that is where we are but in fact there is so much more we could be giving that we have not done and those are the things that i've listed in the introduction. >> i hate to do this but please, let's think the panelists for this robust conversation. [applause] thank you all for being here at the festival and please, buy some books.ions] ..

>> written a book charlton heston, talking to him on book tv about politics 'when did mr. heston become political? >> actually he was political for most of his life. he was part of the greatest generation. he saw action in world war ii, off the coast of alaska. he was on several missions because he was trained as a radioman. he enlisted after pearl harbor he was in school and took him a year to call him if up and just before he went out the married his wife and they were married for 65 years. when he was in aleutians they were about to -- the soldiers were about to invade japan for

the final big push, and the estimate was that the army would lose up to a million men. when he bombs were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki he was overvowed. that was other -- overjoyed and hat semenned heston's political view. for for the world war ii soldiers think greatest generation men and women, there is a very clear delineation between right and wrong, and between good and bad. they all felt that they were the good guys, the whole generation, and they all felt quite clearly that the japanese, the germans, all the axis powers work the bad guys.

all of that kind of black and white definition of war, good, evil, all of that fed into heston's acting career. it was very easy for him to play heroes because he identified if heroes. he believed he was part of a hero mission. when the war ended, he was a huge supporter of fdr and then of course when fdr died and truman became president, huge supporter. mostly because of the dropping of the bombs. he was ad --ed alay steven continue supporter. people think of hesson, over my cold dead hands but there's a lot more to his story.

he actively campaign ford adlai stevenson in 1952 when he was running against eisenhower, so, that is part of heston's individual thought, where even though eisenhower was a war hero and celebrated, he believed that stephenson was more on the same level as roosevelt. that stephenson was the real roosevelt liberal and eisenhower might have been touch to militaristic for heston. in 1956 he supported adlai stephenson, again a losing proposition, between 1956 and 1960, charlton heston became a major hollywood star.

in fact, the biggest star of the '50s in hollywood. he supported john kennedy over stephenson, and in the primary -- in the democratic convention. he supported jfk. jfk, of course, won the nomination, and he went out and actively campaigned for kennedy. he was -- there was no ambivalence in heston about who he supported, who we wanted in office. in 1964, something changed. and he felt -- first of all, everybody who supported jfk was in shellshock after the assassination, and johnson's

sudden rise was not what the jfk people had in mind as presidential future. so a lot of them either dropped out of politic for a while and waited for the tide to turn, heston decided that barry goldwater is something he looked and could support, and the reason for it was goldwater's campaign, which essentially was in your heart, you know he is right, somehow that resonated with heston. in fact, he first saw that on a billboard while he was driving through arizona. he looked up and saw that and he thought, yeah, that's right. and of course at the time vietnam was just beginning.

johnson's great leap backwards into vietnam. so he voted for goldwater, lost again -- his only real victory was kennedy. then something happened to cement that shift. in 1968, heston decided that he wanted to go to vietnam and meet the troops. this was not a popular war. younger people today, want to thank you for your service, and throw out the first baseball, and all of that, that's not the way it was in 1968. there was a huge counterculture movement that climaxed that year with the student protests, the anti-johnson stuff, the

assassinations, bobby kennedy, king, so there was lot of unrest, and much of that anger was directed not just toward nixon and she vietnamese war and johnson, but to the soldiers who were fighting. that drove heston crazy. while other many performerred like bob hope were going there and not really putting themselves in any danger, entertaining troops and bringing some women, showing some legs, this is why you fight and then selling the thing to a major network and making money off of it. there's nothing wrong with that. they did a good service. i'm not knocking bob hope. sacrificed a lot of his christmases and all of that.

he's a good guy. but heston went right to the front, worked to the front. and he met with only soldiers. no performing, no pr people. he personally talked to about 400 men, took all their names, and their phone numbers, and promised when he got home he would call their wifes and loved ones, and he did. he came home and he called each and every one of them. at the same time when he came back, the fury that was going on in this country over vietnam, he felt was focused on these soldiers. at that point the last shred of his liberal leanings evaporated or were torn up. they were thrown out.

he felt that if you didn't support the men who were fighting for your country, for your freedom, there's something wrong with you. and of course the counterculture movement was all leftists, liberals, kids, who were anti-vietnam and that quickly spread to anti-americanism, i remember all this because i lived through it. i was at columbia during the height of all of this, columbia university. so, when he came back, he was firmly to the right. in defense of what he felt was democracy. again, remember, his war was very clearly delineated between good and bad, right and wrong, evil, hero, this war, the people he thought were the heroes, were being vilified as evil.

