Michael Beschloss at 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] welcome Michael okay could everyone here okay everybody here okay so how many people here have been here all day okay Wow very impressive okay how many people here came just to hear Michael okay all right okay my wife is here I'm sure she did Michael Beschloss is one of our country's most distinguished and most respected and most admired presidential historians let me tell you a little bit about his background before we talk a little about the presidency and then his latest book presidents of war try how do you recommend and we'll go through that so Michael is a native of the Chicago area he went to Williams where he came under the influence of a famous historian James McGregor Byrnes and subsequently went to Harvard Business School after Harvard Business School he did not go to private equity which he should have done it's a higher calling say you see David did it the right way he was always inclined to history he took what about a 30 year sabbatical as a lawyer and private equity and now has come back to history so and then Michael began writing books about the presidency and history and is now written as your tenth tenth book okay and he's also the official historian for c4 in MDC among other things that he does you've probably seen him many times on television and Michael why did you decide to be a historian after going to Harvard Business School most people go to Harvard Business want to go out and make a lot of money and not go write history books obviously bad judgment when I was at Willie I wanted to be a historian no joke since I was 10 years old I was growing up in Illinois and the true story I've told it before is that I was taken down to the Lincoln house in Springfield anyone seen the Lincoln sights spring you can clap were we from Illinois I love to hear that and I sat in Lincoln's parlor and the guide this is where Lincoln sat reading to his children I was very young I said well actually I wish I could have asked about civil liberties or something like that but I was I think eight years old or so when I said actually when Lincoln's boys were naughty did he spank them and the guide said with this disgusted look no Lincoln didn't believe in discipline he just let those brats run wild through this house I heard that Lincoln was my men so I began reading about Lincoln and other presidents and literally wanted to write books about present since I was ten or a little bit earlier than that but when I was at Williams College you know Jim Burns said if you want to do that you'll probably have to teach and I said I don't think you know I've had great teachers I don't think I could teach with as much quality and enthusiasm as I would write the books what else could I do and he said well why don't you you know gear to become a foundation executive I said well how do you do that so why don't we send you to Harvard Business School get an MBA if you want to do that you can go on get a PhD in history if you want to and that way you can write history books and not starve and as it turned out my first book came out just after I got out of Harvard Business School and I was kindly offered a great job at the Smithsonian this was the early 1980s and the foundation world was spared my full-time services probably great for everyone okay so who's our greatest president coming from Illinois you expect me not to say Lincoln well I would never let be let back in but but I would say there's a very close almost a tie between Lincoln for obvious reasons and George Washington who essentially formed the presidency the presidency is not described with very much detail in the Constitution 20th century who would you say as our greatest president uh I would say Franklin Roosevelt who rescued us from the Great Depression in sort of a zigzag way it was not very linear and more important than that the world from fascism and totalitarian so you admired Lincoln as many people do obviously if you had chance have dinner with him what would you ask him actually I there are a lot of things I probably ask but it would be less necessary to have dinner with Lincoln to find out those things than it would be to have dinner with George Washington and the reason for that is Lincoln has these extremely detailed papers letters they're not all preserved but a lot of them are preserved in the Library of Congress so you've got a pretty good paper trail plus you know Lincoln died at the age of 56 at a time when a lot of people who had known him almost all of his life sat down their recollections and there were people who were doing books his old law partner William Herndon interviewed a lot of people and so the result is that Lincoln you know we'd always like to know more but the paper trail is pretty good the paper trail we do not have as George Washington for a lot of reasons so if I if I'm allowed to have my dinner with George Washington we for instance know very little about his marriage now one book that you guess helped you did the Johnson tape right all right so if you had chance to ask Johnson one question what would you ask him why did you feel so compelled to get more deeply in the Vietnam War when you knew that it was going south fast and does everyone know what the Johnson tapes were he taped his private conversations about 680 hours from the beginning to almost the end terrible invasion of civil liberties but wonderful for historians I did two books on them and so the most heart-stopping moment in those tapes was in February of 1965 just when he was taking us into the Vietnam War for the first time in a serious way sending off ground troops