I wondered, could have made the choices they had to make to protect ones family, to protect myself. Could i have found the perseverance, the fortitude, the courage, to get to. Its where i am now where i wrote my book, if you hear noises in the background, those are not horns those are frogs croaking away in my pond at college hilltop in connecticut. Hopefully there wont be a thunderstorm and it will stay nice and you callawhen i was up your writing i would spend a good deal of my time wishing i could understand what was like to live in world war ii. Wishing i could find the apathy, the understanding, to convey on the page what its like to live with a constant sense of uncertainty. What its like to live not knowing whats going to happen next. What its like to live through a great unknown. Now its a previously unimagined year later and all i can say is, be careful what you wish for. I am not saying that our battle against the pandemic is the same as fighting world war ii. There is not another nation trying to congress, there is not another nation trying to take our treasure, trying to replace our philosophy with its own. But we are in a fight for our lives and we are in a fight for our countrys future. To see how american can get through this crisis and persevere, how it will adapt. And central to both world war ii and today, navigating these problems, we turn to our leaders, we look to them to ensure we can manage today but still have jobs, paychecks will come in. We look to them to the future to ensure that america will persevere and that america can adapt to the challenges that we will face in the years ahead. Today i think more than ever we can understand how important leadership is to a nation in a time of crisis. The story i want to tell tonight is the story of world war ii, previously largely unknown story, about how three allied leaders, fdr, churchill, and stalin, were suddenly put in harms way. Its a story about hitlers realization that he could come up with a secret plot, hitler came to the conclusion that ab some way out of this. Some declaration strategy that could help the like. He came up with the secret plan, a secret mission, the mission to target the three allied leaders, fdr, churchill, and stalin, at the tehran conference. The assassins specially trained team of ss commandos, identified as the most dangerous man in europe, nothing less in the future of the world. One man, mike riley, the 33yearold head of the fdr secret Service Detail had to find the ingenuity and the courage to prevent an assassination that could have changed the course of history. There is a story that has its roots in january 1943, at the casablanca conference. They are in north africa fdr and churchill were meeting, and the final day of the conference, january 24, 1943, fdr made a statement to the press, his final press conference at the casablanca conference, that surprised churchill. Took him totally by surprise. Fdr announced that the allies would fight until the Unconditional Surrender of the nazis, japan, and italy. Once this condition was laid down, once this statement about Unconditional Surrender was made, the nazis realized that all their previous plans had suddenly turned into sand. At this point of the war, most of the nazi high command had come to the realization that the war could not be won on the battlefield. They had lost its athe allies had invaded north africa, america was coming into the war with troops, with airplanes. The nazis, however, were now going to engage in a very pragmatic endgame strategy. They hoped they could snatch a stalemate from the jaws of defeat. With that they believe they would get a negotiated peace, peace with the allies to stop the fighting, and in this piece they be able to keep their territories they won in Eastern Europe and to be able to survive. Now the fdr had announced the Unconditional Surrender they realize that was impossible. They realize that ultimately they would have to answer to an allied war crime that would stand for the court and they would have to pay for their crimes against humanity. The extermination of the jews, and the court they knew would find them guilty and pay with their lives. The nazi leadership was also a athey knew the last time in history and ultimatum and Unconditional Surrender had been given, where he said carthage much be destroyed and thats what they realize what happened to germany too. Unless something could be done. So on july evening 1943, two men walked into the eden hotel on astreet in berlin and they walked past the bar and went into a private room. The bar at the eden hotel, usually filled with intrigues they have whats called taxi dancers, young boys, teenagers and others, that were paid a couple of marks to dance with women to boyfriends or husbands were away fighting. This was usually the only intrigues that went on in the hotel. That evening in july the back room, two of the nazis top spy masters met in secret. The two men were the head of the ss section 6 cloak and dagger operations. This was general walter schonberg. He was 33 years old, born a bureaucrat, a pragmatic man, and the man he met with wasnt old enough to be abwas old enough to be his father. Parnassus was the head of the traditional military intelligence in germany. The two men wanted to talk, not officially, but began to discuss an Impossible Mission how they could target the three allied leaders, these allies had been talking about having the conference. Immediately as their discussion began they realized the problems they would face. One, while the allies had said they wanted to be together, no meeting had been planned. There was no date that was known. No location had been set. Even if a date had been set and a location had been chosen, the allies were not revealing this. This is one of the greatest secrets of