-From all over the United States, except Hawaii,
we're gonna go now to Redlands, California, for our next caller.
Go ahead, please.
All of a sudden, we have this screen.
We don't do the air thing.
We had a screen that said, "The next call --
Washington, D. C."
In those days, people spent a lot of money
on long-distance calls.
So, if I saw a local call, I would not be that big a hurry.
Hello?
And Susan Swain, who was, at that time, a producer --
She just typed on the screen, "Take the call now."
-Go ahead, please. -Hello.
Is this Mr Brian Lamb? -Yes, it is.
-Would you hold one moment for the president?
-Mr Lamb and students,
I just came upstairs to the study here
and turned on the set, and there you were,
and I watched long enough to hear several questions
that showed your concern about the exclusionary rule.
-It was great because we were trying to get attention
for the fact that we existed.
And the President of the United States had called this network,
which, by the way, has never happened since.
-I come from the California School for the Deaf,
and I would like to ask you a question.
Is that okay? -Yes.
-And I thought to myself, this is it.
We just crossed the finish line. -Ford!
Gerald Ford.
-Is it Gerald Ford? No.
-Eileen is all right now.
-Well, she could have been disfigured for life, right?
-The U.
S. government has been involved
in what officials here in Washington describe
as a "full-court press" to find the shah a new home.
-When we started in 1979,
there was no cable in Washington D.
C.
-Mr Speaker, on this historic day,
the House of Representatives, opens its proceedings
for the first time to televised coverage.
-This should have been on television from
the very beginning.
It should be completely open.
They're spending our money, and, as we know,
they're spending money now we don't have.
$22-trillion-plus.
And people still don't pay attention.
When we came along, it changed a lot of things
in people's minds because for the first time,
people could listen to somebody make a speech
from beginning to end.
It was incredible.
It was as exciting to us then as Twitter and Snapchat
and all this stuff is today to the younger people.
There's a connection between what freshman members
of Congress did back in the early days of C-SPAN
and today's Twitter.
-Those people who are watching this debate on cable
or through C-SPAN must find a sort of "Alice in Wonderland"
quality about the whole discussion.
-And Newt Gingrich was very much familiar with technology.
He recognized that this was a platform
that he could get and speak, and he started a process
of just standing at the microphone every day.
And he told me one day, he said, "Well, I'll tell you,
interestingly enough, when it got to 1981,
what I was doing, more than anything, is,
I was talking every afternoon when I got on the floor
to the Ronald Reagan White House.
-It does turn out, in fact,
that there is a world-wide effort by the Soviet Union,
that there is a very great likelihood
that the KGB Embassy detachment in Nicaragua
in involved in Central America.
-That was the time when Tip O'Neill
was Speaker of the House,
and the Conservative Opportunity Society was getting up every day
and beating up on him and making Tip O'Neill mad,
and we don't control the cameras.
And he turned to his broadcasting chief and said,
"Turn the cameras so everybody can see who's here."
-The Ethics Committee, I must say,
did a thorough job of looking into the incident.
-And, of course, there never was anybody there but the speaker.
-And it must be said that what they did
was drastically limited, the scope of the investigation.
-I used to go up when I first came to the town in 1966.
I'd go up at night and sit up there and listen.
They performed on the floor of the House just like they do now.
It was much more raucous then.
There was much more drinking going on around the House
of Representatives then because they weren't on camera.
But they also could go to the editing room
and change the words on the transcript.
We make sure that there is a record there.
-We decided against Contra funding because we felt
it is against American tradition to fund a private army
whose goal is to overthrow another government.
-One of the things that we watched over the last 40 years
is that the government is trying all the time
to control what you see,
and with the new media -- and we used to be new media.
We're the old timers now --
it's getting harder and harder for anybody in government
or in Congress or wherever they are to control excess.
-I know people love to sit outside of the process and say,
"If we didn't have televisions, cameras in there,
we'd be getting a lot more done."
These are grown people who have just been selected by voters
in the country and to suggest that we have disrupted
their little events there is crazy.
-Mr Speaker, it's time to take the mask off this institution.
It's time to expose the check-writing scandal
I like to call Rubbergate.
-Beat me up.
I say it's time for Congress to shove these illegal tactics
right up the assets of the IRS.
-The greatest thing about living is learning, in my opinion.
So, we're just a part of a big package.
This country and the people who live in it
need to educate themselves beyond sound bites,
and I suspect, in most cases, it'll never happen.