Good evening and welcome to another expanded edition of Inside the Cover.

I am your host, Ted Ayres, and as always, we appreciate having you join us.

I think we have a really special show prepared for you, and I'm anxious to get started and have you meet our guest this evening.

Our guest tonight is Jerry E. Shiles.

Mr. Shile is a member of the Oklahoma City law firm of Parman & Easterday.

His practice is concentrated in areas of military law, elder law and Medicaid, Veterans administration issues estate planning and trust administration.

Mr. Shile is also a retired Army colonel with over 33 years of service to our country.

His degrees include a Bachelor of Science in Business and Economics, Master of Arts and Strategic Planning, the Juris Doctorate, and a Master of Laws.

He is also a graduate of the Armor and Military Intelligence Advanced Courses Judge Advocate Graduate Course, Command and General Staff College, the Army Management Staff College, the Air War College, and the Army War College.

This is one educated gentleman.

Mr. Shiles is licensed to practice law in Oklahoma, Nevada, and the District of Columbia, The United States Supreme Court, and as I understand it, he has argued befor the Supreme Court and a number of federal jurisdictions, including the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Armed Forces, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the U.S. Court of Custom and Patent Appeals, and the U.S. Court of International Trade.

Mr. Shiles has made over 340 presentations, published more than 300 articles, and had two television and radio programs, Tax Talk and, Legally Speaking, on the armed Forces Network.

For more than 15 years, he has been recognized by the National Press Club for his ability to translate complex legal issues into readily understandable language.

As you can see, Mr. Shiles is an educated man, an individual of multiple experience, and someone who is a skilled and talented communicator.

He is also the stepfather of the wonderful director of Inside the Cover, Phil Searle.

Perhaps most importantly for all of us tonight, Mr. Shiles is a dedicated and thoughtful reader.

I have asked hi to bring three books to the show to share and discuss with all o us in the PBS Kansas audience.

He has done so, and I look forward to the upcoming conversation.

And it is now time to go inside the cover.

Jerry, Welcome to the show, it is suc a pleasure to have you with us.

Well, thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I thought we would just to get us started.

The audience, might like to know how important is reading to you?

I probably read five books a week, in all different categories.

But obviously history i an area that I'm fascinated with because I think the more we read history, the more we can interpre where we're going to be moving into the future.

And where the problems are.

Absolutely.

How long have you been a reader?

Since I was about three years old.

My mother was an avid reader, and so she started introducin me to books as soon as I could.

And so it was fascinating when I got to kindergarten, in the first grade, in the second grade, I was bored to tears because they were still reading, you know, See Dick Jane Run or whatever.

And I'm reading more fascinating books.

And fortunately, in the third grade, I had a teacher who recognized, that I was bored and provided me with th incentive to keep reading more and gave me the opportunity to continue to develop that.

And it's just been a love all my life.

Wonderful.

And related to nothing, Where did you grow up?

Well, that's kind of fascinating.

My early years were on a ranch in the middle of Nevada about 60 miles from Las Vegas.

We had horses.

We had a little one pump gas station, and we had a little, combination cafe and bar where where my mother would make pies and feed people and, you know, the truckers that came by.

And both of my brothers had to ride the Greyhound bus at 4:30 in the morning all the way to school.

And then the Greyhound bus back getting home about 8:00 at night back in the early days.

So that was fascinating.

I moved from there to Las Vegas, and then my parents moved out to Henderson Nevada, a suburb, if you will.

And, that's where I grew up.

And then I went away to law school and, decided to travel the world.

And so I've lived everyplace.

I've been in Japan, I've been in Korea, I've been in Hawaii, I've been in Kentucky, Texas, 20 years in Germany.

So I've lived multiple places since then.

I would sa you've had a very blessed life.

And again, I would also say that because I'm biased, but that reading has had a great deal to do with your success and that life that you've enjoyed.

And this is a question that could take us lots of places, today.

But before we get to the books, what kind of reader are you?

And that could be subject matter.

Real books, e-books.

What kind of a reader are you?

Okay, well, I read them all.

I liste the audiobook books in the car, I have e-books, when I'm out and about.

And I have a break in time.

