Evan Thomas, Author, "Ike's Bluff"

this week on Q&A author and journalist Evan Thomas discusses his latest historical narrative titled Ike's bluff President Eisenhower's secret battle to save the world Evan Thomas author of Ike's bluff sub discussion throughout the entire book Ike's health why well he had a heart attack in office a serious one he had a stroke he had a latest stomach operation I mean and he was old he was at the time the oldest president ever he smoked four packs a day up till 1949 I mean his health was not great he was a robust man in so many ways but he was an older man with some serious health issues and they got to him dr. Snyder yeah dr. Snyder was his personal doctor lived very close to the White House seemed to be there 24/7 kept a daily diary this was crucial to me and I used it in a way I think other biographers have not kept a daily diary from 1955 on about the president's moved why because they feared that if I blew up or if they got too tense or too worried he'd have another heart attack and Eisenhower you know I used to say what do they think that they would say mr. president II have to be more relaxed you can't worry so much and he would say what do they think this job is because of course he worried so that was a constant sub-theme in the White House was keeping Ike from having another heart attack who was Howard Schneider Howard Schneider was his personal doctor he was older he was he had been an army surgeon kind of happenstance that he became a doctor he really wasn't properly trained to be he in fact he misdiagnosed Ike's heart attack in 1955 he got away with it but he could thought it was indigestion they come then they covered it up with the records but I could have died in 1955 he was not a great technical doctor but he was a good old-fashioned general practitioner he knew his patient emotionally which I think was as important or more important than any kind of medical training he could have brought to the table and where did he meet him he met him in the army guys an army doctor when Ike was was was was an officer in the late 40s and became his doctor when Ike was first I guess attached he was Ike was army chief of staff then he was uh the first supreme Allied commander in Europe in 1950 and that's when was about the late 1940s when he became like his personal doctor your chapter seventeen starts off when Eisenhower was feeling down or under stress he sometimes lashed out at his doctors the only people he could safely blame yeah well Ike was an old-fashioned figure in the sense that he kept his emotions and he didn't unlike our modern age where everybody's sharing their feelings all the time that was not Ike Ike as 1900 Kansas but like everybody I can't need somebody to blame and he could he used his personal doctor as somebody he could get mad at now he did blow up in his office at other people as well like one of the things I write about is that Ike had a temper a real temper it was like staring into a Bessemer steel furnace according to one of his aides when he blew up and Ike would periodically blow up but his doctor even throwing his golf club at him one time in the next sentence on New Year's Eve 1956 with the Suez and Hungary crises still smouldering hard schneider had found his patient quote in an evil state of mind well where did you find the Diaries there in Abilene hey you know Sue's me the the presidential the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene they'd been there for maybe ten or fifteen years they were used by by there's a book by a guy named Laz B who's a wrote a book for an academic press about Ike's health and he used them but popular historians for reasons I don't quite understand have not used them I I got a lot of use out of them there they were all there but they were open to the public anybody can see him where'd you go to get them Abilene I went out to the presidential libraries like all like biographers I spent time the Presidential Library and just asked for him you say in the acknowledgments that a fellow named John Newhouse got you interested in this book yeah John Newhouse is a longtime Washington figure correspondent wrote The New Yorker and we were having lunch one day some years ago and he started talking about the Dulles brothers Allen and John Foster John Foster Dulles Secretary of State Allen Dulles head of the CIA and I've written a book about the CIA which we talked about many years ago and he said what would you like to do the Dulles brothers as a biography he had thought about it he's getting older he said why don't you try it I said I was interested but then he started the conversation drifted off to Eisenhower to the boss of the Dulles brothers and Newhouse said something to me that was very interesting he said that general Goodpasture who had been Ike's chief staff secretary but really his chief national security adviser in that form as it was in the 1950s had said to had no new house and talked to him and said you know the thing about Eisenhower is that he would never tell anybody whether he was going to use nuclear weapons now why is this important because in the 1950s nuclear weapons were pretty new and we threatened to use them at various stages Ike did but nobody ever knew whether he was serious or not whether he meant it and of course to be credible as a deterrent you you you know you have to be credible and I'd never told anybody and I was fascinated by that notion talk about the loneliness of command the use of nuclear weapons what could be a greater command decision than that here was a guy who had run the Allied invasion in World War two liberated Europe but now he's president and he has an even greater level of responsibility at a time when nuclear weapons are new or new Soviets are getting them we've got them not just one or two but we're building a whole arsenal tactical nuclear weapons H bombs are we gonna use these things or not and Ike use them as a tool he embraced this unusable weapon as a tool basically to basically to avoid any war and that's the book is about its how Ike use nuclear weapons to essentially Bluff to avoid any war he didn't want to even get into little Wars because central insight Eisenhower knew that little Wars lead to big Wars that wars get out of control who is older John Foster Dulles or Allen Dulles John Foster is the older brother Allen is the younger brother and John Foster Dulles Secretary of State Allen Dulles CIA you say that Eisenhower hated him Allen Dulles well Eisenhower came at first said you know first tolerated him because to run the CIA you need as ice never said a kind of a genius a different kind of genius a spymaster and at first Dulles was that man for Eisenhower but as time went on and and Dulles became sort of looser around the edges and distracted and older and the