construct a quick and dirty index of the book which we published peter: is that almost an ultimate washington insider book? mr. lozada: it's a washington insider book written by a certain kind of washington insider. he's a very good washington insider journalist, but he is not someone who held high office. he is not someone who has worked in the white house. those are different kinds of insiders. there are pockets of insiderness in washington, and that is one of the ultimate versions of the journalist as insider. what was the

reaction to that book here in this town? because he name checked a lot of people. andrea mitchell, tammy had died, mike allen, chris dodd, trent lott. mr. lozada: this was about 11 years ago. chronologically speaking it's the earliest book -- my essay on that book is the earliest one that appears in this book, in "the washington book.": what was interesting about that book is there was almost as much pre-reaction is there was a reaction. people knew it was in the works and people were talking about it. he had published a profile of mike allen, who was then theof the politico playbook morning newsletter, which was a huge deal at the time. it still is sort of a robust franchise. he had published a profile of mike allen in the new york times magazine, which i think became the publishing "this town."

i don't really know these people. what i hear about the characters in this book is there are some who will still not talk to mark. peter: here is mark leibovich. mark: this book is an exercise in me as a washington insider and i am invited to these parties, i am invited to these press conferences, i know these people, they know me, they call me back. they still call me back. people were wondering, what is this guy doing? is he actually going to be a tr ro his class the class being an insider, someone benefiting from this world someone who actually has access to this world? and yet why is he going to speak out of school like this? peter: now, is mark leibovich an acquittance of yours? mr. lozada: he has become one.

when i read his book i had never met him even though we overlapped at the washington post briefly. but he worked in different sections, there was a large newsroom. if i felt friendly toward himiewed "this town." but over the years we have run into each other in different places and come to know each other, not in a have dinner together kind of thing, but we ran into each other at book events or festivals, thatind of thing. and he was gracious enough to be in conversation with me about this book at a recent event at politics and prose washington's terrific independent bookstore. peter: his tour of washington feeds the worst suspicions of washington, you write. mr. lozada: yes. i don't stick by that. i think when people read "this

town" == and i think this is what makes it an effective book -- they see a lot of self-serving actions and not a lot of public service. in the sort of daily conduct of the nation's business. and i think that part of what he was trying to do he's a consummate observer, but there's a few moments and that book you can tell he is pisssed off. when people who promised that they would never sell out, that they would never try and quote monetize their political experience, become lobbyists. you can tell he is annoyed by it even -- peter: carlos lozada, you have mentioned the washington post a couple of times. but you have moved on. mr. lozada: yes. i spent 17 years at the post. about 1.5 years ago i left to

become an opinion columnist at the new york times. i still do very much the same kind of work as i did when i was a book critic at the post. i mainly try to understand national politics and national debate through various books an d texpeter: one of your old colleagues at the washington post, bob woodward, what is his importance when it comes to "the washington book?" mr. lozada: he is one of the definitions of the washington book from a different way from leibovich. i think bob woodward likes to focus on p white house, on those corridors of power. the contrast to someone like mark leibovich is leibovich focuses on some of the same people looking at the way they socialized, the way they network and connect, and looks at kind of lower level perhaps

staffers as well. if you want to understand the american presidency, or get almost a blow-by-blow transcript of the american presidency, you can read woodward's 20-something books, starting with "al president's men" about the nixon presidency, through his books on the trump presidency. peter: we have not seen one yet on the biden presidency from him. mr. lozada: as soon as there is one, i will read it. peter: here is a little bit bob woodward talking about writing. mr. woodward: i have a more modern chair now but at that desk, door, if it turned over, i think i have written nine books. and this is a working office, as you can see, dominated by chaos. and the filing system is not as organized as it should be, and s something i'm going to try to work on at updating.