then he came under the influence of ronald reagan, which kind of cemented all of this because reagan also was a roosevelt liberal in the '40s. the president of the screen actors guild, which was seen in the '40s, less so today, as a kind of a liberal organization, leftist, maybe softly communist organization, and he was the head of it. and they -- he -- reagan actually saved hollywood from splintering but that's another story. he mentored heston into the screen actors guild. he put him on the board and he was an actor so he had access, and then when reagan retired because he game a producer on

nbc for ge theater and you can't be a producer and be a union leader. just no mixing there. so he left, and there was another president in between, and then heston became the president of the screen actors guild, and what he did was he worked diligently to reverse the liberal drift or the liberal direction of the screen actors guild. he believed that the guild should be much more to the right and in the six years that he led the screen actors guilt, which was the longest continuous presidency of the guild, he in fact did move it to the right. as an example, the screen extras guild, sag, wanted to merge with the screen actors guild, they

said we're all actor, in union there is strength and all of that. heston was against it. he said, well, if we bring you in, you will dilute our ability to get work for our actor. we'll just be diluting the agency that was very controversial because a union president locking out union membered from the possibility of getting work. secondly, he worked out a deal with the networks to avoid a strike having to do with reside alls. an extension of the reagan deal that he had pulled off. very few people in the guild thought this was the right thing to do. give up residuals, essentially, and get a better deal up front. heston was at the helm of the

deal and ultimately cost him his presidency because it was felt he was too far to the right by the constituency to truly represent them. after that -- he had 50-plus year career and anybody who has that, that is lasting power. that's not a flash in the pan. so, as he got older and he had been -- the interesting thing about heston, he was never a romantic figure on screen. he wasn't gregory peck, where there was always a woman in love with him. he wasn't rock hudson. he was this uniquely action-oriented figure. as he got older and work became less frequent, in the '80s, he was approached by the nra.

now, the nra in the early to mid-'80s was almost bankrupt. they had really no following. they were followed in those long-gone days as a walk co -- walk co group as opposed to today. i don't not today. they were kind of john birchers with weapons. they were looking for a face, someone who could represent the nra and make them all plausible, more acceptable, and easier to align with. they approached heston, who was essentially out of work, and they said, look, we'd like you to come to this -- we're having a big affair, an outdoor kind of ranch festival, and you can be the star.

so he did it. cowboy hat, the whole thing. and the audience went crazy seeing moses leading them out of the wilderness. it all walked. so a fellow named tony makris was the head of the p.r. organization at the nra had hired to find somebody. he then made a deal with heston. he said, look, we'll give you a private plane, we'll give you the best hotel rooms in the world, we will promote you everywhere, we will bring you back to hollywood prominence if you be our spokesman. like that heatson grabbed it and eventually became the head of the nra. so, just as he was the president of the screen actors guild, now he was the president of the nra.

so his political journey really continued back from the aleutians to the nra, and one meeting that they had planned -- they would say, come meet charlton heston and that would binge 5,000 people who weren't real nra members but they want to meet a celebrity. big meeting they had took place a week after columbine, and everyone told heston, don't go to that meeting and it was only about 30 miles from where columbine took place. drop out of this one, let it cool down. my beliefs don't depend upon what happens outside. i still believe in what i think is americans rights, their first amendment rights -- on second amendment rights. getting my amendment

amendments -- he went and did that meeting and that cost 11 years of blacklisting in hollywood. what is interesting and ironic about that is that the children of the blacklist generation, when hollywood was in the grip of the right, all grew up to the left, and blacklisted all the people on the right. so, the irony of that is to me profound. the generational shift and what they did. so that parent they saw as having done something awful and they wound up doing the same thing. but when the left does it, there's a certain implied nobility. when the right dot is, a certain implication of evilness, and i

find that fascinating. so, a lot of what i've written in my biography is a journey of heston as a man, as a filmmaker, as a star, and as a political figure, and i don't take any sides but i lay it all out there, and let me just say one thing to you. after a year of working on this book, i approached the family. i thought, they're going to be paranoid about anybody who wants to write about their dad because they're all going to be michael moore with a pencil. when i approached sager heston, the son who is a producer in hollywood, i sat down with him and he said to me, what is your plan? what's your agenda? and i said, i have no agenda.