CIA which had had some early successes the overthrow of the governments in Guatemala and Iran as they started having some blunders poof plots that failed as an hour began to distrust Dulles but one of his failings and I said I was not perfect I've written a flattering biography but he was not perfect he should have fired Dulles because by the end the CIA was out of control and as I write in the book really came a cropper at the very end in 1961 the Paris summit very important with Khrushchev to try to bring date on into the Cold War the CIA did not warn Eisenhower that the u-2 spy plane was at risk of getting shot down flying over Russia very important spying over getting information but Bissell who was the head of covert operations at the CIA did not warn the president United States big oversight that this plane can get shot down and it did get shot down at 1960 Francis Gary Powers big to do that was the end of day taught for a long period of time and the Cold War entered a very dangerous phase so the CIA basically betrayed betrayed Ike I think it's a strong word but maybe not too strong a word at the end here and for that reason Eisenhower was really mad at himself that he didn't fire Dulles I took to Eisenhower his son John was 90 years old very much alert heads all his marbles I had lunch with him recently a really interesting guy who worked in the White House for his father worked for Andy Goode pastor there the staff secretary and John Isner as they flew to that failed summit meeting John Eisenhower went to his father and said you should have fired him and Eisenhower blew up defensively you know told off his son he blew up I think cuz he was mad at himself that he hadn't gotten rid of Allen Dulles earlier and I remember that quote something like you you know you're not president why you know it's very very critical of Assad yeah this reminded me acts of George Bush one of the George Bush and Eisenhower similar George Bush HW Bush the first George Bush we're similar they didn't boast much they had a kind of a natural confidence but everyone smiled they would say things like I'm president and you're not George Bush would say that famously and Eisenhower in this case said to his son I'm the president you're not and it's a kind of a it's a it's a in a way a feeble defense I mean it's it's it's sort of don't question my judgment and Eisenhower was not that way normally Eisenhower welcomed criticism and he would engage in debate and he would bring his subordinates in but on something like this I think he know he knew that he'd blown it and he regretted it what book is this for you number eight of all those which sold the best I wrote a World War two book called sea of Thunder that sold over 100,000 copies in hardback which sold the least I think my CIA book might have been I'm not sure to touch it either my CIA a book authors should know these things or a book I wrote my last book which was called the war lovers about Teddy Roosevelt and both those books sold less than 20,000 copies when you did you decide that this was going to be a flattering portrait of Dwight Eisenhower it's hard to say you know it's it's sort of a slow process authors the cliches the author's fall in love with their subjects and then they kind of fall out in love with them then have to reconcile that I was I would say I was predisposed to like Eisenhower for one big reason I'm fascinated with the idea of confidence that is so great that you don't have to pretend or Bluff we live in this celebrity age where people are always showing off and Eisenhower's a throwback figure to somebody who's so confident he could be humble I'm so interested in people are so confident they can afford to be humble they don't have to show off arrogant people are generally insecure I'm at my worst when I'm afraid I could be arrogant when I'm afraid when I'm insecure I'm arrogant when I'm secure I'm more humble and that phenomenon interests me and Eisenhower really represented that's kind of secure confidence even though as I say in the book he was seething with anger and he had a lot of fear and insecurities but he had this basic confidence that allowed him to kind of rise above things to keep his own counsel to experience the loneliness of command to take on responsibility in a way that was really unusual about every chapter you have a quote from John Eisenhart from an interview how often did you see John Eisenhower and what did you learn from him that nobody has ever printed that you know of I had lunch with Eisenhower three times and interviewed him over the phone several times Susan Eisenhower his daughter got me too and and and she'll be the first to tell you that dad could be a little cranky and he can't be he's a cantankerous guy in some ways but he's really smart and he's really honest and he's honest about his father and he came right out and this is new he came right out and said to me good luck I don't understand my own father good luck and he's clearly been spending a lot of time in his life trying to figure out dad and he engaged with me in this process of let's basically let's figure out my father he was funny and charming and amazingly honest there was a moment there when he said we were weighing the genial warm sunny Eisenhower against the cold blooded Eisenhower sort of 50/50 and John Isner I said well make that 75 percent cold blooded now that's an unusual son who's honest enough to talk that way about his own to he loved his father there was a loving relationship nope about it but it was a complicated relationship because can you imagine being Dwight Eisenhower's son John Eisenhower begins his memoirs with a great first sentence he says I sometimes think that I was born standing at attention very tough to have a father who's always lecturing you on deportment as Dwight Eisenhower did to his own son John but John remarkable man you quoted Susan at length but didn't quote David Eisenhower except through his book did interview David Eisenhower David was sort of one step more guarded with me then Susan now I spent a lot of time was Susan and John but David was he was friendly he was polite he's a very nice man but I sensed in him a bit of reserve I sent him the manuscript saying here it is got no response I did hear back from Susan made some fixes based on what she told me sent it to John basically all he did was send me a blurb on the back saying very flattering blurb saying you got as close to my dad as anybody's going to but David I think it's been more in the public eye in a way you know he's married to Julie that next Julie Nick's excuse me that can make you a little wet where e'er his book I should say is fantastic it was a great source of me John David Eisenhower wrote a book about his father's retired grandfather Susan grandfather's retirement oh what's