because of, i guess of my age, i tend to wake up early 4:00, 5:00 in the morning when i am writing. and i will go up here and right. and you can get anh awful lot done before 9:00, before the phone starts ringing. so that's the general pattern. but again, having an office in your home is a great luxury and advantage, because you can go to work when time available or when the impulse strikes you. peter: carlos lozada obviously that video is a little bit old you can tell by the computer. bu when you see that what strikes you? mr. lozada: all those boxes. i would love to spend time inside those archives. inside whatever bob woodward has in his addict in -- attic in his boxes. i remember long before i read

this book, long before i was a editor in the sunday opinion section at the washington post called outlook. and when gerald ford died, woodward reached out to my boss there and said, i had this interview with ford i promised i would not run until he died, and i want to run part of it in outlook. i am trying term and for most revelatory moment. i am sure they were there. but i just remember being struck by the existence of that. how many things like that are sitting in that office? peter: in 2020, you undertook a project to read all of donald trump's books, including art of the deal, art of the comeback, think like a billionaire, the america we desire, time to get tough, and you concluded quote sitting down with the collected works of donald j. trump is unlike any literary experience i

have ever had. over the course of 2212 pagesd where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking where repetition and contradiction come standard, where ventral nest and insecurity eruptrandom. besides that, did you learn anything? mr. lozada: well, this was in 2015. this was when he had just launched his presidential campaign the first time around. he was doing well in the pollsi think it was july of 2015. and so, i had just that year become the book critic of the post, and i wanted to take a stab at the big story which was the rise of donald trump in your public and party. so i asked my editor, what if i just read a bunch of his books and see what i find. he said to me that is a great idea, but do it quickly, because who knows how long interest in this guy was going to last.

that was nine years ago. what i learned in that experience -- and it was not all of them, it was eight i believe and they are making more. what i learned is that all the qualities that we came to know from donald trump's campaign and later his presidency, they were all there already. they were not hidden. they were obvious to anyone who even read the sanitized pretty nice face on him-kind of books. he's very open about his willingness to deceive, to i his comments about women were often crude or just cruel. when he described i think the divorce proceedings or something with yvonna, his first wife, he

mocked her accent. so after the fact that just thought, the trump presidency and the trump phenomena could be shocking at all times, but having read those books is not entirely surprising. it was all there. peter: there is a genre of washington book that's an anti-book. anti-trump anti-hillary, anti-obama. do you get into those books as well? mr. lozada: sometimes i do. actually, i find the the hard-core anti-books, and the devotional pro-books, to be interesting. i don't like to spend too much time there because it is full on propagandr. i like living -- i think propaganda is useful. propaganda is useful because propaganda conveys how someone wishes to be interpreted, or what one side things of their

audience. like, that tells you a lot. it reveals what they perceive their audience to be. and so there has been an enormous appetite for anti-hillary clinton books for anti-obama books, and later for resistance books against trump. those end up revealing plenty about those enclosed communities , perhaps more than they do about their subjects. peter: in writing about your own new citizenship which you got in 2014 i believe, you say that tocqueville's democracy in america is an ideal book to read as a new citizen. why? mr. lozada: embarrassed i had never read it before. it is a classic tale, and often cited -- i suspect more cited than read these days. but there were two things that really struck me that i would

highlight from that book. and you feel that becoming an american citizen is this huge decision, this big undertaking. and it is. even know i had lived here for many, many years, it was still a very intense and emotional experience for me. but what struck me about tocqueville's view ons his focus on associational life. americans are always joining things, they are starting groups and fighting against another group. this came alive when he first came to college in the u.s. i went to notre dame. there were the international students association and hispanic american association. i'd come from finishing high school in peru. but i felt like i considered

neither one. and those two groups didn't particularly care for one another, and they were very different. one was filled many latin american students and the other were american hispanics. i felt i had to kind of choose an identity between ethes i chose neither. i hung out with the kids in my dorm. but tocqueville talks about that urge to join. that the moment you become part of the whole individual parts start claiming you. the other thing i liked about tocqueville's book that i saw -- that i thought was so apropos of this period, of the last 10 years since i have read it and since i became a citizen that he writes how americans lose their minds every election season. they just go nuts. and it is all people can talk about, write about, think about fight about. then he says the moment the election is over, everything comes down again. and i think that part has changed. i don't think we live in a world

