 Here I am at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study where I'm completing my book on firing line, which was William F. Buckley Jr.'s public affairs show that ran on PBS from 1966 to 1999. And Buckley was a key figure in pushing the extreme aside of the conservative movement and forging a more mainstream image for right-wing conservatism. The firing line premiered in 1966 at a moment when people thought liberalism had really won in America. He created the show in large part to debate with liberal guests, to put liberals and left-wingers on the firing line. It's the name of the show. And to show what a proper right-wing conservative response would be to the left and to liberals. So if you watch the show from 66 to 80, which is in many ways the golden age of the show, you see him encounter so many of the key liberals in left-wingers of that era. It's astounding the people like Betty Friedan from the liberation movement, Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver from the Black Power movement. Nixon was on the show before he was president. Reagan was on the show several times. Very golden-wider was on the show. Victor Novansky, the former editor of the nation. And so you really get to see the encounter between left and right over this period as the country started veering more to the right. People who were later not obscure were on the show when they were obscure. For example, a very young Marine named Oliver North was on the show shortly after the mass occur when there were debates over war crimes happening in Vietnam. You could have Mr. Buckley, a Marine general or an Army general come down here on this show and tell you what his specific orders were when he was a colonel or you could have a lieutenant colonel come up and tell you. I think it would be massively disbelieved because here's a man who in the eye of the public because of the way this thing has been presented is trying to cover his tail if I'm to use the vernacular with paper. I think I want to go on the set of Firing Line and watch it happening live. I'm not sure which episode because there are so many good ones. The shows often start with a camera moving over the crowd. There's a couple of great episodes. One with Timothy Leary and one with the filmmaker Otto Preminger. Shot with students from Queens College asking really great questions. Do you plan in the future to use these means to settle with present-day problems? Let's say as in the Cardinal you dealt with Nazism or what do you plan to deal with let's say communism? If I have a chance yes. I would like to make a film. What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for? Well a story. You see I make films I basically needed the Cardinal was a personal story. How about I chose freedom? Well might be interesting. Whether you're politically the left or the right or more towards the center I think you can really learn a lot from thinking about William F. Buckley from looking at his program because it was a space where left and right could have honest debate. Sometimes it was clear who had won. Often it was not clear who had won. You can watch it as a liberal and learn about liberalism. You can watch it as conservative and learn about conservatism and learn about Buckley's idea of what true conservatism was and it was a moment when political debate was not driven by sound bites. There was real discussion these were hour-long shows and so in a cable news environment like we have now it's hard to find that kind of extended debate. People get a minute to be a talking head and then you move on to the next person. Not to the cable news is divided politically so that you have the liberal station, the conservative station, you know Fox News, MSNBC and a firing line presents such a different picture of how we can debate politics, how we think about politics and how we can listen to each other on the left and the right.