that oh it's something like in all his glory or something like that but it's about Ike after he's president and it's a fantastically warm affectionate funny memoir and I did use that what you learn from Susan Susan I learned I was very interested in Mamie who does not play a great role in advising Ike but whose marriage was important and as Susan told me the kind of things that little things that make a difference that for instance Mamie dressed carefully for Ike and wore clothes that showed off her bosom and her waist there was some sex life between these folks and you know Ike was a very handsome guy virile guy here here the wedding wedding pictures of them and they you know there's all this chatter about Kay Summersby and Ike having a mistress in World War two you know he may or may not have slept with Kay Summersby but he had a real love with his own wife and Susan help me understand that Susan is also very savvy very savvy public observer think that's her right there that's baby yeah yeah it could be with Grant with uh with granny look at that Susan and and David were close but he was a good grandfather he paid attention to his grandkids and Susan was a writer and she's a wonderful story about her horse getting loose and tearing up the putting green at Gettysburg where they lived and she thought oh my god grandpa's gonna let me have it but he didn't he was he was sweet with her and controlled and you know showed his self-control and his graciousness Mamie Eisenhower did she have a drinking problem and the whole thing that the picture do you paint in there is they were at each other's throat but yet very close and there's a quote once from dr. Schneider I think in his diary where he told her to go wrap her itself around her husband to keep him warm yeah when he had his heart attack one thing Schneider did write about this he misdiagnosed it but he he told Mimi to get in bed and unfold her husband because he was in shock and chilled that was actually plain spoken old-fashioned medical advice at work but it gets at a larger thing Bob maybe and Ike were the first president I believe in a long time to share the same bed they made him the first president said that I know they slept in the same bed and they had a close physical and personal relationship even though they snort at each other they fought Mamie was high-strung she was paranoid about her husband's health they would clash and this is all in Snyder's diary but there was nonetheless Snyder has one scene where they're at each other all day long grabbing at each other and yet at four o'clock in the morning that Snyder's in the White House he records that I gets up in the morning and and he was sleeping he had gone to sulk his dressing room and he gets up and he crawls into bed with his wife that's very important you know that those intimate things are so important to somebody who has to deal with the responsibility of handling an arsenal of nuclear weapons how extensive were Howard Snyder's Diaries usually a paragraph or two every day they would come and go a little bit I can let Snyder had a bit of a falling out towards the very end over a sort of a jealous spat and they unfortunately they their the diaries are less full right around the time of the Paris summit but generally it's about a paragraph a day we used at what times were you surprised by what you read and did Howard Schneider know that these Diaries would become public I don't think he did I mean you know I he would quoted like a couple of times saying okay Howard let's get drunk I'm not sure the personal doctor would have if he'd known that those things were coming public were to put something like that in or intimate details about his his stomach was always acting up there are a lot of stories about Ike's flatulence I mean very personal stuff that I don't think a doctor would want out but one way or another it made its way I guess to Snyder's family to the Eisenhower library and now it's public and historians are lucky that it is how long has it been public I I'm trying to remember this I think late 90s I think it was bequeath to the low library there's also a discussion a lot in here from the diary of and Whitman yeah who is she and what was Mamie Eisenhower's reaction to Han Whitman and Whitman was Ike's personal secretary incredibly important to him really good at her job and she kept a diary that which is also in the very useful and and I used in the Eisenhower library but she and Mamie did not get along some backstory on that Mamie of course have been jealous of kay summersby the English driver who allegedly I I'm not sure if this is true but allegedly had an affair with Ike during World War two so two weeks after Ike hires Whitman mrs. Whitman in the 1952 campaign Mamie tries to get her fired she's it's a rival and I gets her to calm down mrs. Whitman stays in her side mamie's diet stays in her mamie only visited the Oval Office four times in eight years that was mrs. Whitman's domain name ease domain was the White House was the residence and they had sort of an uneasy peace although after Ike retired mrs. Whitman came at the Gettysburg and didn't last that long I think there was some friction with Mamie then and she then went to work for Nelson Rockefeller the I'm pulling out a lot of the personal stuff primarily because so much has been on this network about Dwight Eisenhower that some of this I'd not seen before including the fact you said he played 800 rounds of golf in eight years that comes out to about two rounds of golf a week and we see complaints today about Barack Obama playing too much golf as he come close to the kind of golfing no III saw some number on Obama I think was like a hundred times or something not close I played a lot of golf now he took some grief about this while he was president yeah in fact developed this kind of reputation is a golf playing kind of out of it caretaker president so there was a political cost Ike's own view was it was essential for is mental health that to be a commander he needed to be out on the golf course and relaxing as I write in the book however it was not a good game to relax any any golfers out there know that I got geek golf was not a game a perfect as they say and Ike was tense and he blew up he said he threw his club at his doctor once he was not an easy doctor and if anything I think sometimes the golf didn't relax him it made him more tense you say in your book that he thought Milton Eisenhower his brother could be a successor in 1956 yeah he was very close to his brother who would was a president of Penn State and would drive down every weekend and stay in the White House till he found out that Ike was paying for him to stay in the White House some fee and then he stayed at the Mayflower Hotel typical penny scrupulous cost-conscious Kansas