And the Welcome to Conversations, I'm Bill Crystal, and I'm very glad to be joined today by my friend Steve Hayward, now teaching constitutional law and political science at the University of California at Berkeley.

I'm going to be an inmate for the next three years there.

That's excellent. When you were a grad student at Claremont, did you expect to end up as a distinguished

professor at Berkeley? Not in my wildest imagination.

Congratulations on that appointment.

And author of many books, articles, all of them

valuable on a wide diversity of topics,

I guess maybe most famously, your two volume,

I would almost say definitive or authoritative study the age

of Reagan which came out when well the first volume was 2001 actually arrived

at bookstores on September 10 2000 2009. Is that right?

And then the second volume took a little while longer and came out in 2009.

I remember that.

I had wanted to be one volume and it grew to two as these things sometimes.

So how did you decide?

I don't know. I'll begin with that, since that's such's such an important I really I highly recommend that book to all of yours but tell us how did you come to write it?

Yeah, well two inspirations for it. One was I had a premonition in the early 90s for a bunch of reasons that

Edmund Morris's official biography would be a disappointment.

I didn't think it would be crazy as it turned out to be.

I just thought it would be narrow in scope and wouldn't capture the fullness of the Reagan story, wouldn't put him in proper context.

And that's why I thought there was going to be room for another major work that put Reagan on a larger canvas in the style of Churchill's Marlboro or I think my model

of biography for an American is Lord Charnwood's biography of Lincoln, which is a

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