he's talking to his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara everyone know that name and he's talking about the fact that the war is really beginning and I'm expecting Johnson to say what he's saying in public which is we expect to win instead he says to McNamara I can't think of anything worse than losing the Vietnam War and I do not see any way that we can win this is the very beginning of the war thought maybe it was just a moment of depression that summer a ladybird later gave me her Diaries he says to her about the Vietnam War I feel as if I'm in a plane that's crashing and I do not have a parachute so one of the things you can get from a source like the Johnson tapes and I use this a lot as you know in my new book is you can find revelations like this where if we did not have those tapes for instance we would not know how pessimistic he was about the possibility of winning a war for which at that moment he was sending these idealistic young kids off many of them to die now he retired from the president's he didn't choose to run for re-election at the time I was younger and he seemed old to me but right was today he was about 60 years old when he when he retired in 1968 he was actually 59 59 and he died at the age of 64 right so but he died of a heart attack where today with a stent he probably would have been able to stay alive right you're gonna kill me for mentioning this but I actually learned that from David's new book which is coming out next month called the American story Robert Caro told that to it so let me ask you you've told a story before I think people might be interested here and hearing it Lyndon Johnson was worried that the people were not coming to his Presidential Library so he wanted to increase attendance what was the clever way that he came up with to do that story I got from his great friend Harry Middleton director of the library died not long ago Johnson anyone been to the Johnson library you you can clap great library you may have noticed that across the street from that library is a fairly large football stadium gets you know maybe a hundred thousand people so Johnson was worried about getting people to attend his library which in the spring of 1970 and 71 around that time he was very unpopular and so he calls over to the stadium and says to the guy that makes announcements at halftime or his boss something like make an announcement of the next game that anybody who I'm cleaning this up by the way anybody who wants to take a leak or get some cool water can do it at the Johnson library across the street and the announcement was made and huge numbers of people came in the front door they were counted as visitors this was done at later games and I am told that by the end of that year Johnson library between became the best president best attended presidential library in the country so if you're asking how presidents get things done sometimes you know their letters tell you when their mem Khan's sometimes other sources tell you better now you also were involved with Jacqueline Kennedy's interviews or Diaries right and you did you edit them or did you could comment on them Jacqueline Kennedy was interviewed a number of times by Arthur Schlesinger not long after her husband's assassination and these were to be locked up for about 50 years Caroline Kennedy nearly ten years ago decided that they should be opened and published so she asked me to annotate them and sort of explain them and write a foreword the most surprising thing that you got out of that was the most surprising thing was that throughout this book she basically says I had very little influence on my husband all the credit goes to Jack and if you read the book carefully people that she disparages you notice sort of disappear from the entourage people that she praises are promoted so one thing that comes across is that he really understood that she had a very accurate ability to look into people and I think he took that very seriously and one of the other things that was calm at the time was that she seemed to know a lot more about what was going on in the government than people thought at the time that's exactly right and that's something you find with most first ladies in my experience by the way which is that at the time the husband serves they always say you know it was always the president who did it I had very little influence and as you get into the inner records of an administration you find that these first ladies and one day I hope soon the first you know gentlemen or first spouse have a lot more influence than they let on at the time so you can clap for that too okay so the presidents of war it's a very interesting book about presidents when we're at war why is that presence of war and not presidents at war because the book is sort of half about how presidents took us into war and half about how they did when we were there so presidents at war suggests that you're missing the first part but the other thing is that in calling at presidents of war I was trying to make the point that presidents who take us into wars they're of a category that's different from almost every other president okay so your basic premise in this book is that we're supposed to under the Constitution have Congress declare war but we've kind of forgotten to do that it seems to be true anyone know the last time Congress declared war yes sir yeah 42 43 during World War two have we had any wars since 1940 to 1943 so we've gotten out of this habit of what the Constitution says which is that if someone wants a war Congress has to declare it why did the founding fathers of the Constitution Constitution