Kansans anyways Milton there's not much record of what Milton said to Ike though that's those who notes weren't taken Milton has kind of a bland memoir but clearly Ike Milton because he said in various letters that he thought he could be President the United States obviously impossible presidents brothers not gonna follow him well maybe not so impossible look at the Bush family but it didn't happen and was unlikely he was president 1953 to 1960 the end of 60 he was if I calculate this right he was 63 to about seven he was seven he turned 70 in November of 1960 so he was 70 he was and that made him the all the time the oldest president ever he was 70 at JFK's inauguration it was it struck me though that 63 to 70 and he was sick all that time and tense all that time after he had won World War two among other things yeah I mean you know war two will take a toll out of you I don't think he ate all he ate a lot of steaks by modern standards he was probably didn't have the healthiest diet he did quit smoking but four packs a day from nineteen what it must have been 1915 or 1910 to 1949 that's a lot of Camel cigarettes and you know it took a toll on him and his stomach was in bad shape I think he had a latest which was a not something wrong with his intestine they had to operate on it but it was a mostly a nervous stomach when he gave a really important speech he'd get sick he gave a famous speech early on about the chance for peace and he could barely give it his hands were shaking he was sweating he was skipping pages in his speech because he was afraid he was gonna have it was he put it in an unfortunate accident you know his stomach a lot of people get nervous stomach psyche really did I wrote down a lot of words you used to describe him and I don't know that this is gonna work enough but I'm going to mention him and just give us a little touch of what you meant by that you said he was manipulative well he he didn't always tell you what he want he seemed to be plain and sunny but he had a way of pushing people in a direction when they didn't even know they were being pushed you said he was crafty well he was he seemed to be honest and genial but he was he could lie I mean he believed in the sea I he was a big user of the CIA he believed in deception and assembling mercurial well yet in enormous temper he was sunny but he had separately Gopal a romantic well you know I think here's a romantic about the United States you really loved his country he loved his wife he loved West Point duty honor country those were not just romantic ideas they were from his heart hero worshipper he liked de Gaulle interestingly Churchill he was an admirer of Washington he really Lee I mean he had heroes widely and you point out that he was a big fan and he lived on it lived on the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg Lee's a complicated figure Utley on the one hand was good because Lee cared about his troops Eisen that was really important to Eisenhower or a general who cared about his troops basically a great strategist but importantly he thought on the third day at Gettysburg Lee made a big mistake by allowing Pickett to make the charge that failed because Lee said to Pickett do it if you can Eisenhower as a commander never would have said to his combat commander do it if you can it was either you know you're gonna win or you you don't you don't take a chance on something like that Eisenhower was an all-or-nothing guy don't do it unless you're gonna win and so I thought Lee made a big mistake on the third day Gettysburg and that was an important lesson to him another person note when he was president of Columbia University for I think seven years yeah only really though for one or two he was formally the president but really only in 1949 50 and went back to NATO for a while yes but you say that what I'm getting at is where did he get his money and to buy the farm and Gettysburg in place like that because you say that Mamie had to sell her stocks in order for them to buy a car when they were in New York at Columbia yeah he got he wrote a memoir World War two and was paid $800,000 and he got a tax deal to treat it as capital gains so he had at least a half a million dollars of cash which he used to buy that farm he also got some help from a friend named George Allen who bought some of the land I think and had a farm next door he had rich friends Ike's buddies bought him a house down at Augusta at the golf club down there he got a lot of gifts the rules are a little looser in those days speaking of Augusta of course explain that business about them building a pond and putting fish in it so that he could have fish to catch yeah that Augusta wanted Ike he was their kind of guy and his millionaire friends they built a house for him and also a pond they dug a pond there and put fish in it so that I could relax by fishing when the weather was bad did we know that back in those years you know I don't know I'm not sure they people certainly knew about what it was called Mimi's cottage I'm not sure they knew the detail about the pond back to the way you described him warmly human he sure could be if you were in his presence you felt his once he had a great smile and this warmth that really flooded over him although if you were ran him long enough you also felt the cold side expansive well he had a large Nasim you know he was about he didn't get caught in the petty details he was a big picture guy you know conquer Europe save the world he thought in those terms patient he was not patient when he was losing his temper but he had a long view he had a long view and he only decided things when he had to this is very important I wish I was like this he didn't make decisions too quickly he would wait till the last second to the side he had wisdom well clearly he had the most ineffable and important quality of a leader good judgment he was wise he made good calls I'm using all these words because I don't you know is it hard good question is just hard for a journalist like you all your life to use all these very positive things to describe anybody in politics well it's true I've been a snarky journalist for much of my career and I've used a lot of critical terms but I think these all are true of like he was a complicated figure he wasn't perfect he made mistakes I'd point that out in the book he made made some big ones I mean cunning while he was back to shrewd manipulative savvy all that he could outfox his opponents he was good at hiding the ball I'm not the first to discover this I mean the hidden hand idea of Fred Greenstein at Princeton talked about other scholars have come before me and established this this grand there's a guy named Campbell Craig who wrote a wonderful book about Ike's nuclear policy this is not these are not discoveries