In this episode of Newts World, My guest today is Steve Israel.

He served as Congressman for New York's second District from two thousand and one to twenty thirteen in New York's third District from twenty thirteen to twenty seventeen.

When I retired from the house, he opened an independent bookstore, Theodore's Books, in Oyster Bay, New York.

He's written two critically acclaimed political satires, The Global War on Morris and Big Guns, and he's joining me today to discuss his new novel, which I have to say I found fascinating.

Steve is a brilliant guy and remarkably versatile, so I'm really pleased to welcome the author of The Einstein Conspiracy, my guest and good friend, Steve Israel.

Steve, welcome, and thank you for joining me in this.

World, mister speaker.

What an honor it is for me to be on.

And had somebody told me when I entered Congress as a Democrat in two thousand that one day I'd be conversing with you about books, I would have told them that they were out of their minds.

This is really special.

Thank you well, it's great, and I think you and are the other one time at a National Book Day event put on in Washington and celebrating various books.

But I have to ask you.

You are the only member of Congress to retire and open an independent bookstore, Theodore's Books in Oyster Bay, New York.

Was that part of your plan when you left the Congress?

It was actually and I know you yourself and acclaimed author and voracious reader, I'm sure bookstores had a special place for you.

They sure did for me.

When I would travel anywhere in the US or on Congressional delegations abroad, my scheduler would always put on my schedule the name and address of the closest bookstore.

Those were my retreats, my refuges.

That's where I would go to let my blood pressure drop a little bit from the demands of Congress.

And when I left Congress in two thousand and seventeen, and I decided that I would devote the next chapter of my life to owning a bookstore and selling books.

Which is a pretty courageous decision given the complexity of the modern book market and the rise of systems like Amazon.

Was it as big a challenge as you thought it might?

Be in many respects.

Yes, I'm a Democrat, and now suddenly I'm obsessed with less regulation and lower taxes.

Now a book like George McGovern after he had retired and open up a sort of a boarding house and realized how many rules there were.

Lots of rules.

I mean, it's a very difficult competitive environment competing against Amazon or some of the big box bookstores, who can literally sell their books online at a loss because the only cost that they're factoring into the book is the cost of an algorithm.

Really, I've got to hire booksellers.

I've got to hire people who know what they're talking about.

I've got to pay them a decent wage.

I've got to pay rent.

The margins on books is very, very narrow.

We really don't make much on books.

We've had to adapt.

We do very well with author events.

We have acclaimed historians come and Ron chernow and Eric Larson, They've come to our events.

So when we bring authors in.

We do well.

But it is a struggle.

On the other hand, I'm having more fun now, mister Speaker, than I ever had in sixteen years in Congress.

Oyster Bay, of course, was Theodore Roosevelt's home and it's Theodore's books, which I presume was a tribute to the former president.

That's exactly right.

His home, Sagamore Hill, is less than a mile from our store, and everything about Oyster Bay, and I invite you to come when you have an opportunity.

Everything about Oyster Bay is Theodore Roosevelt because that's where he shot, that's where he went to the drug store.

His Masonic lodge was there, It's where he ate.

And what better name for a bookstore in Theodore's hometown than Theodore Roosevelt.

By the way, when he died at Sagamore Hill, he left seven thousand books on his shelves and they're still there.

So let me ask you, though, if you get out of Congress you write two critically acclaimed political satires, the Global War and Morris and Big Guns.

That sort of makes some sense because that is your background.

And then all of a sudden my door is darkened by the Einstein Conspiracy.

I want to start right off and just say to all of our listeners, the Einstein Conspiracy is a terrific book, and anybody who has any interest in the most important scientists of the twentieth century and an extraordinary time in history.

Will find the Einstein conspiracy just draws you in.

It's remarkable what led you from political sce to suddenly writing this kind of a historical mystery wrapped around a famous personality.

Yes, we have something in common, and that is I think we're both fascinated with these little hinges of history, these fairly unknown moments that, if they tip in a different direction, fundamentally and profoundly change all of history.

So I have in my collection Gettysburg and your trilogy on the Civil War, which is kind of instigated by one simple alteration of fact, and that is that Lee wins Gettysburg, and that takes the country on a completely new course.

So I've also been fascinated by that.

And I live on Long Island.

One day I was driving around the North Fork of Long Island and I literally stumbled on this little cottage overlooking a harbor where Albert Einstein lived in nineteen thirty nine.

And it was in that cottage that he wrote a letter to Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him that Germany was trying to build an Adam Baum.

We at the time had no Adam Baum research program, nothing by the government it was being researched on an ad hoc basis by various scientists, and so I was thinking, what if Einstein hadn't written that letter, what if FDR hadn't received that letter and authorized a research program.