the war and the two german spy masters wondered if they be able to get this information. The second problem, both analyze commanded between the three of them the greatest Standing Army in the world, over 20 million men, certainly heavily guarded wherever they decided to meet. Thats the third problem. They need a plan, with such protection a frontal assault would be a suicide mission. How could they sneak up on them and make a Strategic Plan . So these problems were unresolved. Yet at the same time, the two german spy masters resolved if they can move forward with the operation they now called long jump, the plot between the allied leaders. Then on september 12, 1943, eight weeks later or so, something happened that gave them hope. Another Impossible Mission succeeded. Home this afternoon have september 12, 1943, 12 gliders flew down out of the sky above a 7000 foot italian mountain. They had come to rescue mussolini. In the man leading them was ss captain ascorsese was a fascinating figure, totally useless, aa scar on his cheek that he was very proud of. He was a very inventive commando. He headed the ss special operations just outside the concentration camp. He was totally dedicated. Hitler came to him and said, i want you to lead a mission to get mussolini out of the hands of the italians who are imprisoning him. If you know mussolini, italian dictator, strutting dictator, had been abstripped of his power by the time abstripped of his power by the italian government. They put them in this fortress and kept him there until they made up their decision of what to do with him. He looked at this problem hed been given by hitler and it was very daunting. The only way up the mountain was one single cable car up 7000 feet and surrounded by a battalion of italian troops. You could storm it. You couldnt drop paratroopers out of the sky because it was 7000 feet the winds would blow them off to montauk. In the mountaintop was just ab there was no field, you couldnt land the plane. So he came up with this idea of coming in with gliders. Five of them made it, the other seven were blown off course or crashed. The five gliders came in on the mountaintop, he leads his men to the fortress where mussolini is headed. The italians give up without much of a fight. And three nights later scorsese led mussolini to hitler at hitlers hideout. Hitler was overjoyed, scorsese abafterwards takes scorsese aside and told him, i want you to head operation long jump. Another Impossible Mission to target the three allied leaders. Scorsenzi takes his challenge, his now famous throughout the world. The press is going him the most dangerous man in europe. He assembled his team, but he still has a major problem. He doesnt know where or when or even if this meeting between is going to take place. Oddly enough, in the fall of 1943, thats the same problem thats facing fdr. On november 2 fdr calls into the oval office mike riley, head of the secret Service Detail, and gives him a special mission. He wants michael to find out if a meeting is going to take place. Mike riley is really the hero of my story of night of the assassins. He gets the job in charge of fdr security at 31 years old. He is a former College Football star in montana. He takes the job two days after pearl harbor and hes immediately overwhelmed. He describes himself as an irish cop abbut the obstacles he faced were tremendous. This was the first war where the enemy could fly bombers across the ocean and bomb washington dc him parachutes could drop out of the sky and the parachute lawn and Something Else that made guarding roosevelt such a challenge, fdr was quite literally a sitting target. He was paralyzed from the waist down, he couldnt move and mike riley knew that if fdr would ever get in the crosshairs of an assassin mike would have to put his body in front of fdr and he was willing to do this. He would have to take the bullet. He called fdr with great affection and respect, the boss, and the two were quite close. November 2 fdr tells him, i want you to go to the airport in morocco and meet someone come hes going to give you the information about whether or not there is a meeting with stalin and where its gonna take place and if its gonna take place you better go check it out. Fdr was sort of the spymaster in chief he liked these intrigues. Four days later mike, this guy from a little town in montana. Standing at the airport in morocco and a car pulls up there are two soldiers and as prearranged the soldiers get out, mike walks slowly so he doesnt attract attention to the car. The back door is open and there he finds the agent he supposed to meet about the information and its cornell holcomb secretary of state. It seems the secretary of state has just been in moscow the past five days and been meeting with stalin to see if they can work out a plan for this meeting cordell hall turns to mike and says, its done, its going to be in tehran. Stalin has agreed to tehran. Mike hears this he immediately has two thoughts, the first is, he has to get to tehran right away and scope out the place of the Second Thought is, where is tehran, he has to go look for a map he had no idea what country it was even in. Meanwhile, as mike is finding out where this meeting of the big3 is taking place and when, the germans are fighting it out too. Approximately the same time they find it out athe spy is a walk in, a walk in is an interesting operative in the intelligence circles. Everyone dislikes them because abhe comes to you bearing gifts that you have asked for and you dont know why hes bringing you this information. Is it ego is that money . Is he a loose cannon . Or it makes spy agencies the most suspicious the most oleary. Is he a double agent . Is he bringing disinformation trying to send you off on the wrong path . Into the German Embassy in angora