convention say the president is the commander-in-chief but he or she cannot decide to go to war why did they let the Congress do that when the founders were writing our constitution one of the biggest things that they were worried about was that they would write a constitution that would lead to a dictatorship or a monarchy exactly what they were trying not to and because of their study of history they found that one of the ways that happened was that monarchs or dictators would fabricate reasons for war usually in Europe and and say we have to go to war the country would unite behind the king or the dictator and totalitarianism greater to totalitarianism would follow so they felt that it was very important that the President of the United States not be the one that had the war power that was in the 1780s here we are in the 21st century who now has the war power as it Congress or a president so let's talk about some wars where we did declare war what about the war of 1812 did we declare war there we did and it was a close call and the irony was that James Madison everyone remember that he had a little bit to do with the writing of the Constitution Madison was one of those who was most worried that there might be a dictatorship of some kind yet Madison was the one who took us into a war the war of 1812 against England that the Congress the American people were extremely divided about and the reasons for it were semi bogus one was stopped the Brits from bothering our ships well turns out a couple of weeks later they did so there was no reason to go on with the war number two sees Canada and so you know one way of looking at the war of 1812 that's that's a little bit novel is you know it's always said that Vietnam was the first time we lost a war I would say take a look at 1812 because of our motives in the war of 1812 we're number one stopped the Brits from bothering our ships well it didn't do that number two do we own Canada today now this is an audience response question don't think so so 1812 turns out to be I think one could argue the first war that we really lost and also probably the most unpopular war in American history even more so than Vietnam and James Madison was the one who took us into that mexican-american war did we declare or we sort of faked ourselves into it what happened with the mexican-american war was that James Polk who was not high on my hit parade he wanted to get a lot of land from Mexico and make the United States a continental nation from east to west so far so good he did it by faking a reason for war by provoking the Mexicans to attack Americans and in South Texas and he then went to Congress and said we have to have a Mexican war war against the next code Mexicans all the way to Mexico City and the result was that yes we did become a continental nation but we established a precedent which is not a great one which is fabricating a reason for war Abraham Lincoln who was a young member of Congress got up in Congress and said I don't believe there was ever a real reason for war show me the spot where the Mexicans really attacked us for good reasons now the Civil War did we actually declare war no we didn't but that was for a good reason that was that Lincoln said that for us to declare war would be to recognize that the Confederacy was a different country the whole thing was Lincoln's argument that this was an insurrection so he did not ask for a declaration he did ask Congress for military support and other things that would help him fight it World War one did we have a declaration of war yeah that we did and that was Woodrow Wilson and the Vietnam War let's talk about that for a moment the Vietnam well let me start with the Korean War the Korean War what prompted us to go to war and was there a declaration of war yeah that's where everything changed because this was as a few here might remember in the summer of 1950 North Korea attacked the South America and its allies responded and again so far so good and then Harry Truman the president his aides said when you're gonna go to Congress for a war declaration just as as our audience member here rightly said as FDR had done in 1942 in a little bit in 1943 and Truman whom I otherwise loved for many reasons not all said I'm not going to go to Congress to ask for a war declaration because it's 1950 there are a lot of fights in Congress I have to you know run a midterm campaign this fall all its gonna do is arouse problems for me in the administration I'm just gonna go ahead and send troops to defend South Korea and I don't think anyone is going to object okay no one called it a police action and Truman agreed you point out in your book something very interesting that why did we actually have the Korean War in the sense that the North Koreans invaded the south but that's that because they were led to believe by Truman or his Secretary of State that we wouldn't respond a large reason was a big goof that was made by our Secretary of State Dean Acheson who in January of 1950 gave a speech at the National Press Club implying that South Korea might fall outside our defense perimeter and you know fairly suggesting perhaps to the other side why not try to grab South Korea and test the principle and you know if we're wrong you know and did the Russians have any objection to the if it could be done cheaply and if it didn't lead to a nuclear war what did the Chinese have to say about it sort of the same so when the North Koreans invade South Korea and we decide to pursue defense who was put in charge of the military gentleman named Douglas MacArthur and what was he doing for that he was the Viceroy of Truman and the