Latest Nonfiction Book and authors, cspan2 created by americas Television Company as a Public Service and brought to you by your television provider. History and biography is sponsored by wells fargo i am judy would read and i am thrilled to be joining these three amazing offer authors, yoe them on the screen, george packer, Richard Holbrook the end of the American Century and Susan Glasser and peter baker whose book is out this fall, the man who ran washington, the life and times of James A Baker the third period two brilliant books about too complicated and fascinating men. They were born a decade apart, baker in houston in 1930, holbrook in manhattan in 1941, baker republican trained as a lawyer, holbrook a democrat, Foreign Service officer, student of Foreign Policy, their lives to very different project trees but they both ended up in washington where they became major power players. Peter picking up on that, this is a man with great ambition and even was there before he came to washington. He is part of a family of houston aristocracy, he built modern houston and was expected to do great things, very dominating father who imparted on him the legacy of his family and they were met to do these things. Odyssey that put them in the center of world events. And george, im going to be going back and forth because the stories of the book are so rich that we could go in so many different directions, but i want to try to weave the stories together. George packer, Richard Holbrook, i use the word complicated. That doesnt begin to do justice to him. But why did you want to write about him and talk about his ambition, what drove him and frankly, what the First Quarter of the book is about, vietnam. So, he died in december, 2010. He was actually stricken and Hillary Clintons office, the secretary of states office, which was a fitting finale and high drama characteristic of him. A few weeks later his widow offered me his personal papers. I knew him a bit, not very well and i thought i have a chance to explore a flamboyant, mesmerizing character whose career covered from kennedy to obama to vietnam and afghanistan through an intimate look at the diaries and letters and other papers, so i said yes without quite knowing why i said yes. Holbrook as soon died began to read the letters, and to some of them as you said he began his career in south of vietnam and the dal tile where the war was at its hottest in 1963. As soon i sigh began reading his letters i knew i made the right choice because he was such a good writer, so intelligent, so observant and funny and arrogant and just a guy who could fill a book and may be more. So his ambition was a kind of demonic engine that was there from the very start and got him into very high places and led to some triumphs and in the end cost him a great deal. Friendships, relationships and maybe his own desire to rise to the top of his field. He never got there partly because people found him to be too difficult and abrasive and he could never keep it in check. Demonic engine, what a term. Talk about jim baker. He came to washington and ran the campaign against Ronald Reagan for George Hw Bush and Ronald Reagan shows him to be his white house chief of staff and was seen as the most successful person of this modern time. How did he do it . He didnt really have a background that he was going to be successful. He had been a lawyer and ran in 1976 in the wreckage after watergate there were no republican platforms in his generation and the previous group. It opened up the world for people like jim baker, Brett Scowcroft and a whole group of people who came to the floor. He wanted to get things done for the Organizational Skills and who ran not just one but two campaigns against him. It would be a smart choice on his part. Susan, what was that quality that got him chosen for the job that made him successful as he went on to become treasury secretary sends back during the reagan years what was it about him that pulled it all together . Jim baker, this is the question everybody asked him. He will give you the sort of we all know pretty well famous for staying in the white house and until he returned every phone call and every member of congress and are extremely well prepared, certainly one aspect but i think we found in working on the book that in the end, for jim baker, success was the only option. Hes obsessed with winning and i think the hyper competitiveness is part of what he had in common with George Hw Bush. I think that is how they bonded on the Tennis Courts and by the way, there are stories about how they came to be seen as a double team but one simple answer and a picture i was looking at the other day of jim baker pointing to the wall before George Hw Bush showed up and then the single champion to the country club the past three years it was james baker the third and George Hw Bush teamed up with the lawyer. There is no question on that. Jim bakers father exerted and his family in general exerted this power over his early years and it shaped him as a person. He is a dad literally beat this kind of competitiveness in him. They joked and called him the warden. But he would play tennis matches and when he was done as a boy his father would make him stay on the court and keep practicing. I think that tells you an awful lot. Baker and holbrook, both men of ambition and both had a certain insecurity and affection with how