I always have a book with me.

I love reading hardcove because I can go back and reread those sentences that really impact me.

And I like a little bit of everything.

I like biographies, I like histories, I like, social development, if you will.

I like, how to be a better person, how to influence people.

So I read a lot of those kinds of things.

I like things that stimulate me.

Like, the Boys in the Boat.

I thought that was fascinating.

You know, how they were able to come together and incentivize and become what they were.

And so, and then sometimes I'm just in the mood for, you know, som funny story out of Zimbabwe or, you know, something that's that doesn't take a lot of challenging thought to follow.

I just want something light.

So I read all levels and I read constantly.

I mean on the way up here, I have a book in the car, by Tom Hanks, and it's a fabulous book.

I've got three other books I'm reading right now, so I, I'm not one type of reader.

I read everything.

And that's a perfect answer.

And, much like, myself.

So let's get to, I ask you to bring three books that were important to you.

Let's talk about the first book that you brought.

Well, the first book I brought is the Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

And what I find fascinating about this is you have an anthropologist and an archeologist, highly respected in their fields, who said, we've gotten history wrong We've thought we started out as hunter gatherers.

And then we came together into a community, and then we started planting crops.

And then as we got bigger, we had to create a form of administration.

And then we had other enforcement mechanisms.

So we had to have polic and we just and it kept building in this way.

And that's untrue.

You can go back, 45 million years ago and you'll find that there were neanderthals and there were Homo sapiens, and there were other groups that were interacting with one another.

And things did not develop in a straight line.

You might have, for example, in the southwestern, California, you had, Indian tribe that were totally egalitarian.

They had no slaves.

They had no leaders.

They would get together, sit down and decide what they were going to do what the next, next process was.

And then you just go to the northwest tribes, and they had leaders, and 25% of them were slaves that they wen and captured from other tribes.

And so they were still hunter gatherers.

And then the slaves raised their crops.

And, you know, you hav all of these diverse mechanisms.

I found it interesting that the, when the French first came over to Canada, to, northwest Canada, they found these tribes that they followed the chief if they agreed with the chief.

So the chief would sit down with his council, he would come up with wha he thought the next big plan was going to be, and then they would have these meetings that all of the tribe members would come in, and they'd have to articulat why that's what should happen.

And if they agreed, they did they had, nobody was suffering.

Nobody went unfed.

Nobody was unclothed nobody was, you know, unhoused because everything was communal and it functioned perfectly.

And they thought the French were doing it all wrong because people were afraid of their leaders.

People were living on the streets.

People were, you know, homeless, without money.

And they said, you're a savage society.

And it really upset the French.

So I guess the story of this, I mean, this is, you know, years and years and years and years of history here, but you ca look at the way things developed and how much was ignored by the experts.

If you went into the Ukraine, you could find these societies from the fifth millennium.

There were large cities that functioned without an administration, without a police force, without a set of laws.

They just followed the the old role of Malum in se, you know, is it a crime against nature?

We didn't have Malum prohibitum.

We didn't have speed limits and and all this other stuff in play.

And they function effectively for 800 years.

And yet the archeologists and the anthropologists, because there were no castles, there were no palaces.

They kind of put them off to the side.

And they said, well, they're just real big little cities.

And they ignored them and said, that's not a successful way to be.

And yet they survived for 800 years.

And so I what I, you know, we find that, you know, where did the first settlers arrive.

Well, they didn't come across the island bridge up high.

They came by boat, but that was covered over by millennia of silt.

And it's taken all these years to dig down and say, oh, wait, they were here first.

So if this tells you anything at all that tells you to go back and question what we've been taught.

And that is so important.

As we were talking earlier about history, and I think that we can learn from history, but we should always question and look deeper into that history.

I was not aware of this book, and so I am really anxious to dive into it.

What was your second book that you brought with us?

The second book I brought is, the Team of Rivals, and I see you've got that here as well.

And I love this because it's the story of the political genius of Abraham Lincoln.

But it's much more than that, because what Doris Kearns Goodwin did is, she said, in order to understand Lincoln, you have to understand the people that rose up at the same time as he did.

