>> From the Library of Congress
of Congress in Washington D.C. >> Good afternoon. Good afternoon and welcome to
the National Book Festival. On behalf of the Library
of Congress, we hope you're having a
wonderful day celebrating the joy of reading here on
the National Mall. My name is Carlos Lozada. I'm editor of the Outlook
section at the Washington Post. [Applause ] The Post is a charter
sponsor of the book festival and a long time supporter of this
event since it began 10 years ago. Yes, this is the 10th
anniversary of the festival, just hoping for many, many more. I should inform you that the--
this particular pavilion, the presentations here are
being filmed for the Library of Congress' website and archives
and C-SPAN is airing it on Book TV, so you should all be
on your best behavior. Please do not sit on the camera
risers located in the back and turn off your cellphones. Also, there are mics on either side
here for questions during the Q and A. Our distinguished author
this afternoon is Evan Thomas, a long time writer and editor
of Newsweek and more pertinent of our purposes, the author of
several wonderful books of military and political history such as "Sea
of Thunder", "John Paul Jones," "Robert Kennedy: His Life,"
of course "The Wise Men" and "A Long Time Coming" about
the election of Barrack Obama. Evan Thomas is in transition from
Newsweek and is taking up residence as a professor of journalism
at Princeton, was also writing a biography
of Dwight Eisenhower. The power of Evan Thomas' books and
his ability to really transport us, the readers, to a place and
time long ago and feel not only like we're there in the
chaos of battle with him, but that somehow we're
seeing it in real time. Writing in The Post,
Book World back in 2007, he described the challenge
in this way. How does a sedentary
Washington journalist who has never seen war
learn to write about it? I have never heard of
shot fired in anger. I don't even like roughing
at outdoors very much. How could I possibly know what
it's like to fight a battle? The answer is, I don't. But by talking to veterans and
reading their letters and memoirs, I can try to imagine and I
can walk the battlefield. For the one here who's a fan of his
work, it has been a great pleasure to walk those battlefields with
him and it's my great pleasure to give you, Mr. Evan Thomas. [ Applause ] >> Thank you. I'm delighted to be here
with all of these readers. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Edith
Roosevelt was a loving and tender and supportive wife but she
knew when to take her husband, Theodore down a peg or two after
the Great Battle of San Juan Hill when Teddy Roosevelt
charged up that hill. She went to Cuba herself. And when she came back, she
said to her husband, "You know, that hill really wasn't that big. It was sort of a little hill." [Laughter] A couple of
years ago, I went there. I went to San Juan Hill and
it's big enough if somebody's up at the top shooting down at you. Certainly, for Teddy
Roosevelt, July 1st, 1898 was what he called the
greatest day of my life, for somebody who'd been president
of the United States for 7 years, but for Roosevelt, this was the day. He got up at 4 o'clock
in the morning. He put on his Cavalryman's
uniform especially ordered from Brooks Brothers. He tied a bandana to cover the
sun off of his back but also because he knew it would stream
out behind him when he ride on his-- rode on his horse. Roosevelt was very good at
public relations and like a lot of great men, he always
kept a reporter close by to record his events. In this case, the most
famous reporter of the day, Richard Harding Davis. And Davis reported that as Roosevelt
bounded up that hill on his horse with the bullets flying
at him, Davis wrote no one who saw Roosevelt, take that ride
expected him to finish it alive. He was the only man on a horse, a huge target well
ahead of his troops. He made it up to the top of the
hill, he rested for a minute, and he started down the other side. He shouted out, "Holy
Godfrey, what fun?" When he got to the top of the next
ridge, he took out his pistol, a Colt 38 and he shot a [inaudible]
Spanish soldier and that night, he took out his little
diary and he wrote 4 lines. He wrote, "Rose it for, big
battle, commanded regiments, held extreme front
of the firing line." And a couple of days later, he wrote
his bestfriend, Henry Cabot Lodge, "Did I tell you that I killed
a Spaniard with my own hand." And Teddy Roosevelt
was a true war lover. In 1886, when he was
27-year-old gentleman rancher out in the Dakota Territory, he
proposed raising "some companies of horse riflemen out here in the
event of trouble with Mexico." He wrote his friend, Cabot
Lodge who was a congressman back in Washington, "Will
you telegraph me at once if war becomes inevitable?" In 1889, while agitating
for military preparedness, he wrote British diplomat
Cecil Spring-Rice, "Frankly, I don't know if I should be sorry
to see a bit of a spar with Germany, the burning of New York and a few
other seacoast cities would be a good object lesson on the need of an adequate system
of coastal defenses." Now Roosevelt loved the hyperbole,
but he was apparently serious. He wrote Spring-Rice, "While we
would have to take some awful blows at first, I think in the end, we
would worry the Kaiser a little." A few years later, in 1894, he
wrote a family friend, Bob Ferguson, that he long for "a general
national buccaneering expedition to dive the Spanish out of Cuba,