they were perceived by others. But the differencthe differencer iec had an enormous selfdiscipline where this following character that emerged in the wonderful and powerful book and baker put that discipline that was beaten into him and the politics with his rebellion. He never could have done it while the staff was around and alive and it was only after that he rebelled from the tradition and moved to washington. George, pick up on that. There is so much to say as we keep saying about Richard Holbrook. His area was understanding the world. People talk about was he another version of a Henry Kissinger. How did you see him and his take on the world as a diplomat and how did he combine that with getting things done in washington . There are overlapping seams between the books and mine. One is ambition. Holbrook played a ton of tennis and i have a feeling that he froze up through the hierarchy in saigon and washington by whipping people on the tennis court were so competitive they had to respect him. First it was his close friend and peer in the Foreign Service in saigon and they remained friends about ten years and their friendship mysteriously disintegrated with great consequences for them and the u. S. Foreign policy and later when they were working together with bosnia he then started playing tennis against westmoreland in saigon and eventually got to Bobby Kennedy in washington and this is how you get invited to the best of dinner tables in georgetown. He revered this postwar generation of americanstatesman the george kennan, clark clifford, george marshall. He thought of them as the model for him. He wanted to be just like them. The problem is he wasnt born to the lost aristocracy. He was jewish although he never talked about it and kind of had an outside rawness and even uncouth nest that kept getting in his way as well as a way to push other people aside and get ahead and the times changed. The Foreign Policy establishment was falling apart during his career in the wake of the vietnam. There was no longer the group of wise men that could be called on. So holbrook was forever trying to get to the top of the mountain. He loved mountain climbing stories and always just falling short of the summit. I had the highest base camp imaginable and i think that its partly because history changed. He didnt have a geostrategic mind. He was born of an operative. He was a guy that went in and got things done. Times changed and holbrook wasnt cut out to smooth his way to the top and wasnt disappointed like baker as susan said. He was undisciplined and transparent. His appetite and insecurities were all on the surface. He thought he was playing people when in fact they sell right through him and in the end of the relationship that failed him is the one with barack obama that he desperately wanted to work closely with him and to be trusted but obama never trusted or liked him and in the end holbrook died with some degree of a broken heart with a sense of failure at the end of his life. A. To add quickly on the parallel between these two men who are vastly different in a lot of ways and also what made them successful, they were relentless and instinctive. Ive been looking for places may be where their lives intersected, and they obviously knew of each other. They were there in the administration at the end of the cold war. He said something about we dont have a dog in the fight. And later that became the place of Richard Holbrooks greatest triumph. Its a place but it may be a way to look at what was it about the balkans that led itself to Richard Holbrooks strengths and weaknesses . I think the line we do not have a dog in the fight is crucial because it said something about james bakers worldview and his view of american Foreign Policy and where we had interest seemed where we didnt. He looked at the balkans and he saw a hopeless ancient struggle that we could never understand and had no business getting involved in. He made a very cursory effort to try to negotiate with melissa veggie and other leaders at the beginning of the war. He botched it, the war happened anyway. Bill clinton inherited it at a terrible stage in bosnia. Its not bakers finest hour, and it shows something about the limits of his realism because the difference is holbrook had a passionate sense that america had to be involved in the bosnias of the world and if we let that country believed it would eventually become our problem. It would possibly rupture the Transatlantic Alliance. It was not of no consequence. We actually did have a dog in the fight. What holbrook committed himself to that, and he did it in a way that shows he really did care about other countries and people and places whose names we cannot pronounce who are suffering and civil war as refugees and floods and famine. This is something that characterized him throughout his career. He had a passionate humanitarian stream and that was activated by the suffering in the balkans as was his very postwar sense that america had to leave and so he was not going to stop until he had a deal and that relentlessness that peter mentioned is what bosnia brought out in him. The same qualities didnt work in other places but all of the strengths came together and he achieved what his claim to history that he supports. Listening to you and thinking about how the first iraq war, 1990, where in writing the book he wanted to take out references to