Salon@615- Michael Beschloss with Jon Meacham

[Music] [Applause] this may be the greatest gathering of presidential dorkiness since Michael Beschloss so thank you all would be hard and I wanted to say at the outset anyone who is expecting us to be sort of a cage match or you know the lincoln-douglas debate John is just about my closest friend on earth and has been for 25 years so long time we should manufacture some controversy but it wouldn't be easy you son of a yeah as Harry Truman once said exactly there is Evan Thomas and I have a rule it is a true story that for six months after we publish a book we refuse to have lunch with Michael because Michael still knows more than we do about the book we just published cuz later well as you know is like no I didn't know and isn't that really a charming thing to say notice that you didn't mention this no no you just you know you assume your friends are your equal but it's an honor to have you here for me too ten years in the making one and you're taking a real risk by having me here someone who took ten years to write a 700 page book I mean if I if I answer everything that John says in direct proportion with the to the length of time this book took to write you were gonna be sitting here in seven weeks petrified well I'm driving a villa John will be long gone by then merry Christmas to you all right no absolutely I think it's more Valentine's Day but you if this was after the Koppers your book about Roosevelt and Truman and the fight over post-war Germany so you started this in Oh 8 right so what was it in oh wait that push pushed you into this direction now John is gonna ask these questions as if he does not know we talked on the telephone how often a good bet maybe twice a week although he's here and I'm in DC and we would have been at the time so this is a little artful John may be asking some of these questions if he did not know the answer have you been in straighten history for long actually thank you so much John I just wanted to tell a story that I've never told before which is that when I was seven years old and Illinois when I was growing up anyone here from Illinois actually all right all right I'll ask this in the for were you Kennedy voters only yes they were the ones who put the Nixon ballots underneath exact waves of the Chicago River those here from Illinois did you ever go to the Lincoln sites when you were children all right so that's okay good half credit I'm not asking about the Andrew Johnson sites we'll get to that no more that's right yeah but in any case in Illinois I think you'd agree that going to the Lincoln sites is almost a requirement of citizenship in Illinois maybe a little bit less now than it was in those days so I was taken when I was seven shown the chair in Lincoln's house where he sat and read to his children and I always say I wish I could report that I asked about Lincoln and civil liberties do something like that but I was seven so I said when Lincoln's children misbehaved did he spank them and the guide said with his disgusted look no Lincoln didn't believe in discipline he let those brats run wild through this house and Macon was the man for me once I heard that I'm back reading books on Lincoln and other presidents so since John is asking when I got my history it was sort of in so the other thing you should know about Michael is he published his first book about the time you hit puberty and maybe a little before we have a photo of that actually but which which John was indiscreet enough to tweet before he got here really good and I look like an urchin extra in the Broadway play Oliver I was looking more Holden Caufield yeah that works too but I gotta find that picture oh wait what happened oh wait that was a time that we were we had been involved in two wars for years Iraq and Afghanistan that had gotten extremely unpopular and that George W Bush took us into without asking Congress for war declaration and so I began this by saying how is it that presidents in our own time are able to take us into Wars we Americans almost single-handedly almost overnight and so I wanted to write a book you know the whole of 200 years of American history going back to the beginning what did the founders say about that and what I found was that the founder is one of the things they were worried about most of all was that presidents of the United States would turn into dictators and a lot of as you all know the American system is an effort to make sure that we're almost the opposite of the British monarchy and in England and elsewhere in Europe when the monarch got unpopular the monarch would all oftentimes come up with a fake reason for a war and everyone suddenly loved the King and was united behind the King and there was a war and so Kings were tempted to get involved in Wars for political reasons so if you read the Constitution it says that the president wants a war he can't do it it's Congress who comes up with a war declaration anyone happened to recall the last time Congress declared war it was 1942 have we had any wars since 1902 and so you know something went off the rails and this was 2008 but you know the other thing that I knew you know from history even before beginning to research and write this book is that if you're worried about presidential power if you're worried about presidents becoming authoritarian and I have my whole life and I know the job has you know when Benjamin Franklin said asked what kind of a government he had he and the founders have brought he said a republic if you can keep it the founders expected us to always sleep with one eye open because any president could turn into a king or a dictator well the time when it really happens is wartime and if you were ever worried about a modern president getting too strong presidents can be tempted to get into Wars possibly for unnecessary reasons it's happened a lot and I've written about that yeah and and the other thing can I say one other thing the other thing is biographical because I've written about as John mentioned a lot of presidents a lot of wars you know in different books you know a different size and I was always curious you know they're only about eight or nine