by me but I told the story how did you go about writing a book about a man that lots and lots of books have been written well I don't think that they I made it much more personal I mean we've just been talking about all these personal things the as you said yourself are not fronting there they're in there but they are not front and center in other biographies so I got more personal I did one presidential biographies are I think boring cuz there's too much going on presidents do too much they do seven different things an hour I took really one narrative like keeping us out of war keeping us out of nuclear war pretty exciting narrative I think and I just focused on that while we're on the writing of this for a moment you talk about a famous person in the back of your book who's not famous to most people but to people follow books Mike Hill I kill my researcher my wonderful research tell me he's not that you're not the only one he research yeah David McCullough and that Philbrick there are others but he's had a long client list over the years and he's a warm wonderful and great with librarians man is he good how does he do his work and how does he fit into your work he does he's he does it blots of different ways you know he goes out he does advance work he went out to Abilene and met the staff he puts together a briefing book for me and what I need to know he doesn't enormous amount of xeroxing he'll he'll do that kind of stuff but he's the kind of guy who I really is a good friend of mine and he knows what I the way I think and what I'm looking for and the two of us we went out to Abilene together he has a good eye he I trust him he's careful and thorough and and in all the years he's worked with me never complained and I know from talking to other stories Michael Beschloss has used him Jon Meacham has used them lots of asourian's have used them he's really good so how do else did you prepare yourself for this book where did you go I went to Gettysburg of course to his farm I walked the battlefield by playing golf at Eldorado where he retired I never got on the course at Augusta of course I've been in Washington I really prepared for this book by being the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek for ten years and having been I've been in Washington since 1986 in a stent before that in a way I've been preparing my whole life to write this book I wrote the wise men with Walter Isaacson long ago that was about this period I wrote a biography of Bobby Kennedy again about period a little bit later you know I I've been essentially preparing for this book for 40 years you say that President Eisenhower did not want a statue of himself as a memorial what would you and I don't know how many people know what's been going on in this town but and the Frank Gehry architect version what would he think of what this whole discussion I you know Susan Eisner it feels very strongly about this thinks that he would have hated what's going on I don't know III III don't think he would have loved Frank Gehry's designed but I don't know that he you know he said offhandedly to Sousa and others and his family don't let him put me on a horse he was a modest guy but like most modest guys there's a little vanity in there he would have wanted some kind of memorial would it have been Frank Gehry's I doubt it you know Ike was a traditionalist and I'm not sure modern design was his thing but he might have liked them the theme of modesty of the barefoot boy from Kansas he he might have thought that was a good idea maybe not rendered that way but he might have gone for the theme it's hard to read Ike's mind SIOP the single integrated operating plan for nuking the Soviet Union and others and China too it was the the throw everything throw the entire nuclear closet at the Communists and eyes now are various when the Navy was having its own nuclear posture and the Air Force I said we need to have one single integrated operating plan when he saw it in November 1960 just as he was leaving office he was pretty upset by it because we had it was a kitchen sink operation and it was making the rubble bounce I mean it was way out there other presidents would get briefed on the SIOP which continued they're made I think probably still is a sigh up but but when Kennedy saw it ready he said to Dean Rusk and they call us human beings it was so drastic and draconian what we were gonna do it really was a plan to end the world why well we wanted to have overkill as they say because we didn't want the Soviets to even think about it Curtis LeMay was sort of useful the Curtis LeMay was the head of the Strategic Air Command but you know people have seen dr. Strangelove of seeing the parody of him general Jack the Ripper jump on the cigar you know and LeMay was a very tough bomber commander from World War two who built the Strategic Air Command was a great general and a great leader but he was on it on the leash he was I kept him on a leash but he was straining at that leash and you know it's hard to know for sure but LeMay sort of wanted to do a preemptive strike you know we he thought early and that in the nuclear build-up that before the Russians got too strong that the tradition air coming in could have gone first and just taken him out eyes narrow actually considered doing that I mean in fact there was a moral argument for going first before the Soviets could build up now they rejected that idea they didn't do it because it was ultimately immoral and draconian and godless but they had to think about it because they had to consider well maybe before the Russians can hit us we should hit them the number and you have it in the book of nuclear weapons that we had in this country when he started as president and the number he had when he left his price went from about a thousand to 20,000 I felt like for this a little bit I think there was too much of a buildup here Ike wanted to send the message we are unstoppable strong we will crush you if you even think about it but in doing that the nuclear genie got out of the bottle in a big way and we had lots of tactical weapons and submarine launch weapons and bomb drop weapons and missiles towards the end and there is a view that we overdid that Arsenal got too big you refer in your book to these Sunday night dinners in Georgetown yeah this is the the sort of chatter in class height chattering class the AUSA brothers Ballwin sort of a the well-to-do tend to go to Harvard a Yale the cool crowd sort of in the cafeteria and where did you go I went to Harvard and where are you teaching Princeton it's it's a world I'm familiar with my father was a book publisher and was in peripherally part of this world so I and I work for Katharine Graham at the Washington Post for many years so I went to dinner at her house so I I do know something