I also knew that the Nazis had a very aggressive program to try and assassinate Albert Einstein, that they had agents on Long Island, and so I put it all together into one historic thriller called the Einstein Conspiracy.

I'm may of viewing you from Bern, Switzerland, which is less than a while from where I'm sitting.

Einstein lived for years working as a patent clerk for the Swiss government because the universities wouldn't hire him because he was too bold in his ideas.

And then I run across this book by you, and I have to say I couldn't put it down.

I don't want to give the whole book away, but you come at it from angles involving the FBI and a whole Nazia, forte Quill, Einstein, and various other things that are going on in parallel.

I can't imagine anybody reading this and not walking away thinking a whole bunch of new ideas and new thoughts.

No.

In your case, once you had seen the cottage, how did you go about researching this?

Because it's a very well researched.

Book, thank you, And that's, as you know, very difficult.

You know, the tension between the research and a propulsive story is complex.

You know, you can over research a book and then it turns out to be nonfiction instead of fiction.

My aim was just to entertain the reader, to bring them on an adventure.

That's the bargain that authors make with the readers.

They're going out be on an adventure.

They learn something, perhaps new, and reflect on it.

And so I had to really kind of temper my research.

I went down a three day rabbit hole once on exactly what it would have taken for Albert Einstein to sail about twenty miles in the Peconic Bay.

I talked to sailors, and I wanted to understand the wind conditions, and I wanted to understand how the sailboat would have responded to certain wind shifts.

And finally, my editor.

I don't know whether you ever went through this, but my editor called me and he said, you're up to page twenty on this voyage.

It's really interesting.

If this were a primer on how to sail in the Peconic Bay, but it's not.

You need to cut it to three paragraphs.

So I did a lot of heavy research and then really needed to kind of tailor it and cut it so that the reader would turn the page and keep it propulsive.

You're a much better team player than I am.

I hate being edited when I write it.

I don't want some person who doesn't have my passion step in and say, well, the only problem is that entire paragraph is not understandable and nobody will be able to wade through it.

Those are the moments when I just want to quit and go hide somewhere.

So I have great admiration for your calm willingness to accept what I regard as a horrendous interference with the artist right to do what he or she want was.

I don't know if this was deliberate, but you actually, in my mind, have three different kinds of insights.

One is Einstein himself as a personality and the things he was doing and his speech at the New York World's Fair, and I mean just a lot about Einstein I didn't know.

And then second, you have the whole challenge of the FBI, which is increasingly engaged in anti Nazi activities, and trying to track down both from a sabotage standpoint and from a spying standpoint, what the Nazis are up to in that period.

And then third, you do a terrific job.

And I'm curious how much of this is built out of that kind of historic research and how much it was just a novelist keeping us amused your description of the village, for example, that was very very pro Nazi network of people who were actively anti American and pro Hitler.

That third track, in some ways was as interesting as anything else in the book.

Well, thank you for saying that.

For me, that was the most chilling to write.

This little village, and it's all based on actual events.

It's called Yapank's Exit sixty six of the Long Island Expressway.

But back in the nineteen thirties it was called German Gardens and was a neighborhood where you had to show full Ariyan blood in order to have a home.

Now this is in the United States.

It then became a training camp for pro Nazi activities.

And so I'm not making this up.

This is the historic record.

The streets in this little village included Adolf Hitler Street, Joseph Goebels Street, Hermann Gerring Street.

They had these massive Swastika banners flying from the community meeting house.

They had parades where they trained their young people to march in formation wearing uniforms of Nazi stormtroopers.

This place existed, and it was a haven for pro Nazi activities.

And now here you have these two FBI agents, who, ironically, one of them, by the way, is based on truth.

James Amos was an FBI agent.

The two of them have this mission of finding a Nazi spy who's going to harm Albert Einstein, and you would think it couldn't be that different.

Only it turns out he's a needle in a haystack.

Because there were pro Nazi activities just permeating and penetrating New York at the time.

I'm known for a long time about the German saboteur's landing on Long Island, who had picked up almost immediately, but I didn't realize that there was this entire internal network, if you will, that already existed that had really planted pretty deep roots in the United States.

They were penetrating our defense plants.

You know Long Island known for Grumman.

That's where Grumman started Republic fair Child.

We were the backbone of the defense industry during World War two and after.

It was very easy for a Nazi spy to get a job as a custodian, as a janitor in one of those plants and fine blueprints.

It was a very sophisticated operation, so much so that Jadgar Hoover met secretly with FDR.

I don't know if you ever knew this.

Under the Woaldorf Astoria there was a train track and FDR had a car there, a train car.

And whoever meets with FDR in that train and tells him that he needs more funding for counter espionage activities.

Because the Nazis were so powerful and so pervasive.

I think we forget how real these kind of activities can become.

We see some of it now with the Chinese and the Russians, but in their day, the Nazis were very formidable and very strategically thoughtful.