people in American history who had the experience of taking in the country into a major war and I wanted to know what they had in common humanly and these are really different people from James Madison all the way to LBJ I don't write about bush because it's too current to be history but I found that every single one of them became more religious they were all people who had extraordinary empathy felt close to the soldiers they almost all had emotional or physical breakdowns and every single one of them was married to strong women who changed the course of history I mean someday I hope I'll be able to write about a president married to a strong man yeah is there what's the role of a guilty conscience guilty Beliveau not had over having gotten involved in an unnecessary whatever that's something you don't see very often and and the real problem here is that the number of times as I said in history we have gotten into unnecessary wars that were staged by a president and the first big example of that was an eminent citizen locally yes this is the part where I dumped on James Polk is that okay it's all right sorry on the way over here I stopped at the Capitol Hotel to apologize for what I was gonna say this evening that's where Pope's house was Polk place was torn down see what I'm 1802 they all right I told him if we start with our usual trivia questions of each other this is gonna go on for hours and you will be so bored you will be walking out immediately but Polk a wonderful man eminent citizen of Tennessee slaveholder liar cheap bully is counting so what one four five I think that is these are our people right but Polk is the one who basically started this trend because he staged this fake incident on the Texas border does this count sound current ahead and send Zachary Taylor down there with soldiers to provoke the Mexicans who attacked in a tiny way and then Pope went to Congress and said we have to have a major war against Mexico all the way down to Mexico City lied to Congress lied to a Secretary of State did this for one good reason one terrible reason the good reason was he wanted to get land from Mexico almost a million square miles so we could become continental nation Atlantic to the Pacific the bad reason was it was a ranked slave holder and wanted to spread slavery all the way to the Pacific so while saying the reason for this war was this skirmish the real reason was he wanted to get that land from Mexico and wanted to make it congenial to slavery there was one young congressman who rose on the floor of the house who said I think this is an illicit war I don't think there was even an attack by the Mexicans on us and his name was Abraham Lincoln of the state of Illinois and Lincoln was it's a good thing that Lincoln didn't have to run was not going to run again because he probably would have been defeated because Pope was one of the early presidents who started something we've seen in our own which is to say you criticize the president you're criticizing the soldiers and you know it's what presidents need in wartime is constant criticism makes them better leaders so this happened again with McKinley it really happened with LBJ yeah Michael remembers this from whatever happened in real time but when George W Bush was first running for president he was running a kind of William McKinley front porch campaign down in Texas so I was a journalist then went down with the delegation and he knew I was from Tennessee remember when he said I want to show you the portrait of Sam Houston I said that's great governor you know if it weren't for us you know y'all still be part of Spain and he said that's really funny am I allowed to tell what he told you about my when I went down to see you is this okay sure I went down to talk to there's a little passage in this book at the end on george w bush which as i say having spent all this time researching all these presidents and writing about them is history with hindsight I can't write about george w bush with no documents with one of the wars still on right so i went down to talk to him and you know i thought I was you know suave and opaque so John says Oh what down to see President Bush us at how is he he said well he said I really like that Beschloss he's so pod came all the way down to Texas to tell me I wasn't gonna be in his book John did not tell him this is probably not a book you want to be exactly talk about if you would the religiosity point because your are you from James Madison through Johnson different levels of people who would have had some can have been conversing at different levels with theology along yeah and and Madison probably the least but even he brought himself to declare a day of prayer which took some doing with Madison as you know everyone else becomes more religious and it's amazing Abraham Lincoln when he was a young man in our beloved state of Illinois was thought of as a skeptic Navy and a 'thus atheist certainly an agnostic and when he was president a friend from Illinois came to see him and found him reading the Bible and said I can't believe what I'm seeing and Lincoln said I don't know how any president can go through the trauma of being a war president without finding the spiritual comfort of Bible reading or some form of religion the most interesting thing was Lyndon Johnson who was what I would call a show Protestant in other words he was glad to be photographed going to church I don't see much evidence and John has written about this and studied it more that there was a deep spiritual aspect to his early life particularly although there were some preachers in his background in his family line and I got to know Lady Bird Johnson pretty well because I did these books books on LBJ's tapes you know the ones he made of this private conversation so I spent a lot of time with her and she said late in the Vietnam War you know she said Lucy our daughter converting to Catholicism at the age of 16 she was an Episcopalian like her mother her father was disciples of Christ and she said you know Lucy almost secretly used to take Lyndon off to her little Church in southwest DC and he loved it so much and it gave him such comfort that late in the Vietnam