Everybody focuses on 1980 as being the year of Reagan, and nobody had really told this story. It struck me as something that people of a certain age who maybe if they hadn’t, maybe even if they had lived through it they'd find it interesting, but certainly there's plenty of people now who weren't even alive at that time who I think would find it interesting.Īs I kind of just probed in to the story, I realized nobody had done. I was in the middle of this conversation with them and they started reminiscing about Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter and Carter chasing a drunken Kennedy around the stage on the final night of the convention and I just didn't really know a whole lot about any of that night or really the Kennedy candidacy. I happened upon a conversation in 2013 at a Democratic national committee meeting between two operatives.

I had been on the lookout for good stories that could be turned in to book-form narratives. And books have always been a passion of mine, probably one of my great passions, so I've always wanted to write books. The indirect answer is that I may be in the news business of covering the things that are day to day, but I really do have a deep hunger for deeper stories, for more complete stories. Jon Ward: Well, it's kind of an indirect answer to that. I want to look at big questions of history and meaning, but my first question I simply, as young as you are, how did 1980 become enough of an interest that it ended up with this book? Americans read your work eagerly, but in this book you go back to the 1980 race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Jon, you're now Senior Political Correspondent and the day-to-day headlines are very much your interest. I'm pleased to welcome Jon Ward to Thinking in Public. The book was published earlier this year, and Ward and his family live in Washington D.C. Carter and the Fight that Broke the Democratic Party. He's the author of the book, Camelot's End: Kennedy Vs. Currently he is Senior Political Correspondent for Yahoo News and is the host of The Long Game podcast, which looks at the value of key institutions in American culture, such as the political parties, the media, and the church. As a White House and national affairs correspondent, he has covered two presidential administrations and also elections. Jon Ward has chronicled the drama of American politics for two decades. I'm Albert Mohler, your host and President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Albert Mohler: This is Thinking in Public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about front line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

Camelot's End by Jon Ward