about this world I'm a later generation but I saw it and it's it's it was the the in-crowd and they had very smart variable people but they could be snooty Richard Nixon never quite recovered from going to one of these Sunday night suppers and being snubbed by Averell Harriman I mean Nixon's resentment against the establishment than the Harvard's and the Yale's was rooted in part and going to this dinner and being snubbed but as long as our talking about you for a moment back when we did booknotes in 1995 here is a clip that talks about your own politics and I think that my group my background growing up growing up in the 60s going to Harvard at a time it was pretty liberal I had a liberal Sensibility but I came from a conservative background and the combination gave me a sense of curiosity a sort of a skeptical curiosity and fascination with the workings of the American aristocracy had those terms changed any since 1995 no I mean that's I'm still curious I look younger but I still yeah I was younger then but I haven't really changed I mean I'm still curious about I did come from a liberal background I got more conservative I'm sort of a mushy moderate now I'm I would say I'm unpredictable at some weeks I agree with Charles Krauthammer and some weeks I agree with Mark shields on a TV show that I'm on so my politics have become more unpredictable but the source of my curiosity you know coming from a liberal background but having grown up in a fairly rich and conservative environment created a kind of yin yang thing for me that helped spur my care what was conservative about your environment I grew up in a town full of lawyers on Cold Spring Harbor New York and they voted Republican my parents vote a Democrat so I grew up in a conservative kind of preppy environment upper-middle class and I was always a little skeptical that I was brought up to be skeptical my grandfather was a socialist Norman Thomas ran for president six times as a socialist so I came from both worlds pretty strongly from both worlds and they little confusing at times but also I hope bread and me a healthy curiosity and made me not too literal and not to believe not to believe everything well we're on your personal stuff when did you get married and how many kids do you have I have about I got married in 1975 right out of I was in law school to my wife of many years OC freer and we had to have two daughters ages 31 and 28 one's a writer professional writer and the other is a construction manager construction manager of what she's building a building here she's the assistant construction manager Mary working for Heinz which is a real estate developer building a ten story building it's I guess it's six than K right now and what kind of writing is your other daughter doing Louisa wrote a book called conscience that came out to pretty good reviews year or two ago about consciousness objectors in World War one she's now writing a biography of Louisa Adams who was the was the wife of John Quincy Adams she's also a sports writer for ESPN for a blog called Grantland you open your book this way at 8:30 on the night of January the 17th 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower gave his farewell address from The Oval Office even after years of coaching from actor Robert Montgomery Eisenhower did not look comfortable giving his televised speech Robert Montgomery what role did he play in his life and who was he he was an actor brought into the White House to coach icon being better at TV and and I drove my Gummer II crazy one point they covered all the elect chronic equipment the cameras in black so that I couldn't see it so he wouldn't be distracted by it Ike was a good public speaker but he had trouble with the teleprompter then you're right he disliked using a teleprompter and he began by glancing down and reading from the printed text on his desk he paused blank looked up at the lines on the screen looked back down at the speech lost his place and tripped over a word why did you choose to begin the book this way I wanted to capture his will fun things most important speech he gave but I wanted to personalize it right away get you in the head of the and and in picture and also subliminally lets you know that this great man was a human being you know he was like the rest of us he could he could make mistakes it's very important to signal the reader that this is a real person that you're about to read about we'll see how well you described it we're gonna look at the beginning of the speech this evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell and to share a few final thoughts with you my countrymen like every other I like every other cities and I wish the new president and all who were labor with him Godspeed in the council's of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex why was that speech so important it warned against the military industrial complex which has become a cliche now people didn't pick much of attention in the speech at the moment but they sure have since then and I spent much of his presidency making sure the military didn't get out of hand he was only partially successful we just talked about how he led nuclear weapons build-up but he kept military spending about steady that was very hard to do in the 1950s tremendous pressure we were creating his whole nuclear arsenal rockets all that I gutted his own service the army cut it cut really cut it in order to have the money to buy the missiles that was not an easy thing to do military spending in the 1950s was 70% of the federal budget today it's about 25 percent I think so it was the big-ticket item and Ike really believed we had to control federal spending even if that meant holding a line on military spending even as the Cold War was building up and there were all these threats it was kind of a hidden victory people didn't really pay attention to it at the time in fact I took a lot of grief from Democrats who accused them of you know my there's a missile gap and you're not building fast enough ayuk stuck to his guns so to speak did not overspend kept the federal budget under control kept taxes from going too high quietly help preserve the prosperity of the country by controlling his own military and warned that in the future presidents would have to do the same do you remember whether the balance the budget was balanced back in his day it was almost budget Bal he was a balanced budget it wasn't literally but it was with him it was close too close to balance do you happen to remember what this the tax rate wasn't well you're very high for millionaires like 70% or something for high-income may have even been 90 World War two the tax rate went way up and it only got gradually whittled down in the 50s and 60s I think Kennedy cut the tax rate at the very high end is