War I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if Lyndon and become a Catholic and so that is one thing that is through all these present take that Bobby yeah what is it you and I both had this we don't really have a conversation with Bill Clinton used to listen but he has this Clinton has this set-piece he does about two-term presidents without a major war and why they should be thought of more warmly by history I wonder why and Boyd his a goes on a long time right but compare and contrast Monroe Jackson grant I Clinton those presidents who reigned for a year Eisenhower who being the great example who reigned for eight years [Music] conflicts came and went but they were in fact resolved without meriting inclusion here yep was it their leadership was it circumstance in every case it was their leadership and well the first chapter of this book is about a gentleman the best one volume biography of whom was written by my friend right here Thomas Jefferson and in 1807 Jefferson was president and there was a pretty little-known episode you give it a little bit of space but most people are not particularly aware of it between the British ship the leopard and the American ship the Chesapeake off of Norfolk and the British fired and they won the skirmish and the Chesapeake surrendered and Americans once they heard about this were irate as they should have been and they were really demanding war and Jefferson later wrote to a friend as I quote he said if I had wanted war all I would have had to do was open my hand but the thing is that Jefferson was anti-war he knew he knew what war does to a society he remembered how opposed the founders were to the idea of war unless there was an immense national emergency and an immediate need and through great leadership he stopped the war from happening had that not happened we'd all be thinking about the war of 1807 and I contrast that with his much lesser successor James Madison I mean the CliffsNotes of this book Madison great founder terrible president especially as a president of war because Madison lacking Jefferson's strength allowed himself to be pushed by the Warhawks in Congress to ask Congress for a war of 1812 in June of that year and and the way I look at it is to ask it this way what was the most unpopular war in American history I would not say Vietnam I would say the war of 1812 New England almost seceded over it was never popular in Congress Americans didn't understand it what was the first war we lost I'd say it wasn't Vietnam I'd say it was 1812 because the idea was to put a complete stop to British harassment and also steal Canada anyone been to Canada lately I think it's still independent zone didn't work so despite all that Madison and his spinners which would not have been called that in those days basically allowed people to think it was a great victory and star-spangled banner' I mean I'm a part of this conspiracy this is the Battle of Fort McHenry you know it's a wonderful story and don't give up the ship and you know Andrew Jackson of New Orleans and so the result was that the war of 1812 rather than being a scene what it should have what the way I think it should have been which was as an unpopular war that should not have been fought and which we lost and which should be a disincentive to later presidents instead along comes our eminent Tennessean James Polk who carried a cane as I read about it and the cane was emblazoned with wonderful scenes glorious scenes of the war of 1812 he wanted to be a war president too so the main thing I would say from all this is beware of a president who thinks that war is to greatness right so Jefferson where would you rank Jackson and Eisenhower on that spectrum I think that they deserve more credit for keeping us out of this kind of major war than they got especially Eisenhower who I write about a little bit in this book although he's not one of my eight or nine obviously but in 1954 the French collapsed in Vietnam there was huge pressure on Eisenhower to fill the vacuum by putting in American troops and Eisenhower said no he had been a general he knew the cost of war he also had the prestige to say no and no one was gonna say I could soft on communism they might have said that about almost anyone else who might have been president so I think we should give a lot more credit to those presidents who stopped the rush toward war and Thomas Jefferson is honored for a lot of things but I think he should be honored more for that than he is so characters destiny which is good because it enables us to make a living so we're for that is there a consistent personal characteristic is it vainglory is it overweening ambition that links presidents who take us into conflicts that may be more elective than say the Second World War I think it it's all those things and this is the real problem because founders didn't want us getting involved in unnecessary Wars and why does it keep on happening over and over again for instance McKinley McKinley was a well-meaning person of the strongest guy on earth and the American ship the main is sunk in Havana Harbor so on this wave of indignation against the Spanish attack on the main McKinley ask Congress for war declaration and gets it only one problem who sank the main was not who was responsible for the sinking of the main was in the Spanish it was a boiler accident you can't go to war against boilers so he went against Spain and also Americans were angry about Spain and so the result was you know mission creep was not a thing in those days but this was not just retaliation for the Maine this got into a four-year insurgency war in the Philippines we took took WOM we changed the government in Cuba we took Puerto Rico and once again that seemed like a great thing encouraging the later presidents but the problem is we got into this thing of a fake incident that leads Americans to want a war that is not necessary and that leads directly to Vietnam and how many here remember the Gulf of Tonkin episode well one night Lyndon Johnson goes on TV and said there's been an unprovoked attack on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin a it was not unprovoked as he knew because we were provoking