techie, a man comes about five foot three inches he says the British Ambassador and each night when the British Ambassador goes to sleep he has to the key to the British Ambassador is safe and he can get cables and diplomatic traffic and each time he wants 20,000 british pounds. Its worth about 1 million today. A fortune. The germans cant quite make up their mind what to do. Can they trust this guy or not . Hes asking for a lot of money. Finally, schellenberg the head of the ss special cloak and dagger operation decides, we will give them counterfeit money. They have the ss forages put together 20,000 pounds, pay them with the counterfeit money and they take it back and ab they are quite breathtaking. The documents are so good that the spy gets ab from these documents they find out what mike riley found out, they know that the big3 are meeting in tehran the last week in november. When schellenberg and the not see high commands for the south they have two pieces of the puzzle they can use. They know when and where fdr, churchill and stalin are meeting, but the joy is even greater because of Something Else. The allies picked the one city, to ron, which since the beginning of the war since 1940 german intelligence has been sending agents into tehran, they have a network of spies set up. They have safehouses establish. There is even more than that over the past three months they been parachuting them in and take off from the secret german base jump out of the sky and try to sabotage trains carrying allies to the russians. Even better than that the man in charge of this aerial insertion missions is alex scorsenzi the very man who heading operation long jump. The command feels their fate is smiled on them. The operational gods bless this mission, they will succeed. Mike is going to tehran to check it out. The airport in tehran a big list by Russian Troops and the russians are Walking Around with submachine guns. Later says the russians may be our allies but not our friends. Mike realizes each day with the meetings and the dinners at night fdr would be traveling back and forth where there would be snipers in the crowd to ron is a hot zone. On the streets of the main a the gutters have been carved out the iranians use it to drop their refuse in there and its a mess. With the drs immuneawith fdrs system, he then learns that there are three places in iran where to get fresh water. The market embassy, the British Embassy and the Russian Embassy. The American Engineers came in for the country said to have tunnels in the mountains out of the city to the embassies. These water tunnels bring in fresh water daily. Mike breathes a sigh of relief, only later that he would realize how dangerous these tunnels can be. 10 days later the allies on november 27 come to tehran. There is no press involved, supposed to be topsecret meeting. As soon as churchill gets there theres a ceremony at the airport and then the way into the British Embassy the entire row is lined with iranian calgary and comic opera. And churchill later says, any moment they were showing where the extensives could come get them. He approaches the British Embassy open top car and the car is caught in traffic and its just sitting there. Looking at his watch and he scared stiff. He feels if theres a plan to put in the most danger could have been more successful than planned, he of course is being sarcastic. So mike and fdr, the operation to get fdr to the city goes without a hitch. Fdr arrives, he is taken to the American Embassy, he settles in, hes on the second floor of the American Embassy with mike. Mike is feeling pretty good about things. He gets a message someone comes to tone the russian general downstairs waiting to see him. Mike goes downstairs, the head of the nk bb, the precursor to the kgb, the soviet intelligence service. Mike thinks the general is there to tell him that stalin has arrived at the Russian Embassy. Mike takes one look at the generals face, he realizes something is very wrong. The russian general told him that last night 38 nazi commandos came down out of the sky on a mission to kill the big3. Mike, his heart stops, he describes in his memoirs but the first thing he can say he realizes its a silly question, are you sure there were just 38 . Yes, we caught them all and interrogated them quite thoroughly. As the general explains. When he says, quite thoroughly, mike had a vision in his mind of what it mustve been like to be interrogated quite thoroughly by the nk tv but hes not really too sorry because this is wartime and his whole responsibility is to protect the boss. Then the general says, theres Something Else, we learned from these men that we interrogated that six commandos came in on a separate plane. These six commandos are at least in the city, they have a mission to kill the big3, fdr, churchill and stalin. When mike heard this, his blood ran cold. The next four days of conference its a cat and mouse game between myabtrying to get these six commandos well trained, well armed with their plan in the city of 1 million people. They are going from house to house through the bazaars looking for them. It comes down to the night of november 30 churchills 69th birthday party. It is a picture of photograph in my book, you can see fdr, churchill, and stalin, sitting shoulder to shoulder at this dinner at the British Embassy on that night in tehran. You can almost hear the voices singing happy birthday. At that moment six nazi assassins are trying to make their way through the water tunnels to sneak into the embassy grounds, sneak into the dining room and change history. What happens . How it all works out, i hope this doesnt ruin the book for you, they are not killed and the allies won the war. So that takes you to after the italian conference. December 17, 1943, in the oval office, fdr had