there was a line about maybe we should have stayed longer. He didnt want that in their, suggesting maybe he thought mistakes were made. I think jim baker was a pragmatist. He wasnt all about imposing a freedom agenda. He was very calculating about where he thought it was possible that he was going to jump on it and. At the beginning of the bush presidency he became secretary of state he wasnt interested at all some of the diplomats were suspicious of him. He was going to have his own political list of what he thought he could accomplish and he wasnt going to focus on the rest so he went looking for the deal and that is the key to understanding his foreignpolicy worldview. He was willing to assert power in the world but nobody was quite sure what that power would mean. The world was falling apart. Talk a little bit about the view of all of that and how he maneuvered i think he wouldnt have been as masterful at the moment of the fall of the berlin wall and the dissolution of the soviet union. In a weird way he never showed much interest in the greatest Foreign Policy issue of his life which was the cold war. I think that he found the soviet union may be too abstract, too o static. Not enough was happening. His intensity and attention were always directed towards particular countries where there was conflict and suffering. Vietnam, bosnia, once the cold war ended i think they saw the opportunity for democrats to reenter the Foreign Policy arena this was the position he ended up in, so he was always looking over his shoulder worried about an attack. Once the cold war ended, in a sense that pressure was off and i think that he had an outside idea of what america could do. He wanted to be involved not just bosnia but cosa vo, cyprus, the congo, not with military power that certainly as a kind of all purpose negotiator. There were all of these wars going on in the 90s as the countries were disintegrating and overseeing to find them all. In a way baker is more of a kissinger figure that had a sort of large view of what was possible and as geopolitics as holbrook was more of an operative that could go to solve a particular problem. I think in the post world war era he was at his most successive and got into some troubles he had a hard time getting out of there was one line i wrote down about baker in the end when you were writing about how much you wanted to be seen as a diplomat. Again, working on the book. But im quoting, he was after all a fixer no matter how much he tried to break out of the straitjacket but a fixer that shaped the world events. George is saying james baker in some respects was more like Henry Kissinger but there was a difference. In the sense that they took on the big things. He wasnt moved by pictures, would never have thought. He didnt have a great world strategy or view of things. He wouldnt have gotten into the view. He was in the end a lawyer that knew how to negotiate, a political operative that knew how to get the legislation through, Campaign Leader that could negotiate with the other team. The great downfall that crushed him the most he had negotiated the talks for the gulf war and managed the unification of germany and then his friend george bush calls him to the white house. Once again to resume that and this was a crushing blow he couldnt stand the idea that he was worrying about this instead of the great issues of the day. Through the fall it felt like why arent you doing anything. They called and said youve got to get on his case. Even barbara bush was convinced he wasnt all in. He thought she was avoiding blame for the loss that caused a rift between baker and the bush family that took years to resolve so youre right its what he wanted to transcend. We talked about the ambition of these then larger than life. What was it about him that in the end you think kept him from realigning blacks he really wanted to be secretary of state and you mentioned between what happened between him and president obama. What was it about him . In 1996, he had just achieved his greatest triumph which was a big thing. And reelected they had to decide who would replace christopher as the secretary of state. It came down to Richard Holberg and madeleine albright. He was actually leaning towards holbrook because he said hes brilliant, he has a great mind, he knows more, he is relentless. Hillary clinton wanted her husband to pick the first female secretary of state but said to al gore i dont think holbrook has the selfawareness from becoming toxic. That was clintons shrewd an analysis of holbrooks character. Holbrook understood the person across the table brilliantly. He didnt know himself very well. He couldnt see himself or laugh at himself, he couldnt see himself as others were seeing him. There was a kind of lifelong blindness to his own flaws and character that i think was a fatal flaw and it meant he could negotiate but when there was an obstacle that was within himself, he didnt know how to get around it and that is what undid his relationship with barack obama. Holbrook was driving him crazy with his lecturing and flattering and talking about vietnam and this Ancient Mariner saying you must listen to me, i know. Obama couldnt stand it so holbrook didnt know why none of this, none of his charms and talents were working in who they wanted to impress and that was the reason why i think he never got that job of his hearts desire, secretary of