Welcome to Words Matter. I'm Elise Jordan along with Steve Schmitt. Our goal is to promote

objective reality. As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion,

not their own facts. Words have power, and words have consequences.

I'm very excited today to welcome my good friend, the historian John Darwin, who also covered

politics for Newsweek. He is the perfect blend of history and understanding of the current

day political situation for Words Matter. We are going to talk about his incredible book

called Landslide. Landslide is a book about the period between John F. Kennedy's assassination

and a thousand days until Ronald Reagan was elected as the governor of California.

That era of political crisis and two political landslides so to speak. And John, thank you so much

for being with us today. It's great to be here. Thanks. The book is great on audible because of your

style. And you really tell a story and it's vivid, it's fun, it could be adapted Hollywood, I think.

Clearly I'm a very big fan. Let's start from the very beginning and you introduce LBJ and

Ronald Reagan. And where was Reagan on November 22nd, 1963, the day JFK died?

It's a good question. I think the standard idea of Reagan is that he had this early young man's

Hollywood career where he was a big star in this sort of pre-World War II period. But then

after World War II, he became more and more interested in politics and was sort of slowly

inching his way toward there until finally he runs for the governorship of California in 1966.

But if you ask sort of the famous question of Ronald Reagan, where were you the day that John

F. Kennedy was shot, he's somewhere he's really not supposed to be. He's working on a movie set

and he's playing the kind of role that he hated. He's playing the bad guy in this adaptation

of a pretty dark Ernest Hemingway story called The Killers. And he's not even like a tough

for strong bad guy. He's this bad boy who's a bad guy who's cuckolded by his wife and it's sort of

...