Allies and he ever met Truman No a formal so he comes up with a strategy and what's his basic strategy of how to win push as hard as possible and eventually even if you have to cross the Yalu which was not Truman's way of doing things so but MacArthur does come up with a very good landing at Inchon didn't and what was so unusual about that why was that such a great military feat well because it succeeded by surprise and changed the terms of the war and also in caused MacArthur to think that therefore he had license to do all sorts of things the Truman and the Joint Chiefs had asked him not to and when he was told not to he would actually write to newspaper publishers in the United States and say the Joint Chiefs and the president's holding me down you really should urge that the president give me a license to go ahead did he want to use nuclear weapons yes that was something that was with him so Truman ultimately met him in Hawaii yeah the Pacific so what was that meeting like how did that go not bad and it was going so well that Truman decided to get out before they got to was to leave the meeting early yeah so that in other words they were in such agreement that he didn't want to test that by staying for two days so what led to two Truman firing MacArthur he saw that MacArthur was going to be extremely insubordinate and if you were going to preserve the principle of a military that's under the command of the commander in chief he had to fire MacArthur salmon and the bad joke this is not my job but MacArthur came back and MacArthur famously spoke to Congress gave this emotional speech old soldiers never die and the Republicans wanted him to run for president thought he'd beat Truman the Democrats were worried he'd run for president and beat Truman and so it was said that as MacArthur spoke not my joke the Republican side of the house there was not a dry eye on the Democratic side of the house there was not a dry seat about my joke why did McArthur actually never do what eyes never was able to get a political constituency he was such a famous general why did he not he was contemptuous of Eisenhower but why did he not have a political pool in the United States how come the political parties never really came to him and nominated him you mean a 19-15 yes by then he was considered to be somewhat politically extreme and also Eisenhower would come back and was a lot more popular so Eisenhower ran for president in 1952 but did Truman actually offer him the nomination Democratic Party in 48 1948 Harry Truman offered actually - if Eisenhower would run as a Democrat Truman said he would run with him on his ticket as vice president and so Eisenhower later recalled that I think in one of his memoirs and Truman denied it and said I never would have done that and the problem was the Truman actually had written it in one of his Diaries and someone found the diary page later on so if you intend to disown something you have done my recommendation as a historian is don't put it in your diary where it could be fine well actually he got back on to some extent he gave an interview with Merle Miller Truman did write in which he said that Eisenhower had asked to be allowed to get divorced during World War two to marry his driver right and is that true the Miller stuff is not to relied upon but he was really angry at Eisenhower but one really nice story is Eisenhower and Truman were on terrible terms especially from fifty to one Truman or when Eisenhower was running against Truman's mess in Washington quote-unquote but on the day of John Kennedy's funeral but two of them were outside the Cathedral as President Kennedy's casket was being brought out and the two men were standing when they saw John Kennedy jr. saluting his father's casket the two men decided to have a drink at Blair House and they made up all their difference there are old differences and remembered all they had done to get back back to the Korean War Eisenhower said when he was campaigning I'll go to Korea and fix the problem and did Truman think that was a good idea he thought it was a fake and he sort of further built on his problems with Eisenhower after the victory of Eisenhower in November of 1952 by sending Eisenhower message saying in case you still intend to go to Korea as if this is just some campaigns done made Eisenhower so furious that on inauguration day Eisenhower's limousine rolled up the Truman's were inside to give the Eisenhower's coffee and they waited a long time because the Eisenhower's would not get out of their car and Truman was furious and got in the car and it was said that was one of the coldest riots ever when that car went up but Eisenhower did go to Korea and that he how did he solve the war or ended if you were talking to Eisenhower and this was also a story he told Johnson later on Eisenhower said the way he saw Korea was he sent messages over channels that were likely to get back to the North Koreans and their allies that unlike Truman he would not refrain from using nuclear weapons if necessary to end this war and the war was at least an armistice was imposed within about six months let's talk about the Vietnam War so did we have a declaration of war in Vietnam no we did not and this is the problem you know when a president like Truman says well I'm just not going to go ask for a declaration because it's going to cause me problems it creates a president a precedent that later presidents might use for bad purposes Lyndon Johnson dealt with the Gulf of Tonkin attacks at least one of those attacks did not happen he went to Congress and asked for a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to used force