the English out of Canada." Roosevelt wanted a war and almost
any war against Mexico or Germany or Britain or Spain would do. In 1897, he gave a famous speech
at the Naval War College, he said, "All the great masterful races
have been fighting races. No triumph of peace is quite so
great as a supreme triumph of war." Some wars are noble, certainly
necessary, World War 2 was one. The Spanish-American
War was a war of choice. In 1898, America was
eager to go to war. William McKinley, the president
then called for 125,000 volunteers and a million and a half men
signed up almost overnight. The war really did some good. We did liberate Cuba which
was being oppressed by Spain. It was at least to the
beginning a splendid little war as a diplomatic John Hay called it. But we got sucked into a
vicious counterinsurgency war in the Philippines that
lasted for 4 years. Most people at the time couldn't
find the Philippines on the map, but we lost 4000 men there,
roughly the same number that we've lost in Iraq so far. I became fascinated with
the phenomenon of war fever when I was writing about the
Iraq War for Newsweek in 2003. But I've decided to look at it,
I go back a century and I focused on 3 individuals who seemed to
embody this, one was Roosevelt and I'll come back
to him in a second. His bestfriend, Henry Cabot Lodge who really was America's
first imperialist. Americans didn't like to
use that word, imperialist. It was a-- kind of a European word and Americans were best
ambivalent about imperialism. But Lodge was the first to
articulate the vision of America as an expansionist power,
as a great naval power. He'd been reading Admiral Mahan
and he saw the United States as the natural successor
to Great Britain as a dominant keeper of the peace. I also looked at-- in the-- looked at in the book a flamboyant
newspaper publisher who many of you have heard of,
William Randolph Hearst, a great character in his time. He claimed credit for
the Spanish-American War. He was exaggerating as usual,
but he certainly did his best to stir the pot and he actually
went to the war himself. That day at San Juan Hill, he was
about a mile away from Roosevelt. He got up in the morning, put
on his scarlet tie and his hat with a scarlet hat band and his
valet prepared him a picnic lunch and he stuffed the pistol on his
belt and went looking for the war. He went to the wrong place. But 3 days later, he was on
his yacht off of Santiago and he was there for the
naval battle of Santiago when the American sunk
a Spanish battleship. Hearst took his launched into the
shore, captured 29 Spanish sailors and required them to give 3 cheers
for George Washington and Old Glory. He then turned these captives over
to the US Navy and got a receipt which he put up on the
wall on his office. It was there till day he died. I also wrote about a
couple of interesting dubs. One is William James, who is a
kind of Greek chorus in my book. James is a great early psychologist, philosopher who understand
the lure-- he understood the lure of war. He understood why young men
particularly were drawn to it. But he knew just enough
to warn against it. And I bring him up periodically, even Teddy Roosevelt's
teacher at Harvard. If only Roosevelt had lived--
listened a little bit more closely to him, history might have turned
out differently, but it didn't. The other is Thomas Brackett
Reed, a figure that probably most of you have never heard of. He was in 1898 the second most
powerful man in Washington. He was the Speaker of House up here. They know called him Czar Reed, a very interesting
figure, a very droll wit. >> He once said, "The definition of a statesman is a successful
politician who was dead." [Laughter] The breakup
with his friendship-- he was very close friends
with Roosevelt and Lodge. The breakup of that friendship is
one of the tragedies of my book. Reed could not understand
why the country was so eager to go to war in 1898. He thought we had plenty
of problems here at home but he was rolled by the war fever. There was, when he was the speaker
of the house, a riot on the floor of the House of Representatives,
fist fights, people throwing books, the sergeant of arms
had to come break it up with the silver [inaudible]. Reed knew that he was beaten,
brokenhearted, he quit, became a lawyer, died in
a couple of years later. All these characters are fascinating
men but the one I wanna talk about just for a minute
longer is Teddy Roosevelt, somebody who sucks all the
oxygen out of the room as one of my reviewers said, and he's
one of history's great characters. There's a famous photograph
of Lincoln's body-- Lincoln's casket being
led into Washington Square in New York after his death in 1865. And in the photograph which is in
the book, you can see a big mansion in one corner, belongs to
Teddy Roosevelt's grandfather. And in a window in the mansion,
you can see 2 little heads. They belong to Theodore
Roosevelt and his brother Elliot. And they are not only
watching the president's casket but were [inaudible] to really to something called
the [inaudible] brigade which are badly wounded
soldiers often missing a limb who follow along behind it. Teddy Roosevelt was obsessed
with wounded soldiers. As a little boy, he
would dress up in rags and pretend to be a wounded soldier. As he grew up, he became obsessed
with this idea approving himself in physical danger, testing
himself in boxing and hunting. He went, after his wife died and