So you had Salmon Chase who was kind of a radical anti, you know, abolis slave, very hard, hard speaking.

And then you had, Bates, I think it wa who was much on the other side.

He was he was not accepted by the conservative wing.

And then you had, Seward was, you know, a New Yorker that, was anti slave, but he was sort of in the middle.

So you had all these peopl that were high, powerful people that had been governors and high people in politics.

And then you have this, this hillbilly, this, you know, this backwood man who shows up on the scene.

I have never heard Abraham Lincoln referred to as a hillbilly.

But that's what they thought of him!

I know, I love it.

Yeah, and they discounted him.

They thought, who's this guy?

Who's this hick?

And so they didn't consider him a threat.

And of course, he lost elections.

He won once, but he lost elections.

And even in his famous Douglas Debates, Douglass got elected.

He didn't.

But it was the debates that brought him to the forefront.

And Lincoln was fascinating because he said, I can't win the nomination of president for the newly founded Republican Party on the first go round.

But what I can do is make myself the second choice of everybody.

And so his people went out and said, you know, if Seward doesn't win, will you support Lincoln?

If Chase doesnt win... And they said, yes.

Well, of course there were These other guys were so well known they had enemies.

Lincoln wasn't well known.

He didn't have any enemies.

And so when he came to that later vote, all of a sudden Lincoln got elected.

So that's a fascinating And that's really the first part of the story is talking about that.

But then what's fascinating is what he did.

Because he said, these are the best and brightest.

These are the people-- I need them on my team.

So he went to Seward and said, I need you to be my Secretary of State.

And not only did Seward come on his team, but they became fast friends and he became Lincoln's biggest supporter.

He went to Chase, who was bitter about not getting the nomination, and continued to machinate behind the scenes to try to get nominated the next time around.

But he was fantastic at Treasury.

Was it Seward who was also behind Lincoln's back, negotiating with the folks in South Carolina?

Correct.

Yes.

Well, it just again shows the genius of that hillbilly to both politically and otherwise, to recognize what he needed to do for the best interest of the country.

And I think Lincoln wa that was always his perspective.

And I find Goodwi to be just a fascinating writer.

It's so fascinating becaus Lincoln had no ego, number one.

Number two, he was willing to accommodate.

This team of rivals to get what needed to be done.

And then he brought in Stanton, of course, and he brought in these people that they were diverse.

They were fighting among themselves.

But Lincoln was the glue that held it all together.

And it's an amazing story.

And for our audience, I want to recommend, Jerry has, enthused me to recommend a couple of book about the Civil War and Lincoln.

This is April 1865 by Jay Winnick.

It's, fascinating book one of the best books I've read.

We'll be doing a show on it in our other program later this year.

And then actually a friend of mine, Im fortunate to know, Phili Shaw Paludan, at the University of Kansas, wrote the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

And he spends a long time, a great deal of time, Jerry, talking about, Lincoln's cabinet.

So, folks, there's a couple mor bonus recommendations for you.

Yeah, your last book.

Well, the last book, I like to bring the history current.

So Prequel is by Rachel Maddow.

It's An American Fight Against Fascism.

And it talks about what was going on in America in the 30s and 40s and what we don't realize now is that 60% of the Americans did not support going to war.

They either favored neutralit or they favored the Germans.

And they they consciously tried to overthrow the Constitution, to overthrow the country.

You had the white supremacists, the white nationalists, you had the anti Jews.

And, you know, you had all these diverse groups and you had, dozens of senior government officials, senators, members of the Hous of Representatives, governors, you had the King Fish, down in Louisiana who basically said, thi is my state and told the feds, you can't come into my state.

His state, or his reign?

Yeah.

His kingdom.

And he controlled every single.

I mean, it was political posturing.

Who's the postmaster going to be?

You give me this amount of money.

You can be the postmaster.

And he he rule supreme down there, Huey Long.

And so you had all these forces working, and you had Herbert Hoover diverted and focused on the Communist threat and not paying any attention to the fascist threat.

And but for a group of individuals who took it upon themselve to go out at their own expense, at their own risk to infiltrate these groups, gather the information, and they had one agency working with them, and that was, the Naval Intelligence.