just come back from overseas. He is giving his First Press Conference to tell the press what happened at tehran. They been talking about a20 minutes into the conference you can hear the entire conference, its recorded and in the fdr president ial library in hyde park. You can hear he says, we have a bit of a security problem. I had to move from the American Embassy to stay at the Russian Embassy because there were six nazi commandos on the loose. He gives a laugh, one of fdrs hearty laughs and says, it wouldve been a pretty good whole they couldve gotten all three of us stephanie continues laughing and the press joins in and whats most amazing, you can hear it on the recording, fdr then says, let me tell you about china. They go on and there were no followup questions. Until years after the war operation long jump, this plot to kill the big3 was just a big abthere were some interviews people using participants after the war but then in 2003 the soviet secret intelligence agency, the fdr released a treasure trove of come confidential documents about what happened. I was able to get a hold of those documents, have them translated, then i went to memoirs kamali newspapers, and went to american archives, british archives, german archives and put all the pieces together to tell the true story of what happened that weekend toran and the story of operation long jump. Let me circle back to what i said at the beginning, we are living in a time now, a time of crisis when we can understand how important leaders are. How we rely on our leaders to get us through this crisis and to lead us into the future and prepare that future. The leadership with a lack of leadership can be problematic and we also are living through a time when we all experience how life can change just like that. These experiences that weve had in recent days make us understand what the chilling sense of immediacy what was at stake in the balance that night in tehran where the night the assassins tried to make their way into churchills 69th birthday. Thank you. Heres a look at some Publishing Industry news, last week the Justice Department filed a claim for the royalties associated with former Top AdministrationNational Security advisor john bolton recent book about his time in the white house. The motion, which would include mr. Boltons 2 million advance argues that the book was released before the completion of government prepublication review. Book editor James Silverman died last week at the age of 93. Mr. Silverman edited such authors as james baldwin, hunter s thompson, and David Halberstam during his career at random house and simon and schuster. In other news, the guardian reports that Ernest Hemingways published works contain hundreds of errors that have never been corrected. American literature scholar Robert Trogdon who studied the manuscripts through the john f. Kennedy president ial library reported that the grammatical mistakes were made by editors or typesetters when publishing new additions and do not reflect hemingways original intent. Also in the news, mpd bookscan reports that print book sales were up 20 for the week ending july 25. Adult nonfiction sales rose 23 percent and were led by mary trumps book critical of the president titled too much and never enough. Following the lead of other upcoming book festivals, the brooklyn book festival has announced its going to be held virtually from september 28 through october 5. The 15th annual literary event will feature over 150 authors. Booktv will continue to bring new programs and publishing news to me can also watch all our archived programs anytime at booktv. Org. During a Virtual Event hosted by Harvard Bookstore former Clinton Administration labor secretary robert rice discussed his latest book on economic inequality. In this portion he offers his thoughts on the impact of the Top Administration on the working class. His style is still very much of an antiestablishment kind of populist. He likes to sound tough and he has rallies in which hes politically incorrect and he looks and sounds as if hes calling it like it is. But the second point, very important point, he also has fox news behind it. Fox news manages to translate what is good for the oligarchy in terms of tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks in ways that make its viewers, many of them working class, feel that they are populist policies that actually work for working people. Without fox news im not sure donald trump would be nearly as successful as he has been. If that combination and then obviously Mitch Mcconnell and the republican senators. Its that combination that has managed to pull the wool over the eyes of many workingclass people and its very difficult for democrats to simply say over and over again to workingclass americans, youre worse off than you were before and the wealthy and big corporations are much better off than they were before. And hes done everything you possibly can to widen inequality and basically make your lives more difficult. Its hard to make that argument just by stating it but it may be that the coronavirus and the economic crisis we are in him makes some workingclass people a little bit more open to hearing it. Robert rice has appeared on booktv nine times you can watch this and any others book discussions on our website booktv. Org. Just type his name or the title of his latest book the system using the box at the top of the page. Welcome. Thank you all for tuning into this Cato Institute book form. Today will be discussing the inaccessible work of moral philosophy titled grandtanding the use and abuse of moral talk released in print today, this book examines speakers use of moral language to draw attention to their own purported moral superiority and illustrates how selfaggrandizing use of smalltalk damages book conversations