Now there's another piece of this, which is initially there had been an assumption that while we had passed the han Stressman point and we knew it was possible to create a nuclear reaction.

Virtually nobody thought it was doable as a practical nutter, and there's a real argument in the physics community about the plausibility of actually making a nuclear weapon.

I mean, you do a marvelous job and bring in some very important and famous characters in that period.

Walcus, just for a second, through that whole process in which I think initially Einstein is on the side of it's really not doable, and then gradually being viralized that gosh, it could be doable, and if the wrong guys get it first, it could be horrified.

Well, that's exactly right, and that's why I would hope that's one of the major tensions in the book, So Little Bit of Nuclear Weapon History.

Otto Han splits an atom for the first time in December of nineteen thirty eight.

He does that in Germany.

He's a German physicist.

Ironically, by that point most of the best and smartest physicists in Germany are gone, they're purged, they're expelled, or they leave on their own because of the Nazi movement.

He splits the atom.

There's a scientist at Columbia University named Leo Solard.

He's kind of an eccentric Hungarian scientist who and says, well, if you can split an atom, you can build an atomic bomb.

At some point, you can create a chain reaction that will build a bomb capable of immense destruction.

He goes to Einstein.

This is all part of the public record.

He goes to Einstein.

He says, Ottohn has split an atom that will enable Hitler to get an atom bomb.

They have a research program.

You must warn President Roosevelt at once.

And Einstein says, no, it's not possible.

He says, the science just doesn't justify it.

He actually says, even if you could split an atom, that doesn't mean you can create a chain reaction that can do anything dangerous.

He said, quote it's like shooting birds in the dark.

And he says to Han, prove it to me.

Go back to your lab and prove it to me.

And that becomes the interplay between Einstein and Einstein remains very skeptical until Salard drives out to the North Fork of Long Island in July, forces his way onto Einstein's porch, shows him the data, and only then does Einstein look up and say, why didn't I think of this?

And he then realizes Adolph Hitler is capable of building a bomb that can incinerate cities and the United States is doing nothing.

Five years ago, the opportunity to spend some time with Edward Teller, who is great scientists at creating both the atomic bombing and the hydrogen bomb.

Teler said he got involved in this long argument I think in the summer of nineteen forty with Neils Bohr and in Copenhaken, and Borr had said to him, even if you could theoretically do it, the amount of electricity it would take, the amount of energy you would take, he said, it would take the equivalent of a whole country's GDP.

Well, four years later he is walking down the corridor and he sees Neils Boorr at the other end, and Boor yells at him.

You see, I was right, because the Manhattan Project was larger than the entire GDP of Denmark.

That's exactly right.

Once FDR was convinced that it was potentially real.

The scale of is one of things worrying about America today.

I'm not sure we could cut through the red tape and mobilize the way they were able to in the nineteen forties.

This is a moment in time where the American government just realized we're not debating, we're not deliberating, we're not regulating.

We just need to do this.

And it happens only because Einstein wts that letter.

It's not delivered to FDR three months after it's written, and they finally get the letter to FDR, somebody reads it to him because they didn't want FDR just to read it by himself and you know, just put it in the outbox.

They wanted to make sure he understood.

And after listening to the letter read to him, FDR says, what they're trying to tell me is that the Germans may be able to blow us all up.

He calls in his aid and tells him to do something thing.

That night, calls are made to some scientists.

They convene a group of scientists and that becomes the embryo for the Manhattan Project.

So it was quite at hoc at the time, but it worked.

NTSI, who became very important and wrote the pre eminent document explaining the strategy of the Cold War, was a financier from New York.

Was in Texas and gets a call from his boss, Forestal, who says, you're not going back to New York, You're coming to Washington.

Meet me there Monday.

He shows up Monday, and forest All's on one side of the desk, He's on the other side.

They have one phone they're sharing, and Forrestal says, we are now going to finance and structure the industrial development needed the United States to win World War two, and we'll do our paperwork in about six months.

Now.

Can you imagine today if somebody walked in started ordering billions of dollars, had not been sworn in, had not been vetted, and had not finished out any of their aprilwork between the news media and the Congress, the level of screaming would be unbelievable.

And in thirty nine, forty forty one, that's the way they were working.

That's exactly right.

Most of the people who flee who are intellectuals or Jews, and Einstein actually holds on pretty long and leaves in thirty three.

As Hitler's taking power.

If he had not left, my assumptions, at a minimum put him in a concentration camp or maybe just killed him outright.

But he clearly understood what was coming and was motivated to move despite that Hitler was insanely antisemitic, but if he had understood what he was doing himself, the number some are of competent people he drives out of the country is astonishing and deeply undermines the German ability to mobilize the use science.

And this is one of the ironies of magnitude in world history, is that the Nazis begin to refute what they call dark physics, which is another way of saying Jewish physics.