in response it passed overwhelmingly both houses almost unanimously and the result was that although there was not an attack that was really the detonating incident for that resolution for the next nine years or so Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon waged the whole of the Vietnam War later the Indochina Wars it was expanded based on this resolution based on at least one attack that did not happen and the result is that ever since then and my book only goes through Vietnam because I try to write history and I think the later things are too recent we have never again gone had a president going to Congress and saying I want a declaration you've had you know resolutions but not the kind of declaration at the Congress the Constitution asked for but in in the end did Johnson know that the Gulf of Tonkin was based on false information he knew within a couple of weeks but he did not go back to Congress and say didn't happen he should have so subsequent to Vietnam for example we went into Afghanistan did we have a resolution or did we haven't we have a resolution to go in excuse me we had a resolution but not a declaration if we had a resolution to go into Kuwait when after the invasion by Nam you saying we did that and we had a resolution to go into Iraq and I admire presidents for going to Congress asking for resolution but it's not the same thing as a declaration of Congress because the reason why the Constitution says this is it says we want a declaration that's very hard to achieve who want a president to go to Congress and say this is how long we think the war will take this is the kind of cost it might have they wanted it to be really hard to get an involved in a war and the resolution is different than a declaration in what sense it's legally different and it is it allows people in Congress who voted for it to say I never voted for a declaration of war look at the number of members of Congress no names mentioned who after voting for resolutions for wars that proved to be on popular said they were just voting for a resolution to use forests they weren't voting for a declaration of a declaration of war is it like a legislation where it's passed by Congress but then it's signed by the President or the president doesn't sign a declaration president can sign it and usually do but a resolution does he sign the resolution as well can doesn't have to yeah okay so what you would like to see after all your research on this is a Congress be more forthcoming and actually passing declarations or what would you like yeah I think I think that would be true I'd like to make it harder for presidents to go into Wars unless the American people support them overwhelmingly and I'd also like to see presidents who have some of the leadership qualities that I write about in this book for instance in Lincoln's case you have this wonderful empathy Lincoln in the middle of the the Civil War there were so many casualties that his people said we've got to build a new cemetery where he wanted and Lincoln said I want it build as close to my summer house as possible because it's going to be painful for me but I want to see the graves being dug I want to be reminded of the terrible costs of these decisions that I'm making so today as you look at our Congress today you think Congress actually wants to vote on resolutions or declarations of war they prefer to avoid them oh I think throughout history they prefer to avoid them unless it's an overwhelmingly popular cause that's something that you find all the way through history and as you think about the books you've written today or today which book when you write a book how long does it typically take think this book took how long to write David I'm glad we're saying this toward the end of our talk right in the beginning this is a book that cost took ten years to write I hope not 10 years to read but it goes from you know it begins with basically the burning of the Capitol and the burning of the White House and James Madison and Dolly running away from Washington and the President of the United States spending the night's sleeping under a bush in the rain because he's worried that the British will come and capture him and hang him as they would have done and it has scenes like Abraham Lincoln who was also in combat everyone here had been to Fort Stevens or nowhere it is here in Washington DC battle of can clap during the Battle of Fort Stevens Lincoln stood up and there and stood up to fire and you know subjected to himself to the possibility that he might get killed so when you do your work do you research it and then complete the research and then write to your research and write research and write pretty much do the research before but what I really you know love to look for is documents and other sources that will tell you things that you have never seen before I mean the the Johnson tapes you know again or one great example of that because if we had not had the Johnson tapes we would not have known how pessimistic LBJ was about the progress of the Vietnam War we also wouldn't have known how bad his language wasn't private although I think we probably but in the Johnson tapes I've listened to a lot of them not everyone but he was thought to be some cases maybe foul mouthed or burnt gave the Johnson treatment I never actually heard a lot of curse words on those tapes yeah I was expecting it to be a lot worse actually and what it was was I think our definition of curses in the 1960s was so much more mild than what it was in 2019 I was expecting all sorts of words especially one particular one which doesn't especially appear that if Johnson were