i am interested in film. i'm interested in the link between the actor and the movie, the movie and the actor. and the story behind people who become so much larger than life, and he said, i've read a few of your books. i get it. and i'm going to open everything we have to you. and that's what made this book -- without editorial control, which is amazing. that's what made this book so spectacular for me as writer. >> host: you have been listen to marc elliott, the buying agrapher of charlton heston, here's the book, hollywood's last icon. those stories he told and a lot more in this biography. you're watching booktv on c-span2. >> become tar has attended

freedomfest many times. i you want to go to other free phenomenon defendant author goes to or ones, book tow.org and type freedomfest, one word, into the search are bar. you can view other interviews online. >> tonight on "after words," suzie hansen on her book, notes on a foreign country and american abroad in a post american world. she is interviewed. >> there's that question of are we sensual and the question of -- exceptional and why had i never thought this was a form of propaganda and thought to question where was this concept coming from and what was the joint was doing for individual americans? and i think that one thing i was realizing this took a long time to realize in fact, is that the very language that we used when we talked about foreign countries had been kind of

determined for us a very long time ago because we tended to look at muss cub -- muslim countries, were they catching up with us or behind us. that prevents you from being able to see the country on its own terms. >> watch "after words" tonight at 9 p.m. on booktv. >> atlanta started as a transportation hub for railroads. it got really crowded in the middle by the late 80s they began to build builtline railroads to go out of the center. and there were for different ones so that ryan revelle's idea to connect them was unusual because they never were connected. they were owned by very different railroads and there were industry built up around them, people began to live around them.

and then the street cars came in the late 1800s and there was this magnificent network of street cars in atlanta, and in their infinite wisdom, year every was born in 1948. they destroyed all of the street cars in there why? because they were old-fashioned. why? because starting around 1915, atlanta really began to switch to automobiles and trucks. there's a picture in the book of downtown atlanta in 1914, and it had a few street cars, it had a lot of pedestrians just walking across the street in five points of atlanta and some horses and buggies. and there were a couple of cars, and then there's a picture on the next page from 1924, 10 years later, and it was all

cars, with some street cars packed in. so people began to complain that the street cars were in the way of the cars and there was traffic jams and so they ended up building the streets over the middle of town. that's how downatlanta -- underground that came to be. in the process of cars and trucks taking over the beltline railroads died. the industries moved further out because it was cheaper land, and they could be serviced by trucks. so, by the 1990s, when ryan was writing this master thesis, it was mostly a corridor kudzu. and there are homeless encamp. along it and so ryan wrote this thing and said we should turn the into a vital network, take

advantage of the infrastructure we have instead of trying to make up some brand flu thing and atlanta tends to do. and he saw it as something that could really change the city it was very well-written and is online. let me just say ryan wrote a book himself called "where we want to live" came out last year, very good book and our books are complimentary because his is a big picture book before what to do with cities and et cetera. mine is a very, you'll fine, it nitty-gritty book and down on at the streets and meeting the people there and a different approach. and mine is much more about atlanta specifically. so, he wrote this brilliant thesis and put it on the shelf and thought nothing would ever come of it. like most masters thesises, and so he went to work for an

architectural firm, and one day a few years later at lunch he and his colleagues were talking what they'd written their master thesis on, and he explained his, and they said, wow? that's fantastic. bring that in. let us look at it. and they read it, and they said, you've got to do something with it. so together they wrote a letter and they sent it to every georgia politician and planner and environmental people, and they all wrote back and said, that's a terrific idea. good luck with that. and except one person who is kathy woolard, who is actually running for mayor right now along with eight other people in the city of atlanta. and kathy championed this idea and so did ryan and they sort of built a grassroots organization in 2004, the mayor franklin took it on and it developed into a bureaucracy which we have now.

she found ray weeks, businessman who had sort of semi retired and had enough money where he could donate his time, which he did for four years to this project. and i've got ton know all of these people, and i've interviewed like 400 people for this book in the last six years, since i began to work on it in 2011. and so they tried to figure out how could they fund it -- in the process, i should say, ryan's original idea of running street cars around morphed very quickly. his friend said let's put a trial bit where people could ride the bikes on it and why don't we have people be able to walk along it and then a guy named jim lang forward who was in charge of the trust for public land, somebody reached him and said, they wanted help

turning the sort of derelict land south of this big old derelict sears building into a park, and they said, you know, you can make this into a park and you could alleviate the flooding by building a retention pond there. and he thought that was a great idea but the beltline was all in the news at that point. the idea of it. and the said, you know, look at the map. goes right up to piedmont park. goes through piedmont park. with built this park down here, and -- oh, look, there's this other little park down here in this neighborhood. and he realized that it connected a bunch of parks. why not make it a greenway, make it a linear park that connected parks, and show hired alexander garvin, city planner, to come down here and to try to figure

out what kind of parks you could have and atlanta is severely underparked. we have a lot of trees in this city, beautiful trees, but most of them are in people's back backyards, not in public places. and in metro atlanta, which is this huge sprawling mess of six million people or so now, they're losing land at an alarming rate, losing trees as an alarming rate. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org doering. >> good afternoon. hope you are having a great time at the 17th national book festival.