They were the only ones that were willing to take this information and apply it.

And and it's fascinating as you go forward, because they were able to bring this information to the present.

Eventually it got into the halls of justice.

And the U.S. Attorney Genera said, we're going to prosecute.

And so that's another fascinating aspect of it, because they brought a case to prosecute.

They had all of these defendants.

They had ream and reams of information that, on at least one occasion they caught them trying to hide that information in one of the congressman's offices.

And they they caught hi and they got that information.

So they're bringing this case forward.

They've got all of these people and these powerful elected representatives went to the attorney general and basically said, don't do this.

And so he promoted the prosecutor after almost a year of trying this case, promoted hi and took the case away from him, appointed a new prosecuto who had to start from scratch.

They brought the case.

What should have been like a one hour opening statement took more than a day.

They had like a thousand motions and objections and all of this going on.

It ran on and on and on and on.

You had senators and congressme using their franking privilege for free envelopes and their photocopy machines to make propaganda against the government and mail them in these envelopes to keep the storm rolling.

And then the judge dies.

And so they appointed the ne judge, who declared a mistrial and said, you've got to start over.

And the attorney general said, oh, wait, we won the war.

We don't need to prosecute these fascists.

Let them go ahead and serve in the government.

We'll just forget they did anything wrong.

It's fascinating how close we came to losing our democracy in the 30s and 40s.

Well, and we were talking earlier.

I really admire Rachel Maddow and find her to be, a penetrating investigator and a very good writer.

And we were also talking and a couple of other bonuses for our audience.

I because of Jerry, actually, I happened to see Blow Out by Rachel Maddo at my little Free Public Library and started reading it.

And it's about the oil and gas industry focusing a lot as you know, in Oklahoma City.

And but in that book, Rachel Maddo acknowledges, gives a shout out to the great and good Mark Zwonitzer, who happens to be a son of a friend of ours.

We have on our show, did a review of Mark's book, The Statesman and the Storyteller.

And I'm just fascinated how all these connections come together, and that, Maddow has done such a great job of bringing this information to us in an important and conversational way, I guess.

Jerry, this has been, so much fun and so interesting to me.

Going back to our introduction and some of those thoughts, how do you balance your professional reading and your fun reading?

You know, it's funny.

It's what I'm in the mood for, right then.

I have a stack of books that I'm readin that are almost always with me.

And, you know, if I have a half an hour and theres not something else going on, you know, I could turn on something mindless on TV.

Not Inside the Cover, but something mindless or I could I could pick u a book and read something in it.

So I think it's important that I stay on top of my professional career.

And, I do a lot of continuing legal education courses because I think when the law changes, I better kno more about it than anybody else.

But I also think it's important that I, that I stay on top of the history track.

And as I mentioned before, I'm the president of the Oklahoma Military Heritage Foundation, and we started 25 years ago, the Oklahoma Military Hall of Fame.

And now we have 13 military halls of honor, because all of these veterans have stories and they're not being captured and they're not being told.

And that's an important part of history.

So we're working on bringing those messages forward.

And there are so many stories out there.

And of course, as we were talking, there's not enough time to read all the books that I want to read or we should read, but, you know, going back to something you said, I believe that your what I'll say fun reading enhances my professional reading, that it really opens eyes and makes you think in different ways.

And last question.

Unfair question but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Favorite author of all time?

Boy, that that is a tough one.

I almost say it's it's, Doris Kearns Goodwin.

I mean, she she does such a comprehensive look at whatever topic she takes on.

And it' so thoroughly researched and yet so readable that I just find her work fascinating.

Well, she's also a baseball fan.

Ladies and gentlemen, that has been our show.

We have been honore to have with us Jerry E. Shiles.

Jerry has brought with us, three fascinating books, and we've talked about those, and we hope that you will be encouraged or perhaps intrigued enough to seek out these books or see out the authors of these books for your own enjoyment and edification.

That's it.

That's our show tonight on this enhanced version of Inside the Cover our guest has been Jerry E. Shil I've enjoyed it, Jerry.

I hope you've enjoyed it.

And ladies and gentlemen, we look forward to seeing you next time right here on PBS Kansas and Inside the Cover.