his mother on the same night, at West to become a big game
hunter and famously said, "Black care rarely sits behind a
rider whose pace is fast enough." And in his head along way,
Roosevelt became big game hunter and he wrote a book
which he rated, game-- big game by the degree
[inaudible] to the hunter. Now, [inaudible] to grizzly bear, but of course the greatest
game is man. And Roosevelt himself had never
had a chance to test himself in this great game and combat
and he longed for a war. He was 39 years old when the
Spanish-American War broke out. He had 4 children. He's oldest son had-- just
had just a nervous breakdown, imagine what it's like to be Teddy
Roosevelt Jr. His wife had had serious disease in childbirth
and had almost died and yet Roosevelt had to go to that war. Years later, he wrote his military
aid, "When the chance came for me to go to Cuba with the Rough Riders, Mrs. Roosevelt was very
ill and so was Teddy. It was a question of either
would ultimately get well. You know what my wife and children
mean to me and yet I made up my mind that I would not allow even
a death to stand in my way. That is my one chance to
do something for my country and for my family and my one chance
to cut my little notch on a stick that stands as a measuring
rod in every family. I know now, that I would have turned for my wife's deathbed
to answer that call." The night before he
enlisted in the Rough Riders, his boss at the Department
of the Navy, the Navy Secretary John Long
wrote this in his diary, he's writing about Roosevelt. "He's lost his head to
this unutterable folly of deserting his post where he
is of most service in running of to ride a horse, and
probably, brush mosquitoes from his neck on the Florida sands. His heart is right and means
well, but it is one of these cases of aberration, desertion, vain glory
of which he is utterly unaware. He thinks he is following his
highest ideal, whereas in fact, as without exception, everyone
of his friends advices him, he is acting like a fool. And yet, how absurd all these will
sound, if by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great
thing and strike a very high mark." Well years later, Lodge
went back to his-- excuse me, Long went back to his
diary and wrote a little message in him written, handwriting at
the bottom of the page later, "P.S. Roosevelt was right and we
as friends were all wrong as going into the army led straight
to the presidency." Now interestingly the war
seems to have lifted some kind of burden from Roosevelt. It's as if the fever broke--
he got over his war fever. As president, he was-- I
think a great president, one of the great American
presidents. He stood up to the trust, he was-- and he was fairly careful
on foreign policy. He did not get us into war,
see, had that famous line, "Talk softly but carry a big stick." But the point is he
never used that stick. He aimed it a few times
but he never used it. He was careful and yet again when
he was finished being president, it's as if the fever came back. And when World War 1 broke
out, Roosevelt who was then in his late 50s, went to
President Wilson and volunteered to raise a division
to go fight in France. And Wilson, who didn't
like Roosevelt very much, was weary of this, not about to
make a [inaudible] out of Roosevelt or make him a hero
again, so he said, no. And as Roosevelt was
leaving the White House, he said to Wilson's top aid Coronel
E.M. House, "Doesn't the president after all-- understand after
all, I'm only asking to die." And House who was fed up
with Roosevelt by this time, paused and replied, "Oh, did you make that point quite
clear to the president?" [Laughter] Unable to go himself,
Roosevelt sent his 4 sons, they also action, 3 were wounded,
and a lot of action actually. That was a generational thing. Roosevelt felt that every new
generation should experience his essential test. When his eldest son
was wounded in action, he and his wife hurled their
wine glasses into the fireplace. But then, in July 1918, the youngest
Roosevelt son, Quentin was killed-- shot down and killed when
he was flying his war plane against the Germans over France. And interestingly that Roosevelts
got the axle to the plane and brought it back to Oyster Bay
and hanged it over the mantle kind of a ghoulish of this
black bent piece of metal-- kind of a ghoulish monument to
their sons, it's there today. Roosevelt though was
changed by this. He sat there day after day
pretending to read a book, mouthing the nickname of
his youngest son, Quentin, Quentin, and staring blankly. The romance of war at long
last had given way to heartache and within 6 months,
Roosevelt was dead. War will be with us and there
are times and we'll have to fight hopefully as bravely
as all those Roosevelts did. Teddy Jr., that neurotic little
boy that I mentioned earlier, he was the only general officer
to land in the first wave at the day, at Utah Beach. Using a cane, he led an attack on
a German position and won the Medal of Honor, a medal that his father
had loved before but never won. Bill Clinton actually finally
gave it to him posthumously. And so it goes, generation
after generation. Let me just end with a
couple of thoughts I ran into while I was researching
this book. One is from Paul Fussell,
author of the wonderful book, "The Great War and Modern Memory." Fussell wrote, "Every war is ironic because every war is
worst than expected." The other is from Robert E.