the North Vietnamese was a little bit like poke at the border of Texas and the other thing is that within two weeks Johnson finds that there discovers that there was really no attacked whatsoever but in the meantime he had gone to Congress and got almost unanimously this gulf of tonkin resolution which even though Johnson knew that the reason for it had evaporated Johnson and Richard Nixon for the next nine years go on and waged this whole war in Vietnam almost 60,000 Americans killed on the basis of a fake resolution based on an incident that did not happen so all sorts of things wrong with that but the point I'm making is you wonder why's people are suspicious of our presence in our government how many people here have heard people say FDR orchestrated Pearl Harbor to get involved in World War two well he didn't but when this happened so often in history you know it's no surprise first time I took my kids to the site of the World Trade Center afternoon eleven was maybe you're invited later my two sons were really small they had to have the indignity of having a group they're chanting nine eleven was an inside job and I had explained to them it was not but you wonder why this happens you know people look back on poke and they look back on McKinley they look on LBJ that look on Woodrow Wilson's lying in 1916 Woodrow Wilson as John knows well was reelected on a slogan he kept us out of war hey he didn't he was already at war with the Mexicans in a small way be he knew we'd get involved in a war if he was reelected and the thing that drives me crazy and forgive this being a rat but you can see I feel strongly about it the way that Woodrow Wilson got elected in 1916 to a second term was California more specifically women voters in California who could vote in 1916 and guess why they voted for Wilson they loved peace they didn't want war and they were taken in by the lying slogan he kept us out of war that's how Wilson became president again on the basis of a disgusting lie you wonder what people are suspicious of our presidents there's a history to all this I I would imagine that the two exceptions on the elective conflicts would be the Civil War and the Second World War those would be my two heroes with some exceptions and maybe more than anything else because I think that the greatest war leaders in American history are those who wage wars on a moral plane I mean in Lincoln's case the first year you know he waged war basically trying to keep everyone together saying I'm I've taken an oath to defend the Constitution Constitution says that you know there's a union and the southern states have rebelled against that so I'm just basically litigating the Constitution didn't really work because he wasn't saying what he was in what was in his heart and there's a moment it's like the moment on The Wizard of Oz where it goes from black and white to color he begins saying this is a war against the evil of slavery and he's expressing himself and it turns into a moral crusade and Union soldiers fought harder so one lesson is make sure you understand them all dimension Roosevelt the same thing right the Four Freedoms yeah and of course Roosevelt's moral crusade was deeply compromised in my view by the internment of japanese-americans yeah but you would also argue I think that Lincoln the Lincoln's transformation in the fall of 62 and 63 was also about military necessity we're suppose to litical also his ability to explain what he was doing because you know especially by 1864 when Lincoln thought he would lose because northern voters were getting so impatient and this had gone on so long and it was so bloody and he had expanded the mission from uniting north and south to them a crusade to end slavery Lincoln was able to say the reason that I have done this is a necessary war measure would unveil the Emancipation Proclamation about 100,000 African Americans came from the south to the north they're working in the Union war effort if I cancelled it as many people were urging him to do you know they might go back to the south and they might stop working we'll lose the war yeah back to Johnson who you've spent more time with this is Lyndon not AB exactly yeah I don't know if he's sort of yanking the subject back to Tennessee got it again right that's right I shouldn't use the word yang [Laughter] would John Kennedy have pursued the same course I don't think so and as I write I think one of the great villains of American history is a man called Robert McNamara anyone know his name evil man in my view and evil because for a number of reasons but he wrote a book in the mid-1990s that some of you may have read his memoirs of life with Kennedy and Johnson in which he basically says I told them it wouldn't work and we were all at fault well we weren't all in fact he was at fault and LBJ was at fault in some others but to basically hide behind the skirts of 300 million Americans that's one thing but the other thing is that he sort of writes in the book implying but he always you know told LBJ this might not work and he was sort of the the leavening influence on a wild president unfortunately for him he didn't realize that LBJ had secretly taped those 700 hours of his conversations including many with Mac that does complicate the story I mean it's like it doesn't often happen in history but after this book comes out then come out the tape showing that McNamara had been lying and the reason he's a great villain in my view is that he's the one it's on these tapes who goes to Johnson and says you know if John Kennedy were president he would have pursued our commitment in Vietnam and you don't want to let let down the legacy of President Kennedy and Vietnam is necessary to win the Cold War and LBJ was gold by McNamara McNamara had some secret that he did not have and then of course later on McNamara by 1968 completely spins around and quits his Secretary of Defense basically saying Johnson was crazy and I was the only one there introducing some truth to this operation I mean they're about five things wrong with all that and and there is one moment here that it's like it's almost the worst moment in the book John and I have talked about this I mean