here in 2019 I think you'd hear probably a lot more sort of like as everyone remember when Richard Nixon released his Watergate transcripts and there were a lot of expletives deleted and I was in college and my friends and I thought well they were deleted they must have been pretty expletives and an awful lot of them it turns out were probably damn and hell but his secretary rosemary woods was so prim that she thought that damn in Hell should be omitted so the way the presidency is operating in modern times if you could change it and you could wave a wand how would you change it you think the president could be more effective the way it operates or you think it's operating okay I think I would love you always want a prize a process in which Americans have the freedom to choose presidents well you know some people say the Electoral College was designed by the founding fathers and it's not working as well as maybe it should have what is your view on the electoral college that's that's one example of what I'm thinking of you could make the argument and I think I might have a few years ago that the electoral college is necessary in order to make sure the presidential candidates will campaign in small states and be you know more interested in smaller groups than if they were just in TV studios in Los Angeles and New York which might be the case if you have the popular vote but I think what we're beginning to see among Americans is that there's a rising frequency of presidents and I'm not I'm not in politics today this is not a Republican or a Democratic comment but you know where a president does not win the popular vote but becomes president anyway now in modern times the first time we've had a presidential debate was Johnson was Kennedy and Nixon 1960 right and now it's a tradition but do you think they actually changed people's votes the up debates and are they worth doing I think on occasion they do and they certainly did in the case of Kennedy and Nixon maybe the best moment was this was in my hometown of Chicago anyone here from Chicago okay a small number but high in quality I'm sure when one of the Nixon people said to Robert Kennedy you know does those dick Nixon's makeup look okay and Robert Kennedy said I wouldn't change a bit that looks perfect but that was a time that John Kennedy was seen as an inexperienced rather unknown back-bencher from Massachusetts and it put him on the same level as the world-famous vice president in the United States who had debated Khrushchev I think it's very fair to say that without that first Kennedy and Nixon debate Nixon would have been president in 1961 for those people who aren't who haven't studied it the famous lincoln-douglas debates they were not involved in the presidential campaign is that right no they were a senatorial debate Senate and and they were long long how long were they they would powers and the reason for that was that in those days and I can speak is in Illinois and I wasn't quite alive in 1858 but if you went to a debate oftentimes you know it would take you a long time to get there by horse I don't think anyone ran to a debate although maybe a few of them did and so if you wanted to attend a debate and you would take an hours to get there if the debate is just an hour you're gonna feel a little bit deprived and that tradition went on in oratory in the Midwest for a long time was adopted by Hubert Humphrey who in the mid twentieth century still gave speeches some might remember that seemed like about three or four hours long and I think this is a true story but that Humphrey once was even he knew he had going on for too long yells out to the audience anybody here got a watch and someone yelled back how about a calendar so Lincoln and Douglas did not have that kind of discipline and it's a good thing they didn't because the quality of those debates were was so high that both parties thought that those should be the candidates in 1864 president like reminds me of Jim Baker used to tell a story when he was giving a speech and somebody was walking away and he said where are you going a guy said I'm going to go get a haircut he said well why didn't you get one before I started speaking he said I didn't need one before exactly right so today do you find when you talk to people on college campuses that there is interested in learning about the presidency as you were and or is it something that people are not as focused on anymore I think they are and for some of the same reasons because you know at this time when you know I told you the little story about going to the Lincoln House when I was eight years old or so that was the early 1960s and the presidency really mattered there are other times in American history you might not have felt that way but I can remember John Kennedy going on TV to say that there were missiles in Cuba and even I at the age of seven knew that we might not survive this I was a young person when Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill and then in the voting rights bill so for a young kid just reading the newspapers everyone here know what a newspaper was telephones Telegraph's but you know reading print newspapers the message would be extremely clear that presidents were very important we're now at a time when you know I think anyone would realize in this period and not just the the last few years I would say the last 20 years anyone who would watch this period you know as a young citizen and not realize that it matters who is president was not paying attention now we have a tradition started with FDR of presidential libraries and the latest one is being built in your home area Chicago