Lee, "It is well that war is so terrible lest we
grow too fond of it." Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Sir. >> You mentioned Teddy
Roosevelt being a lover of war and you titled the
book, "Rush to Empire," did Teddy Roosevelt
have a vision of empire? How did he see the United States. Do you think that he saw the
United States as an empire in a way that other presidents and
great Americans didn't? >> He did have a notion. Again, this word empire is not
a word that Americans liked. That was an old word notion, that's
what the Germans and the French and the British talked about empire. What they-- they talked
more benignly about the large policy
and it was expansionist. It was-- they wanted to
build the Panama Canal as Roosevelt actually did
during his presidency. They acquired cooling
stations for our new navy and they annexed the Philippines. But Roosevelt was a good politician
and he knew that there is a lot of ambivalence in this
country about imperialism. There was at that time
and there was brief flurry of it, but then we pulled back. America has a big isolationist
streak and we were isolationist again. World War 1 breaks out,
we go to war again. But then in the 30's pull back and
there had been this kind of back and forth, really not until after
World War 2 when we had no choice and we were the Pax Americana
that Americans sort of take on this empire, if you will. Roosevelt interestingly, it wasn't
so much annexant territories that he thought that
war and adventurism and new frontiers were good
for the American spirit. He thought that Americans have
become soft and overcivilized as he put it and that we needed to
find what he called, the wolf rising in the heart and that conquest
was good for our country. Now, he can sound sort of out there
certainly by our modern standards but a lot of people were with him
at this time and there's no question that he himself had
this war-like spirit, whether he was good for the country. >> Again, I think he
was a great president. I think the war likes out of him. I'm sort of glad he got it out of the system before
he became president. >> You said that the he never used
the big stick, what about Panama-- getting Panama, didn't
he use our naval force? >> Well, we never actually
fought a war. >> Yeah. >> We staged a phony coup in Panama. It was pretty outrageous
certainly by modern standards. We created an instance at--
that let us move in there. By use of big stick, I mean the
battleships weren't firing guns, the armies weren't
marching but certainly, we-- as what was the joke,
we took the Panama-- we took the Canal fair and square. We didn't actually take
it fair and square. We did it in underhanded
way and that was-- >> That's like-- >> That was pretty imperialist. >> He lifted the big stick
but he never brought it down. >> Right. He waved the stick
but he never brought it down. >> Yeah. >> Did Lodge have a future role
in the Roosevelt administration? >> Lodge remained the senator and
was a great friend and a source of wisdom and kind of advocate
for Roosevelt on Capitol Hill. Interestingly, they diverged a bit as Roosevelt was president,
was more liberal really. He wanted to stand up to
the trust in big business. Lodge was more of like traditional
conservative republican business oriented type. And the 2, although they always
remained the dearest of friends and Lodge broke down and
wept at Roosevelt's-- giving the eulogy at Roosevelt's
funeral up here on the Capitol Dome. On policy grounds, they
were not on the same page. >> I've enjoyed your work both
books and especially in Newsweek. >> Thank you. >> And I wondered if you could
comment on the future of Newsweek in particular and news
magazines in general? >> Sure. Well, Newsweek is-- as
some of you, well probably all of you know was sold by the
Washington Post Company this summer to a guy named Sidney Harman
who's a 92 years young. He's actually full of
[inaudible] and energy and I think that he's gonna be a
reviving force of Newsweek. I think he's gonna spend some money. I think he's gonna bring
in some good people. I think Newsweek has got
some good days ahead of it. >> Let see, which-- I
guess I'm on this side. >> Questions concerning
Roosevelt's trust busting. Who held his legislative
supporters during that period? >> Roosevelt-- actually
it's interesting, we think of him I just
portrayed him as a guy who goes charging up the hill. He was pretty good at
compromise and he did-- he did not go that far though. You know, he was urged by
the all out progressives to go all the way and
busted the trust. He did it slowly, somewhat
carefully. He showed a kind of restrained
and inability to compromise but frankly I wish
that we had today. He was somebody who actually could
make a deal even though we think of him as headlong character. >> Well, did he have any key
senators or congress people? >> I don't think so. [ Inaudible Remark ] >> This not my period. My period is the early period, but