a little misleading because rich people had a way of getting around those tax rates but but tax rates were a lot higher in the 1950s than they are today what's your sense of what's happened to us since Dwight Eisenhower was president if 70% of the budget was defense and now it's down to 25% well we much more spend our money on entitlement programs on writing checks to seniors and to poor people that's the whole budget has changed that way and it's a it's a big obligation not easy to cut back on those entitlement programs and it is H the next president that the current president and the next president the president after that will have to face this extraordinary challenge of reining in our heavy expenditures on checks for you and me and and for the elderly and for the sick boy is that going to be hard to do but it is the challenge of leadership and we're gonna need somebody like Eisenhower who is willing to take on tremendous responsibility himself and make the hard choices and do the hard thing when he was president what did people write about the most well there's this sort of snotty I mean the liberal press is little snotty about him as being kind of boring in golf playing he took a lot of grief for that but generally the tenor was still war hero and most importantly the man we can trust his approval rating as president was 65 percent over eight years that's a big number that's uh that's more than you know what's Obama's now it's in the 40s maybe most modern presidents are around 50 if they're lucky Ike was at 65% so the country trusted him believed in him and the press to a large degree reflected that although as I said the liberal north east press was a little snooty about him Joe Allsop Joe was he what was his relationship to Eisenhower what did Eisenhower President Eisenhower say to his own staff people about their relationship with people in the media also the figure is sort of forgotten now it was a very influential columnist in his day that now-defunct New York Herald Tribune and also very influential II talked about the missile gap on the bomber gap these are these fictional gaps that suggested that the Soviet Union had more bombers and missiles than the United States wasn't true as an era knew it wasn't true but he knew from secret intelligence from that spy plane which he could never admit to the u2 that flew over the Soviet Union so I couldn't tell the public about the u2 so he couldn't say hey there is no bomber gap there's no missile gap in any convincing way he was a little bit trapped meanwhile also was going on and on being fed phony intelligence by senator Symington and others air force fed him a lot of that there was this big gap and drove like crazy and I could throw the newspaper across the room have a temper tantrum hate it also because it also had a way of digging at like a lot of presidents I pretended not to read the newspaper a lot of presidents say that don't believe it I carefully read the newspaper and wanting to see also but he would he would get mad also hurt him yeah he took we talked early about the Anne Whitman Diaries we talked about Howard Schneider the doctor but you also looked at diaries of Emmett John Hughes they're Princeton use was a speechwriter and a very kind of literary figure Eisenhower ended up not liking use because use wrote a book about Eisenhower about the Eisenhower administration that was not all that flattering and use had a big ego you have to be a little careful using use his own biography he exaggerated Sal ittle bit but his Diaries at least a contemporaneous and their prints and so I use the Diaries more than they use memoir extensive were they well not every day but but pretty extensive and around and not use leaves leaves after a couple of years and then he's brought in sporadically but they're very useful for the first couple of years of Eisenhower administration Diaries of CD Jackson Seanie Jackson was it kind of something that was hard to imagine date the psychological warfare advisor he was a Time Inc guy had lots of theories lots of ideas most of them bad a few of them good Ike liked to have him around to kind of rev up the conversation but Seanie Jackson was way out there on wanting to do crazy covert action against the Soviet Union and by the way of all these Diaries who did the best who had the best penmanship well some are typed or have been typed up fortunately the ones I read really are all typed who is the best writer well I would say use was the most right early I may be the most honest though is Schneider who's Bernhard Shanley Bernhard Shanley was kind of a confidential appointment secretary not substantive but was a New Jersey lawyer bit of a hack but kept pretty copious Diaries and was good about sort of how it felt to be like her to be around Ike and and but both captured Ike's charm and his anger so going back and looking at that time periods 52 to end of 60 and looking at the president compare that with today a Jim Haggerty versus a Jay Carney well Jim Haggerty the press secretary had real control I don't think that poor Carney you know with all the bloggers and the president more adversarial the press was not as adversarial in the 1950s they would drink with the Haggerty and they'd hang around with Haggerty and they'd come did what Haggerty told him to do they're important exceptions to this Drew Pearson was a muckraker even then in the 1950s and some colonists could be critical and dispassionate James Reston you know would take a step back every once in a while walter Lippmann but generally the press corps was pretty obese --nt if not supine before Haggerty he was very clever guy from a New York Times reporter pretty good press secretary and and the press was pretty tame around Haggerty Kearney couldn't possibly pull that off even if he wanted did you work with him at time where I knew Jay very smart guy younger but I'm not sure how much younger than he is but he's a lot younger and he was a young star he was like a summer intern when I was a time years ago and he was a young start had a good career and was done well Haggerty left and went to ABC you know I forgot that but I guess he did he where did he go after Ike ABC I that could be I think he was a head of news for ABC yeah it could be very smart guy and what about looking today at jacob lew the chief of staff to president obama compare him to sherman adams i mean it's just such a washington so different it's so you could keep secrets in the 1950s the president didn't have to always be out there blabbing and raising money i mean i didn't have to go out and raise a lot of money it was sort of raised for him he didn't even have to campaign he barely campaigned in 1956 he was able to float above it of course Obama can't do that now he's raising money he's out there smacking uh Romney it's