where everything comes down after the election. t vi aec preoccupation. the election becomes the daily graft of the public at public conversations the aim of all activity. and that was written in 1835. mr. lozada: he knew what he was talking about. peter: you also quote tocqueville as saying that americans are irritably patriotic. was that you or tocqueville saying that? mr. lozada: that was me channeling what he was saying. if i remember correctly, i used that to think about the sort of chant you always hear whenever there is something -- it's just, usa, usa, which overpowers everything. i don't know if that chant was recognizable then, but i think he would have known the type. yet, in a sense, i don't intent to mock patriotism. i feel very much like ariot of my adopted country.

yet i think that there's which patriotism itself has become politicized. i think there's different parts of our politics that feel it's sort of not cool to be overtly patriotic, or believe that it's a partisan emblem to sort of display ostentatious patriotism. and i think there is a good, happy medium somewhere. but i would not want patriotism itself to feel like the ltoo. the first time i feel the glorious burden of being american. mr. lozada: i really think that might be part of why i write these essays, and why i wrote this book. because i want to keep understanding it's better. i have a stack of books in my home that are books that i feel that i should have read but i

have not yet. and it is someone i do -- overwhelmingly it is an effort to try and understand this place better. before i became a citizen i felt that even though i had lived here so long, when everything got too weird i could just say , it wasn't my problem. and now it is. and i think that is great. peter: can you name one of those books that is sitting on the shelf unread? mr. lozada: sitting on the shelf unread is -- yes, i can probably name several. i will give you one great embarrassment that i have not read. i have read the power li know the bargain inside is coming. i feel like i need to write about. but the only way to write about volume five is if i read volumes one through four. i have done the math on it. if i read a chapter a day the

chapters are between maybe 30 and 40 pages roughly. it would take me about six months to read those four first volumes. and so, depending on when the book comes out volume five, i may be able to do it. but i need to get started. the powerbroker i read in graduate school and it is still one of the best books about politics i have ever read. but i feel hopelessly behind because i need to read the lbj books. peter: a chapter a day. are you pretty precise about that? mr. lozada: i just counted them. i just counted them to see how long it would take. but i have not started them yet because i'm reading a lot of other things. for my job, i serve on some prize juries, so i have to read those books as well. but if i were to devote myself to this enterprise, that is what it would take. peter: for a book you are reviewing are workingo you take notes as you go? mr. lozada: oh, yes. i take extensive notes. i try to go through each book

three times. first is straight full on read beginning to end. that one takes the longest. writingions and ideas in the margins underlining a lot of stuff dipping into the footnotes. then when i finish, i go through it again with a highlighter instead of a pen this time. i read again a little more quickly, focusing on the areas that quickly struck me the first time. i can tell because i have a lot written in those sections of the book. and i call a subsection of those with my highlighter. then i open up a file and go through the book a third time, reading it even more quickly but focusing on the areas that clearly struck me most the second time around. that way i'm able to get -- and i have put all of that in a file in a word document, full of questions" and ideas and themes that have struck me. the way it usually works out is, say a book is 300 pages long,

it's about 1000 words of notes per 1000 pages. so it would be about 3000 words then that will be my raw material whatever i'm going to write. then i put the book aside and i go over the notes again and again so i develop some kind of theme. and speaking of caro, he said he often decides early on what he wants the last line of a book to be, then works his way. the whole excise -- exercise is getting to that last line. that is something i think about sometimes. sometimes i know where i want to end, but how do i take people on a journey to that last spot. peter: when and why did you come to the states? mr. lozada: i came twice depending on when you start counting. i came when i was three. i was born in lima, peru. when i was three years old my family moved here. not for any big job or any reason other than the fact that my father was in love with the