I think that the important thing is that he would make-- he was
willing to make a deal with anybody. >> Thank you. >> Do you think Roosevelt
was motivated consciously or unconsciously by a political
future like being governor of New York when he went off
to Cuba to fight in the war? >> Well, let me put it this way,
did he have a political ambitions? Within 2 days after returning from
Cuba, he was meeting with the head of the Republican Party in New
York so it was on his mind. >> Right. >> And Lodge is writing
him letters saying, "Hey, you can have anything you want." So sure, he was politically
ambitious. Is that why he went to war? No. He went to war to prove himself. But the politics followed closed
behind and when he ran for governor that fall on the campaign
train, he had his Rough Riders with their hats, hoopin'
and hollerin' and playing happy days
is here again. He played up that Rough Riders
stuff to the hill and it worked. >> Thank you sir. >> Sir, in your opinion, what
possessed Roosevelt to go on that very dangerous
adventure in the Amazon? >> Well, that's a good question. Roosevelt as a fairly old guy,
went on an possibly dangerous and really reckless mission. This wonderful book about it
the called, "River of Doubt." An unnamed-- up in the Amazon
basin, he almost died there. He went with one of his sons. His leg became infected. Roosevelt actually
said, "Leave me behind. Let me die." And he said-- son said,
"No, we're gonna have to carry you out anyways." [Applause] "So, you're
coming with us." [ Laughter ] >> Do you think that if Roosevelt
had been elected president in 1912, we would have entered
World War 1 before 1917? >> Would we have entered
World War 1 before 1917 if Roosevelt had been president? Absolutely, as fast
as he possibly could. He was an early interventionist,
all for preparedness. He and his circle were
constantly agitating to intervene on behalf of England and France. >> Yeah, in your book,
"Sea of Thunder," did you have any problem having
access to the Japanese archives? >> Yes, I-- my book,
"Sea of Thunders" about the Pacific War particularly
about the Battle of Leyte Gulf. And I tell it from the Americans,
I've-- also from the Japanese side. One reason why you don't
see more of that is most of the Japanese archives burned. There is some stuff and there
are some Japanese scholars. I went to Japan with my wife. We spent a lot of time
talking to a-- really Japanese naval historians. There is-- there are-- there are
some records of the Japanese fleet. They are pretty cryptic. What was more useful to me defines--
I'll actually found some survivors of the Japanese Imperial Navy, one
of whom was standing next to one of my Japanese heroes
during the great battle and my wife and I bought him lunch. He insisted that we
rent the restaurant-- I remember it costs us
400 bucks, so I was hoping that this interview
is gonna work out. [Laughter] It did. Japanese sometimes is a little
slow to talk, very formal but once you got going, he relived that battle including taking
off his shoe and socks. So he had been-- he was
on the battleship Yamato, so that I could feel the 27
pieces of the battleship Yamato that were still in his leg. That's a bad as close as you can
get to World War 2 these days. >> Did the Japanese actually burn--
allow the records themselves? >> They didn't-- no,
no, we burned them. Our bombs burned them. We fire bomb Japan, that was
in a lot of those records. They didn't burn. They record-- the Japanese
interestingly are all about not being too critical and so their biographies
are very careful not to speak ill of the dead. They speak very [inaudible]
and it's rather hard to find out what the Japanese real-- really thought about their
own-- their own side. >> Okay, thank you. >> Yeah, Yes ma'am. >> This will be our last question. Thank you. >> How effective do you believe the
tour or the Great White Fleet was at enhancing our natural security? >> Teddy Roosevelt famously put
together the Great White Fleet towards the end of his
presidency, sent them-- the joke was that he got Congress
to appropriate and have called to sent them halfway around
the world, knowing they pay to bring it back the
[inaudible], if they had to. I'd-- certainly it was a
demonstration of American power. We showed it a little
bit in the naval battles at Santiago and Manila Bay. The Japanese sure noticed when
we arrived there with our fleet. I think it was announcing that America was a great
power on the world stage. And it was a show-- it was
a show of force but I think that people were paying attention. I know the British were--
that was the early days of the special relationship and
I think the British could see that we were a partner in this
great Anglo-American Alliance to rule the seas. I think they probably also suspected
that one day we would replace them. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