we've been talking about this for a decade or more so I could apply that to anything I've said tonight so John has done a good job of pretending he's hearing all this for the first time yeah Michael Beschloss in February of 1965 LBJ is and by the way Johnson often taped to protect himself against people who might betray him and so he taped a lot of McNamara so he so there's a call in February of 1965 it was the first month that LBJ sent big numbers of Americans off to die in Vietnam for the first time and Johnson went to those air bases and he pushed those troops practically out of the transports and said you know we win the wars that we fight and we're gonna win this one but privately with McNamara he says I can't think of anything worse than losing the Vietnam War and I do not see any way that we can win the first month of the war and I heard that and I thought well maybe he's just discouraged for a moment and then it becomes a refrain and Lady Bird was nice enough to give me her unpublished Diaries she writes that LBJ tells her in the summer of 1965 about being the president during Vietnam I feel as if I'm in a plane that's crashing and I do not have a parachute so I can't think of much that a president can do worse than to say send off young idealistic these young kids to die in a war in which he knows that they're gonna die and he knows that we are unlikely to win and lies about it that's about that that's about the worst so this is Greek tragedy is this he's trying to prove that he's tougher than Jack Kennedy would have been it's a good big hearted man who had a number of motives one was he was worried that he'd be called soft on communism by Republicans and other conservatives some of them Democrats in 1965 a time that he was really about getting voting rights and Medicare he basically wanted to get this off the table so that he could get those things through Congress number two he had an insecurity about military and foreign affairs that he shouldn't have had no he'd been on the Armed Services Committee for years and he great had great political understanding that he just distrusted and the other thing is that another thing that most of these war presidents had in common is these emotional breakdowns and LBJ had one of them I'm not trained in psychology so I cannot use the terms you know with any credibility but he is totally paranoid and he has up and down and you hear it on these tapes by 67 he's saying and this stuff is in this book for the first time he's saying Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are paying rioters in Chicago to riot and embarrass me and the reason why William Fulbright and other senators are against the Vietnam War is because the Soviet ambassador is putting cash in their pockets and the reason why college students are demonstrating against the wars because Chinese Communists are paying the money well number one in 1960 was seven there were not too many Chinese Communists running around in the United States in a position to send the money and the point is that we had a president who was getting more and more strange and more disconnected from reality and there are other examples of that with other presidents but I think one lesson is if we have a president we're getting involved in a major war that lasts for a while the president you have at the beginning may not be the same guy you have by the end and it probably is not going to be for the better well since you bring up presidents and their relationship to reality yeah yeah Michael was by so many things the first time I heard something but the first time they said that Jack Kennedy had once observed that there's a reason profiles and courage was one volume and not very long right so and one of his sisters was told that by someone who wanted to write a religious life of JFK and she said I'm sure it'll be a very brief boy a very short but very shortly yeah the other way like that is uh sorry that won't stop well promise not to do this Ted Ted Sorensen it was Kennedy speed drive not a very pleasant man I didn't think he used to say to his friends who'd written books you know I picked up your book and then I put it down and I just couldn't pick it up again sweet sweet man talk to us about how the work you've done should inform in your view our thinking about the incumbent I think what it should do is make us even more vigilant and I would say this about any modern president but maybe a little bit about Donald Trump and not for ideological reasons but as you can see I am always worried about presidential power and one thing this is not a value judgment I think it's just fact he is he is very good at accruing power and looking for where he can find it he has said that presidents who are most well remembered in streer those who've waged wars that's something to be a little bit nervous about I think in 2011 he tweeted predicting that Barack Obama would get involved in a war in order to get reelected another idea that you probably don't want in the mind of the president and the other thing and I would say this not so much just about Donald Trump abut about any president who serves in our lifetime what I was saying earlier about if you're worried about a president abusing power and taking too much power for himself the real place it happens is wartime did anyone here happen to get what was called a presidential alert announcement on your iPhone well this time it was benign but in wartime it may not be so benign and may must be used by a president to get more power for himself and get Americans to accede to things that they never would dream of allowing during peacetime Woodrow Wilson another reason I love him so much wrote these wonderful books about how not only presidents should tell the truth to Americans but they should respect civil liberties that's what he preached what he practiced was the second he becomes a war president he tries to become a czar and one example of that was something called the Espionage Act which is still in force has been used by President Trump to go after journalists it basically was passed during World War 1 to say it's illegal to criticize the president and the government and wartime wellbore in wartime