idea of coming to the added states and he thought that political conditions in peru were not good and he wanted us to leave and be educated here. in california where we had relatives on both sides of the family. and we lived there for seven years until i was 10. then we decided to go back to peru. thought things were getting better. they were not, really. maybe they were for a little while but then they got worse. so then, i state there -- stayed there fromhen came back for college. so i either came when i was three or when i was 17, because we came back and forth. peter: you won a pulitzer a couple years ago for? mr. lozada: criticism. this was in 2019, and it was for a lot of -- for my reviews and essays about books on politics. and so,his kind of material. peter: carlos lozada, in your

book "the washington book: how to read politics and politicians," you have a section on government reports, and that you have actually read these concluding the mueller report, the 9/11 report, the iran/contra report starr report, and the dobbs abortion decision. what you do learn from reading these? mr. lozada: that is quite a gamu t of text there. let me start with commission reports. the commission reports i think are wonderful documents. to get a sense of history. i am thinking of the 9/11 commission report, the january 6 report, the turner commission from the late 1960's on urban unrest and property. if you think of those documents, they are snapshots of america at some of

its traumatic moments. 9/11, january 6, the kennedy assassination. that i not one i've read yet, by the way. so i think of them as an alternative history. what's amusing about them is they are often so carefully constructed, but they are highly politicized like on arrival the moment they are released. they often offer all these policy recommendations, how to avoid these problems in the future, many of which are usually ignored. so this alternate vision of america, and at the same time a deep history of america. i fantasize about doing another book where i try to read -- there's these kind of commission reports throughout american time. and trying to read as many of them as i can, and try to tell a history of the united states

just through these documents. maybe someday. peter: this is a quote from your book. rixpected to get a general account of your life. do you know who that is? mr. lozada: that is lindsey graham. i remember that well. in 2015 or 2016, i believe i read -- when you were first quoting and i was like wait, who was that? it's not me. the republican field was wide open in01 when trump won the nomination. but i committed to read a whole bunch of these memoirs by those aspiring for the nomination. and most of them just kind of went along with the exercise. they realized that is what they had to do. but lindsey graham seemed sort of annoyed by the fact that he was expected to write a memoir. and i think that's from either his acknowledgments section of

that book, where he sort of resented the exercise. you know, it is something you have to do. i want to be president, so i have to write a book. i think it was not even a hardcover book it was an e-book. he did the bare minimum he could to check that box. his campaign went nowhere. but weirdly, of respect to the honesty about his honesty about cam books. he was just signaling yeah, this is something i have to do, i don't really care for it so i will have to get it over with. peter: it really is, in a sense checking a box. isn't it? mr. lozada: it seems to be a thing -- i would love to get deeper into the history of her and see when these first started coming out. had presidential memoirs since grant's, or even before. but this kind of quickie campaign book is very much a box checking exercise.

and a lot of them have the same attitudenow that i think about it, that lindsey graham has in that acknowledgment section. george h.w. bush wrote one called, looking forward. the titles are all territhe titles are all, the truths we hold, american dreams. george h w, i believe his was called looking forward. he also had some kind of line like that, where he sort of acknowledged, oh it's the kind of book you are supposed to do. peter: joe biden a couple of books under his belt. promises to keep, promise to dad. mr. lozada: i have read promise to dad, and i am currently reading promises to keep. what i like about those kinds of books is that, you know, promises to keep i believe came out in 2007, promise to dad in 2017.