area but it has no books in it so why do we need all these presidential libraries can you explain their purpose it'll have some some books as you but you're you're saying it won't have books in terms of like Obama Obama exactly things digital right precisely and books are not going to be the the chief purpose of it and archives as some of the others the argument of and this is not just the Obama people many others and I think we are likely to see this in the future is that you can have documents online and they don't need to be in a library and it's actually a more small d-- democratic-- if you can for instance gain access to the barack obama papers or the donald trump papers or other papers in the future online that you're not you know keeping out of the process of history people who cannot for instance afford to go to chicago and so therefore why not keep them in college park maryland for instance where the National Archives headquarters is and being able to gain access to it online you can make arguments round or flat but in certain ways I think that maybe at least in part the wave of the future now if somebody is here and they haven't read this book what is the reason they should go out and buy this book because one of the most important things that as I've suggested we will be coping with through our lifetimes whatever happens is presidential power and the possibility of the president's might take us into war and the other reason is that if you're trying to understand American history and understand these really important stories you know begin with Dali and James Madison running out of the White House and him sleeping under the bush and James K Polk you know provoking the Mexicans and Abraham Lincoln nobly holding the Union together and all these stories that come right up to the feet to the present you know there is a reason why people say that you can only understand the president in the future if you understand that I asked and a very large part of our past both nobly and also in certain cases sadly have been presidents taking us to war alright well I've read this book and I highly recommend it to those who haven't bought it yet and Michael thank you very much for a very interesting conversation okay we now have an eminent a man a visitor thank you thank you David and Michael and everyone don't leave because I have an announcement and a surprise first I want to thank everyone for another very successful National Book Festival thank you to the over 200,000 people who came here today to the convention spinner and all the people who watched it online it's been an amazing day for authors books and reading so it's time to start the countdown for next year's festival mark your calendars for the 2020 National Book Festival it will be the 20th year for this annual festival here in Washington and so we want to celebrate big the date Saturday August 29th again that date is August 29 2020 20th year stay tuned it's going to be something now before we go and here's the surprise yes it's very hard to surprise mr. David Rubenstein look at his face it's wonderful the National Book Festival as you know is made possible with so much generosity for mister from mr. Rubenstein and aside from his support today alone he interviewed five brilliant authors capping it off right here on the main stage with mr. Michael Beschloss now his expert interviewing skills are showcased regularly on Bloomberg TVs program titled the David Rubenstein show peer-to-peer conversations and I want to call to the stage mr. Justin Smith the CEO of Bloomberg media he's wondering where this is going for five seasons mr. Rubenstein has interviewed the world's most influential power players about their personal and professional journeys including Oprah Winfrey Jeff Bezos Warren Buffett Speaker Nancy Pelosi Bill Gates Christine Lagarde and many others here's a short clip [Music] these are good thank you this is good this is good well I watch your interview show so I know how to do something you go into a store when you want to buy something you have to put a credit card down you to say I'm Jeff Bezos and they send you this stuff how do you about that I do you ever had a credit card ID I have well I give him another credit card you were nominated to be a chairman of the Fed by President Trump is being share all that it's cracked up to date you have said your secretary pays a higher tax rate than you do yes right and solos favor of changing that some years ago somebody from the White House called and said would you mind having a tax named after you and I said well if all the diseases have been taken away why shouldn't I I'll take a tax so in partnership with WGBH Educational Foundation and Bloomberg we want to celebrate your birthday this month and your support of the National Book Festival by adding all of the episodes of the David Rubenstein show to the Library of Congress's collection because of its social and cultural significance in chronicling the lives of many important historical figures and as part of this collection it will be made accessible to the public to view forever so David congratulations and here is a certificate to certify that your interviews will live on forever so thank you again for your support Michael Beschloss you were the greatest Thank You mr. Smith and thank all of you who have been here and been supportive thank you the festival gets bigger and better every year have a great evening and we hope to see you next year thank you so much

Channel: Library of Congress

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Length: 53min 59sec (3239 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019