right now we're fighting in Afghanistan so the Act applies this is what presidents do presence can declare martial law during wartime so all I'm saying is that you know Benjamin Franklin's saying we always have to protect ourselves and make sure this remains a republic one of the ways that we have to be vigilant most of all is not only for a president taking us into a war that is not necessary maybe fabricating an incident it's not hard to do I'm not predict but we always have to keep our eyes open to make sure it does not happen and if it does happen make sure that that president does not exploit the fact that he's a war president to take power for himself and abridge our civil liberties in a way that would be much harder to do in peacetime do you think the checks and balances of the congressional role of the role of the press they're all the public nope nope nope you're not gonna I'm very worried tonight you have a press who a president who calls the press the enemies of the people if that's not by accident he wants to break them down as a check on his power he has intimidated the leaders of the House and Senate in his own party I have never seen more timid leaders of a president's party certainly in my memory and one thing by the way the presidents who wage war the most effectively are the ones who get a lot of criticism from Congress Benjamin Franklin said your critic is your friend you know what I'd want if a president is waging war I want smart members of Congress to say you're not doing it the right way LBJ was you know for the most part a terrible war president made terrible mistakes in Vietnam but who was his majority leader in the Senate Mike Mansfield who hated the war saw Johnson all the time and said you're doing this wrong you should do this better you know that's what the founders wanted they did not want a lapdog Congress and as long as you asked the question this goes beyond my book but the other obvious check is the Supreme Court and I'm very worried about that v justice majority and especially v justice not for ideological reasons I'm talking purely in terms of presidential power Donald Trump unconvinced chose bread Cavanaugh because he had the most extreme permissive view of presidential power of anyone who was being bought of Cavanaugh believes as he is written in a 2009 article president should not be subpoenaed in office they should be investigated they cannot be indicted he's very permissive about her presence can use pardons - to my mind obstruct justice so if you compare that to 1974 when the Supreme Court ruled on US v Nixon even though there were four justices appointed by Richard Nixon it was eight to nothing they they went after Nixon they made him give up his tapes he had to leave office would the Supreme Court as currently constituted especially with v justice with those views who wound up being very indebted to Donald Trump by the time he was confirmed would Brett Kavanaugh feel in a position to be equally independent and rule against Donald Trump if necessary I'm not so sure and I believe our democracy and our liberties may depend on that so if I go it's very cheerful and I yes and a happy Thanksgiving I hope I haven't spoiled your appetite okay and you also had in Nixon someone who obeyed the order of the court yeah it's kind of remarkable although it is useful to remember that Nixon was he abated because it was eight to nothing when Nixon got the order of the court he was swimming off of San Clemente wearing a black balance shirt I could just see this and he takes the call from Al Haig as chief of staff was says the court you've ruled against you and he said is there any error in the ruling and by any error in the ruling what he was saying was if it was let's say five to four maybe he's take heed take his chances and defy it so this can happen and I hope it does not happen in our own time a few minutes of questions from you all what's on your minds yes sir and navigation of freedom of navigation of the seas were deeply important that's right and for a decade Americans on the seabed of you okay well the British reversed them sorry no I don't cuz I and reasonable people can differ so we're you know we're discussing it but the British Parliament reversed themselves just a few weeks after the beginning of the war so the war begins in June Madison finds this out about August so that's a problem by what you're saying Madison should have said all right they they've withdrawn the orders for ships to harass the Americans and so Madison by what you're saying should have said the war should stop yet it went on for two more years more than two more years many of us would not be here and anyone who says that I hope that at this late date there's no one here who says it doesn't matter who's president hahaha 1962 Kennedy appoints x-com this committee to decide what to do about the missiles in Cuba which were secret at that point at the beginning of the week almost everyone was for invade Cuba and missile sites Kennedy by the end of the week feels that we'd better not do that and stands up to his Joint Chiefs and others to say let's at least start with just a quarantine and not do that which finally succeeded so I asked you looking backwards with 20/20 hindsight would 16 million Americans dead including our parents including some of us were the issues involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis so important that it would have been worth that I would say obviously not but a lot of people who might have been President 1962 would have done at Lyndon Johnson they will have and that's that's how it matters that one person is president someone else is not talk about the arc of JFK's learning curve from April of 61 to October of 62 it was extremely steep and April of 61 because that's when the band Pigs happened this failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs by the fall of 1962 Kennedy had learned a lot and the one thing he learned more than anything else is I can't understand a president who has no interest in history every great president is I think John would agree with this an assiduous reader of history and Harry Truman maybe more than any other Truman was young man thick