So many Jewish scientists were working in the field, and Hitler has to discredit them, and so they create a kind of a new category called deutsch Physics.

And now it's Aryan physics.

It's not science, it's ideology pretending to be science.

To my knowledge, every credible Jewish physicist ends up leaving or is expelled.

For me, by the way, wasn't Jewish.

He lived in Italy with a Jewish woman, and so he leaves Italy to protect his wife, and they deploy to burn Switzerland.

They're in London, some go to France.

Einstein comes to the United States.

He teaches in California, he does a national tour.

He very much wants to go back to Germany, but he realizes he can't.

He ends up in Belgium and France, where the Nazis try and assassinate him, goes to London, and then finally comes to the United States permanently in October of nineteen thirty three.

But what would have happened had those great, brilliant scientific minds not converged on America.

I don't think we would have had the bomb.

And there are dozens of other breakthroughs beyond physics where we were enormously enriched by the people who came here.

A while back, did a PBS documentary called Journey to America, which was about people who came here legally and who made such a huge contribution.

Einstein is one of them.

I think the last interview Kissinger gave he gave for that particular program.

And it's very important keep this balance.

While we oppose illegal immigration, we desperately need to continue legal immigration and to be willing to attract talent from all over the world.

And Einstein is a perfect example.

Yeah, Clart as well.

You know, the guy who actually convinced Einstein was this kind of mad Hungarian scientist too, wins a Nobel Prize, comes up with the concept of nuclear fusion.

Literally standing in front of a stoplight in London that changes from green to red, has this epiphany.

When the Reichstag burned, he reportedly went into a bit of a trance, saw the Holocaust coming, packed two bags and fled Berlin and ends up ultimately in poopin Hall at Columbia University, which is still there.

It's amazing, and it goes.

Fermi ends up at the University of Chicago.

He's in Chicago.

He also spends time in poopin Hall.

You have this extraordinary convergence of Whiggner, Salard, Fermi, and others who are working on the eighth floor of Poopenhall, or at least that's where Salard's office was, trying to figure out whether splitting a neutron can create a chain reaction and whether that chain reaction can amount to anything.

I know you're just now launching the book, and you share my said understanding that you have to spend as much time selling the book as you spend writing it.

But having said that, do you have an inkling yet of what the next book will be?

I do.

There is a character in the book who is an FBI agent named James Amos.

James Amos was a real person, fascinating guy.

He was the second African American to be a special Agent in the FBI, the second in real life.

He starts working for Theodore Roosevelt as a caretaker to his children in the White House, then becomes his quote manservant, then becomes his bodyguard, then becomes his confidante, and spends Rosevelt's last day and night with him at Sagamore Hill.

He becomes this extraordinary FBI agent.

He takes down Nazi spy rings, he disrupts Murder Incorporated, and he dies into obscurity in nineteen fifty four.

My book ends with well, I don't want to do any spoiler alerts, but let's say that there's still a lot of work to be done by the FBI in hunting down particular Nazis.

And if this book does well enough, I can see a sequel where James Amos goes on his next adventure to bring down an even more lethal Nazi threat to the United States after World War Two begins.

Well, of course, you have the right kind of personality.

Who knows how many adventures he might be in over the course of the next decade.

As long as people will buy the book.

It's remarkable what you can then get done well.

I have a good instructor, because Gettysburg led to a couple of fascinating sequels and other alternate histories and other periods of times, so you know how to do it.

Most of my work has been nonfiction, and I find fiction dramatically more difficult, which is why I'm so impressed with your book, The Einstein Conspiracy.

Saturday, November twenty ninth is Small Business Saturday.

Talk just a little bit about what is Theater of Books going to do to celebrate small business Saturday.

Theater of Books has managed to recruit a very solid author to sign books on that day, and his name is Steve Israel, So that's good.

So it's good.

When you own a store, you can set yourself up for books signing.

I'll tell you, I love the notion of shopping local.

We have now a bookstore, Missus Speaker.

People come in your book March.

The majority is still on the shelves.

People come in.

They can read Gingrich, they could read Adam Schiff.

They're there not to screen, but to learn and to have civil discourse.

And I love the locality of the place.

I want to thank you for joining me.

This has been delightful as I thought it would be.

Your new book, The Einstein Conspiracy is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere, including Theodore's Books and Unsterbay, New York.

And I should mention to our listeners Theodorsbooks dot com you have a holiday gift guide right there on the homepage, so Theodore's Books dot Com.

Steve, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks miss Speaker.

It's an honor.

Thank you to my guest, Steve Israel.

NEWTS World is produced by Gayoish three sixty and iHeartMedia.

Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan.

Our researcher is Rachel Peterson.

The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley.

Special thanks to the team at ginguis three sixty.

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