but reading them years later can be revelatory in the new moment we are in. for instance, there is a moment in promise me dad, which is the mom more -- the memoir of the final year of his vice presidency in the year his oldest son died. and in the acknowledgment section of that book there's something that i started thinking about only when the latest special counsel report, looking into biden's handed of classified documents it said something about how he would come across to the jury as a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory. and in that report was how he had supposedly not remember the precise year that his son bo

died. in the acknowledgment is something that speaks to that. the first paragraph says, this was a very hard year or hard time period for me to look upon. as such, some of my memories of this period are foggy. i relied on many people to help me reconstruct the chronology and get the details right. that struck me as such a human experience. i think anyone who has dealt with the protracted illness and death of a loved one understands how the mind plays tricks on you. how the mind sometimes blocks out details. and there are things you don't want to remember. and i thought that sort of response would have been a lot more compelling than when biden kind of just got angry at the press conference and said how dare he asked me that. it was there intion of

promise me dad. you just had to read it. peter: do politicians use ghost writers? mr. lozada: yes. heavily. i think that is fine. i don't have a huge issue with ghost writers. because i actually do a very thorough job of revealing information, or at least getting a basic unddiligent ghost often will do extensive interviews with the person they are going to be channeling. and kind of unspool their lives that way. then they come up with a draft and they go back and forth with the principles. it does not always happen that way. tony schwartz was donald trump's ghost writer for the art of the deal. and he tried to do that. but even back in the 1980's, he said years later that it was difficult to focus and concentrate on sitting

down and telling his life story. and he thought he could not do it after a while, the ghost writer. instead he followed him around and listened to his phone calls and that became the way he shaved the art of the deal. -- shaped the art of the deal. there is a good book by barbara feynman, who has been a ghost writer for a lot of notable washington journalistic and political figures, about ghostwriting. and the title is great. pretend i'm not here. which is a perfect title for a book about ghostwriters. i found that useful to sort of get insight on the trade. but this is out of the roma politics but -- out of the

realm of politics. the ghost writer who worked with andre agassi is the same who worked with prince harry. and those have been two very well received memoirs. and so, there is a certain artform to it that you can be very good at. peter: do politicians acknowledge their ghostwriters or their co-writers? mr. lozada: they tend to acknowledge them in the acknowledgment sections. sometimes you get a sense that they did so much work that they almost deserve a co-byline. i think marco rubio was describing his ghost writer and described the extent of the work she did. it just seemed like that was a lot. but they don't always acknowledge the ghostwriters. and that, i understand, has been sources of tension sometimes. but also ghostwriters don't want to be acknowledged. it's enough that the people in the business know who it is rather than having your name on the cover or acknowledged in some other way. peter: we are going to show some

first ladies' books. jill biden, where the light enters. laura bush, spoken from the heart. michelle obama, becoming. are these revelatory? mr. lozada: you know, i have not read a lot of first lady books. i have read, of those, miceobama's becoming. actually, my colleague at the new york times katie rogers has just written a book about first ladies. peter: she has been on this program. mr. lozada: first ladies, i believe from hillary clinton to the president and the evolution of that role. i saw an early version of the book and i would recommend it. what i liked about "becoming" is that it showed michellereluctance to really engage fully in barack obama's

political life and aspirations. she just wanted him to be a good lawyer and they could just have a nice life living in chicago. there's one moment where i think she asks him, when will this be enough? liow much ambition do you need to have? and so i always think of that when i hear these rumors that michelle obama might run for president one day. she did not seem to care much, or share political aspirations at least early on. peter: carlos lozada in "the washington book," here is a brief description of to vice president's books. kamala harris, the truths we hole. use a conventional political memoir. mike pence, so help me god served the president more than the nation. mr. lozada: i read kamala

harris's book right when she was named as the running mate to joe biden. if you remember at the time, people thought it would be either kamala harris or susan rice. susan rice who had served in the obama administration as ambassador to the u.n. and so, they both have memoirs and so i had them both on my desk, i was going to read either one depending on who was picked. i hate to admit it, i was sort of rooting for kamala harris because her book was shorter so it would be easier to get through it quickly. i thought that kamala harris's book gave me a good sense of her. it spans her her first interest in politics, her experiences as a prosecutor and as a senator. and it was clearly her campaign book in 2019. there was one moment in that book -- actually, one recurring