glasses couldn't play sports the parents said you know can't afford to replace them if they break so the result was he said I read every book and the independence public lock library which I always thought was an exaggeration but it's a small library so but the thing is Truman said I don't see how I could have been present without knowing in fact his his favorite book was a book with the horrible title of great men and famous women the supposition that women could not be great only famous and the subtitle was from Nebuchadnezzar to Sarah Bernhardt so covered a wide swath of human experience of truancy and so Truman said you know whenever I had to make a tough decision like firing MacArthur or the atomic bomb you know I thought back to that book and other history so Canada gets involved in the Missile Crisis in October of 1962 guess what book he read not long before the guns of August by Barbara Tuchman we should all go lay flowers of the grave of Barbara Tuchman for that she was like that she would yeah and I actually knew her a little bit she what was the lesson of that book the lesson of that book was World War one happen because there were mistakes and miscommunications and accidents on both side and God looks after the United States because if there is one message you'd want in John Kennedy's thinking just before the missile crisis that's the one and so during those thirteen days he basically says I want to know about every message every statement made by the Defense Department even if it's by someone at the fourth level I want to know about every troop movement I want to know about every plane the plane accidentally crosses a border I want to know about that because I don't want to know an accidental message sent to the Soviets that would let lead them to think that we're going to do a first strike attack and lead quickly to a nuclear war and at least try it twice during the Missile Crisis American planes flew where they should not and it could have touched off a nuclear war if Kennedy had not been so vigilant is that great line about there's always some son of a who doesn't get the word right yeah yeah which he said at the time of one of these insults the was it September of six sorry we're gonna dork out we're getting wonky Zeit what was it said if it's too much would someone please just wedges bandages but it was a September 60 he wrote the review of the heart book no heart yeah it sounds right where he is there was this British military strategist and in Kennedy Road there's probably Arthur lazing a horse or your friends my friends arms any exactly based a little heart who wrote the observation that you always had to give your adversary roomed in the new room another important lesson to forget with cigarettes you can't you can't back them into a corner and kid it was a lotta lesson that Lyndon Johnson here taken no no no no no over here anything yes sir yes MacArthur and Truman yeah any woman the Brokeback Mountain no door kit yeah Truman would just love to Group McCarthy you know MacArthur was totally insubordinate was over aggressive to the point of provoking a war with the Russians and the Chinese and Truman stopped him and that's a big theme actually at my book which is you know anyone hear people saying to this day why not leave war to the generals one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard not because you don't have brilliant accomplished generals but you know they're supposed to win wars you're not supposed to have the wider point of view of presidents you know who are thinking about the political point of view an international point of view case in point that I write about is I was able to add some pieces of the puzzle in January of 1968 four years into the big part of the Vietnam War william Westmoreland was Johnson's commander in Vietnam and so he sends Johnson a message saying were stalemated were in danger of a defeat why don't we move nuclear weapons to South Vietnam and use them if necessary to avert defeat and out of Johnson's mouth comes the stream of profanity guess unlike every other minute of Johnson's and Johnson says absolutely not on smooth spending four years trying to keep this war from widening it'll bring in the Russians and Chinese and maybe I'll kill a hundred million people and it's the same question I asked about Cuba what if that had happened and it did escalate into a nuclear war that killed all those people and a few of us were left here to tell the tale here in 2018 would you think that that was merited by the objective of achieving a victory and what we now know was this little civil war in an agricultural country that was not required to win the Cold War so LBJ did a lot of bad things during Vietnam but one of the great things he did was to overrule his general and one reason he did that was because he had lived through Truman and MacArthur and he was very much on guard for that kind of insubordination I think I think I'm right about this that the most significant sequential chapter that came in during the first Gulf War when Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney asked : Powell to lay out what the war plans would be like if tactical nukes were used in Kuwait yeah is there a famous woman who wants ask the question yes ma'am a great woman I think that anybody that talks about his position when Vietnam is speaking out and I guess my question would be what is erect September 2 1963 what day were what she said was a weekday with certain weekday yeah this is getting really bad we couldn't bet her stop this John and I will now compete to see who knows more such dates you told me recently where it was at Hyannis it was a house that Kennedy was renting near Hyannis was also it was actually a place called Island yeah he was doing that because there was too much commotion in his own house which was Michael they are gonna travel cuz he's the only person who makes me look kind of normal right sorry it's bad it's like the mayor who uses drugs and who's sweating and so he gets ten of his aides to stand with them in public events even though it's ten degrees outside every time they see him wipe his brow they all wipe their brows anyway the record is very