just so different what about the chief of staff's job in other words Sherman Adams got in trouble he did he got caught in a little scandal now this is modern because he operated behind the radar screen he made a lot of enemies by being dr. know he was the abominable no man and so he made enemies so when he was caught with a minor peccadillo taking favors from a lobbyist named Goldfine he was a former governor of New Hampshire he was a former governor of New Hampshire ador acerbic New Englander did not say goodbye and the phone just would hang up on you so he did get caught and this is presages the modern press he got caught in a little scandal taking favours from a lobbyist a minor thing but he had no friends in Washington because he'd said no to everybody was trying to get into the president and he was too acerbic and so when he got in trouble there was no reservoir of loyalty or friendship and I had to cut him loose which really pained Ike I had to let him go I hate to do this to you but we had you back in 1995 we also have you back in 1983 oh no here you are there are a couple of competing forces at work one is young reporters like me or ambitious and they want to get ahead and they want to get on page one and that can lead you to take liberties that you shouldn't but balanced against that and usually outweighing it is a terrible fear of being wrong there is nothing believe me nothing worse for a journalist than to be wrong and to be caught at it and you do get caught it's just it's just the most sinking feeling to the print of something that's factually wrong especially something that hurts people today it's 30 years later did you do what you wanted to do in journalism oh yeah I've been so lucky I had a great run time and Newsweek were wonderful to me I had great jobs of the bureau chief here in Washington I was editor large I was assistant managing editor writer like got to write lots of great I wrote more than 100 cover stories with a lot of help I should say so I was really really lucky and I was able to write books at the same time and I was able to blend my weekly or day-to-day journalism with my history one informed the other constantly and I've been I've been I've been blessed so what what's your life like now I teach at Princeton I teach a writing course which I love I got really smart kids I've been doing this this is a year six and I taught it I've taught it Harvard and Princeton before that so I've done a bunch of teaching mostly writing in journalism and also how to avoid reporters I teach for future public a fish how to deal with the press that's a great reward to me and I write books you know I've always got a book cooking I was thinking about a next book so I have a pretty good balance still how long did this book take to write the whole process and research uh three and a half four years from the time I first started thinking about it to have sitting in your hand when did you finish it well it's always went what it's finishing a book when did I really finish it six months ago I mean you're you know you're fiddling with it up to the to the very end I had a very great editor named Jeff Chandler at little brown a really really good pencil editor and he was fiddling to the end I've had a lot of friends who helped me my wife is an incredibly good editor so you're you you're fiddling with a book until the last possible minute and do you have another one you're working on now I'm thinking about stuff I can't talk about it now but of course of course I'm thinking of that a next book said why can't you talk about it because I haven't decided what it is and until I do I don't want to talk about it what in your opinion after all these books you've written do you have to have in order to even start thinking about doing a book on something we have to be curious about a subject a great thing about being a journalist and a popular historian is I don't have a narrow specialty I can do it interest me and so I've done the late 19th century imperialism I've done a naval captain John Paul Jones in the late 18th century I've done more if I have a specialty it's post-war Washington power and post-war Washington foreign policy in post-war Washington the whole generation that came out of World War two and tried to make the world a better and safer place that was my father's generation fascinates me I think that's what I've written the most about probably the best about and your father died what back in 1999 yes and what was his job he was a book publisher so I got to meet some of the he published John F Kennedy and Robert and I got to meet some of these figures be published very statesman and Senators and so I was exposed as a child to the world that I write about now if you had to list the most impressive people you've ever known in the public life who would that be well Katherine Graham my old boss she was partly because she was so human you know I liked her insecurities and her toughness and her her bravery I think she stands out I worked a lot with her in public life who was the most impressive guy boy that's hard to say I mean I wrote a biography of Bobby Kennedy who always intrigued me and had a kind of a hidden power I never met Eisenhower Kennedy yes he signed my biology book when I was in high school I went to hand over and he was looking at the school for his kid and he signed it now I talked to him on the phone briefly once because my father published him and he was calling looking for my father but I had a kind of a fascination with Bobby Kennedy that I that I wrote about where would general president dwight eisenhower be and your list of most popular presidents well I put in my Rushmore because he had and he's not there naturally but but he had a kind of judgment and wisdom quiet confident judgment and wisdom that I believe kept us safe and prosperous at a dangerous time and we think of that 1950s is boring they were boring because I made them boring they didn't have to be that way lots of things could have gone wrong in that period and eisenhower is getting now there is a spate of books about him I'm the third book I think this year third eisenhower book this year he deserves that recognition and he's getting in the name of the book is iyx bluff president eisenhower secret battle to save the world our guest has been Evan Thomas and we thank you very much thanks fine for a DVD copy of this program call one eight seven seven six six to seven seven to six for free transcripts or to give us your comments about this program visit us at QA or QA programs are also available as c-span podcasts

Channel: C-SPAN

Views: 40,004

Keywords: q&a, C-SPAN, cspan, evan thomas, cold, war, Soviet, Union, arms, race, nuclear, weapons

Id: dQnXf3hvv2M

Length: 58min 2sec (3482 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2012