phrase in that book that stayed with me. and it was the notion of false choices. up false choices often in that book. and she says, it is a false choice that have to be either for the police or for police accountability. i am for both. it is a false choice that i care about undocumented versus american citizens. i care for both. and of course that makes sense. it is a wise thing to try and dismiss false choices. but politics is all about,g making difficult choices between competing priorities. i remember thinking that her focus on false choices, which is a term she has used since in the vice presidency, kind of told me that she does not-- pinned down. and i wonder if that is part of

the ason that she has had some difficulty carving out a very distinctive role as vice president. i think that maybe is changing now that she has been full on campaigning mode. with pence that also came out in 2022, when it was clear that he was about to announce he was running for president. and a lot of it was about january 6. and i think he was trying to little bit distinguish himself from the president, separate himself from the president how he had held the line and not decertified the results of the 2020 election. but again his recurring phrases, he often said -- he would often respond to something trump said to him when he give him a task, i am here to serve. that "here to serve," i started

wondering, who is he here to serve? is he serving the president or the country who elected him? and he gave me his answer, at least for me, to that question. when he is looking back on the events of january 6 and he quotes president trump's video message where he is finally telling the rioters to go home and leave. he quotes it extensively in the book. he skips the part. trump says i know you are hurting, but you have to go home, we have to have peace. but he skips the part where trump reiterates the lie of the 2020as stolen from us, everyone knows it. so it is amazing to me that when he is looking back on that day that day where people were calling for pence's hanging, he was still covering for trump. that, to me, captured so much of

the pence vice presidency. in that elipsis. peter: from yourcknowls kind of a big deal. i thank my lord jesussuffer lawyer, bob barnett. even with the almighty on your side it's smart to keep a washington powerbroker on retainer. mr. lozada: i love that rub wrote that in his acknowledgment. because it captures in just a few sentencest game politicians play. leading about your faith in one sentence, thanking your power washingtonn than that. i joke that -- pascal's wager whether you are going to believe in god or not, it makes sense to believe in god encase case there is a god. i think this is sort of a washington version of pascal's wager.

put your faith in the almighty but just in case, hbarnett is a character who recurred in stories of washington in part because -- peter: who is he? mr. lozada: he is a lawyer for prominent political and journalistic figures. among the many things that he does. i don't know this world particularly well myself. but i imagine that many of the people whose books i cover in "the washington book" work with him and must thank him for their lucrative contracts. peter: he has worked with the obamas, the clintons, the bushes, alan greenspan, dick cheney. here is robert barnett talking about his work. barmr. barnett: i have clients all over the political spectrum. >> how do you do that >> --

how do you do that? mr. barnett: i like to think that they come to me not because of my teletext, or in spite of my politics, but because they think i can do the job for them and i hope they all go away saying that i have. when you go to the doctor you don't generally check to see who they voted for. and i found in 30 years of practicing law in washington, not just in this context but in my other areas of practice, that people generally want someone o the job for them. peter: he is not shy about his success. mr. lozada: i guess not. i guess not. that is the first time i have laid eyes on bob barnett. looking at that bookshelf where he is looking at all the books by his clients it is sorta reminding me of bobot and whose -- he's

well known for being robert caro's editor from the powerbroker on. but he has edited incredible chunks of american literature in the last half-century or more, including toni morrison and others. and so, that shows you, thinking about mr. barnett's bookshelf and thinking about gottlieb's body of work it shows you all the parts that have to come together to create these kinds of books. the lawyers who help negotiate contracts, the editors who put them together, it's a whole infrastructure. peter: before we leave the acknowledgments, who did you acknowledge in your book? mr. lozada: editors. i have been blessed with excellent editors at the washington post and at the new york times. and their work is reflected in