ambiguous just as you're suggesting I think you can construct a case that Kennedy would have escalated the Vietnam I think you can construct a case that he would have been a lot more moderate than Johnson I doubt that he would have withdrawn before the 1964 election and Kennedy told a number of people I can't do anything before I'm really because I don't want to jeopardize that but a lot of things I can do after 1964 I think the big difference between Kennedy and Johnson is LBJ and this is the way I write about it in this book he escalated the war largely because you remember the part about emotional breakdown for Johnson this became a test of his manhood a test of whether he would win rather than his enemies it went way beyond the issues involved in Vietnam in contrast Kennedy was very good at looking things in the abstract and if the war wasn't working his personality was such that I think he would cut it off in two seconds without a thought yes sir thank you for saying them because if John and I were just talking about what I really next is asking how do you write about our position in the Middle East I would only do it after a lot of research research and that forethought that I have not yet done I'm the only person I know in Washington DC was happy to say I don't know right but but maybe someday thank you ma'am you then you and then we'll wrap up and and we'll obviously be around afterwards so you know I think John would be so much more very deaf you knew the old story about it was sort of clumsy actually the old story about Albert Einstein and his driver do you know the story so Einstein's on a speaking tour and goes 30 cities he's driven for place to place and the guy was driving him says it's the 29th stop you know dr. Einstein I've heard your speech so much these people here don't know you I think I could give it and so Einstein says it loudly fun what you get up I'll say I'm the driver and you say you're right Stein so Einstein gets the driver gets up gives the whole talk and he's asked a very tough question and the driver says as Einstein you know that question is so simple-minded that my driver can answer it my sense of director Muller is that he's the best quaffed iceberg we've ever seen we see the hair but we see nothing else and I think he has attribute yeah and we have a mutual friend who said to me about a year ago Washington bureau chief the New York Times that she been in Washington for 30 years and had never seen an operation that leaked as little as the Muller investigation except for the Trump White House look Zoe exactly average it's a well well oiled machine is we know so I just as secretary Rumsfeld would say it's a known unknown and but I think we're gonna know between now and Christmas don't you I think we do but we've got real problems because not only do we have a Supreme Court whose independence I have real reason to doubt we also have an attorney general who's a political hack who was never confirmed by Congress acting Attorney General who was probably taking every secret the secret there is in the Justice Department and the FBI and delivering it to Donald Trump and his Pete that's not the way it's supposed to work and so if you take it away the possible check of the Supreme Court and of you know senators and members of Congress who will stand up to a president and an independent attorney general who will tell a president you have no right to see these things you know our liberties are really in jeopardy I do not usually overstate but I really do believe that yes ma'am I'll bet you you're so glad I shared yes that we over 200 years have conquered every time that we have been through a period of turbulence which brings me to my favorite book of the year the soul of America is there anyone here who hasn't yet thought I would recommend buying 10 copies and reading it 10 times and and I say this other stops along my it's dedicated to Beschloss oh but that's not the reason because I've said that about other of John's books but I've done this at other stops on my book tour and people come up to me and say this is really a case of human bites dog you come all the way out here and you promote somebody else's book but it really deserves it and it's the best reply to what you're saying leave us by reading your last paragraph you read ok John wants me to read this and then read it in several other languages just to make sure the evening goes on for a while the founders would probably be thunderstruck to discover I think you're gonna have to have to hand out antidepressants I know I know that's why we have whiskey right forgot where I am AJ the founders would probably be thunderstruck obstruct to discover the option to start a war of a magnitude they would find inconceivable killing hundreds of millions of human beings in less than an hour may now rest on the whim of a President James Madison and his contemporaries never presumed that Americans would be angels not even in the optimistic atmosphere of their newly fledged nation but they hope that all future presidents would be people of sagacity self-restraint honesty experience character and profound respect for democratic ideals the founders anticipated that any chief executive of the future would strain to avoid taking the nation into conflict except to confront a genuine immediate national danger and the founders expected that in the absence of such a danger all future presidents would resist any temptation which the founders saw in the European despot stay aboard to launch a major war out of lust to expand their own popularity and power there is [Applause] point of personal privilege there is no better thinker and writer and human being at work in the public arena than Michael Beschloss thank you all for coming [Applause] [Laughter] [Applause] all I want to say the same goes for Jon Meacham double and I have the last word [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Nashville Public Library

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Rating: 4.6790123 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Beschloss, Jon Meacham

Id: yw5unwawjho

Length: 61min 23sec (3683 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 02 2019