these pages. not just in sharpening my prose but in sharpening my ideas challenging them, helping me prioritize what i should focus on next, what is worth reading what is worth digging into. so editors, copy editors. the copy editor of this book also copyedited my prior book. i've never met her in person, because this was all done remotely but i felt like she was in my head. she knew exactly what i was trying to do and posed just the right questions. and so, that's been a thrill to work with really talented people who have the patience and understanding to work with a writer. other than that, just the many friends and colleagues who support every book. and my family. my father was a very -- my

mother and father were very serious readers. i wa given a lot of books that i was way too young to read or understand. and that sparked a lifelong interest, for me and for my sisters as well. peter: the version i have, which is a prepublication version, the dedication was for kathleen, just two simple words. is that the finished copy as well? mr. lozada: yes it is. kathleen is my wife. she is often my first editor, the person with whom i am discussing the ideas that are rattling around in my head before i write a word. she also give the book its title, this book. in a speech are referred to the washington book and she said, that's the title of the collection. and she was right. my prior book was dedicated to our a couple of novels that you bring up as washington books

i want to mention. sinclair it can't happen here from 1935. the plot against america 2004. why are these washington books? mr. lozada: this is a good example of books that are very much not in the same genre as the memoirs and the manifestoes and the rest, but that become fodder for washington discussions. when donald trump became the nominee in 2016, there was a lot of talk and concern about the rhetoric he would use, the authoritarian rhetoric he would deploy. and people began to refer to it can't happen here, and the plot against america, as reference points. those are two novels about

homegrown american authoritarian rule. and so i had not read them. i decided to read them and see how they felt to read in this moment. and there were some things that were a little surprising. you had the chattering class of people who said, oh, you cannot take these people seriously this is just the stuff they say to the masses but it is no big deal. often the authoritarian leaders had famous memoirs that they wanted everyone to read, kind of like art of the deal. i think one was called zero hour by the antihero of sinclair lewis's book. you started seeing ways in which they treated the press, ways in which their supporters felt strengthened and animated by the

classembodied. and so, it was interesting to me that so much of the atmospherics of the early trump campaign seemed not dissimilar from the store is that roth and lewis told. peter: as a washingtono by the way i don't think ofinside what? inside these books, that is basically it. but yes, i did not get to do that in 2020 when my first book came out because of covid. we had a remote session. this time it was a real thrill to go there. it's a store that i love. i take my kids there all the time. they were all there kathleen and our three kids were there to celebrate together. peter: carlos lozada let's go back to where we started, which is, why should people read

so-called washington books? mr. lozada: i think they reveal a lot about not just the politicians who write them, or the committees who put them together. they reveal a lot about ourright now there is so much concern about the direction of american political life. and i think washington books are an underappreciated window into that life. because you not only see how political figures wish to be thought of, or wish to be seen, but you also get a sense of how they see us. how they see the changes in american political life. and i think that is kind of vital. i will leave you one example of this. when i was sinking about the scandals and debates of the trump era i went back and i read books about watergate

iran/contra, and the clinton/lubinski scandal. and one thing that struck me in those three books is that the sense of honesty from a president was really important. like when it was clear from the nixon tapes that nixon had lied to the public, that became a very serious black mark against him, and he had to resign. when it was clear that reagan had not lent on all that he knew about iran contra,hat was considered one of his low moments. he gave that famous oval office address when it says, my best intentions tell me that we did not tell trades or offices. the same in the clinton and lubinski scandal, whenple realize he had not been honest with the american people, that was a big problem for the senators deciding how to vote. with the trump era the

presumption of honesty has been squandered. it is not as obvious that people feel if someone was not telling real problem anymore. that says something about them, but i think it says something much more about the country that they lead. that honesty is no longer thought of as even in ideal for which to inspire. that is the sort of insight i gleaned. peter: the author is carlos lozada. the book is called "the washington book:politics and politicians." thank you for spending one hour with us here on c-span. mr. lozada: appreciate it. thank you. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2024] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap] announcer: all q&a

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