state. The reason was himself. I want to ask a question if i can. How do you think he became the counterpart to james baker and bush the gore. I always felt that showed him as no one could beat him when it came down to that. How do you think Richard Holbrook would have done going up against james baker on the recount . Obviously he isnt a political operative or a lawyer but hes a brilliant negotiator. How do you think he would have done against baker . One of the interesting things going back to that recount i think people were well aware even as the time before the recount of the differences between them but heres the thing one of the great mistakes was sitting down and we tell the story in the book sitting down for the first meeting, this dramatic moment whats going to happen in florida. He had a whole amount of time to get down to business negotiating. Jim baker wasnt there to negotiate and i dont think, fundamentally that is where his experience as a corporate lawyer for decades came into it so it would have been an asymmetry there before holbrook and baker that did come from his understanding of a high stakes legal venture and he wanted to get out of the Florida Court and he had a very calculated and disciplined sense of what it took. He had no interest in sitting there figuring out what was in the mind of al gore so that might have made it hard for holbrook to negotiate in this particular situation. And you also have to come back to do you have the respect to command your own team and i think that was one of his Hidden Assets in dealing with bush. Weve been having a debate about this were they the closest secretary of state and president ever or were they the closest and friendliest secretary of state since madison and jefferson . I am not an expert. What goes on at your dinner table. I know jim baker would have appreciated Richard Holbrook as a worthy adversary and debate partner. He recognized his excellence and he liked to play tennis and he would have known holbrook for a good player. Its a great thought experiment. What would it have been baker versus holbrook. Pick up on let me ask you he talked about in the end he didnt know himself. Does jim baker know himself . He is not a reflective person. We love doing this book we have a live subject so we got the chance to ask all these questions and the truth is he isnt somebody that is going to open up his psychological profile and expose himself in that way. Hes super disciplined even to this day but he did give access to his papers and again they are not like holbrooks letters. They were not expressive in that way. There were little clues here and there. One was this tragedy where his first wife died of cancer and he gave us a letter that there was a policy for. He writes it with george bush and they moved from the house and he tries to get baker to run from the house seat. He writes the letter explaining why it isnt going to make the campaign. He says the reason why is because his wife is dying and the doctors havent told them. He said to this friend [inaudible] he said i cant do it because my wife is dying and i havent told anybody. I havent told my kids were my y mother. The one person he tells its george bush, that is a friendship that is powerful and transformative. It showed us a way that we hadnt seen and also by the way there was another letter his dying wife writes him a letter because in fact she does know she is dying and she hides it in the house and he has this letter 50 years later crying even to this day and as it is a very human story and very powerful story. Its not psychologically open the way holbrook was. I think the character study is so powerful, so rich. Baker isnt that kind of a person but he is human. That is one of the things that made this book. To be able to do my book dependent on holbrook, to be able to talk to james baker and not having Richard Holbrook looking over my shoulder he wouldnt have given me the papers at all and all of the people that talked to me didnt have to worry about what he would say once they found out what he had done so this had to be the story of a man that had come and gone and that is how he was able to write. Thats an important distinction. Both holbrook and baker were extremely astute in different ways in managing their images, both of their critics saying that was one of their great skills talking to the reporters and they had an extreme sensitivity. You pointed out one of the great sources for us in writing this book was looking at what he deleted from his memoirs at the state department in his years in public life because it is often the stage managing image and the parts they dont want to tell you that are revealing is anything else. Keeping around to document things late in life, he just turned 90 this year. He is written to memoirs of his own and i found them to be surprisingly candid, surprising about his family. You get a certain level of awareness and if you can talk about how your father micromanaged you so much and even after you were a marine veteran and graduated from college, you agree not only to go to law school but insist you go to the signup to the undergraduates because that is the fraternity that his father thought their family should be. He was willing to in a way that helped us understand its not just a resume that you are talking to. You have to look at those personal qualities to understand what made him able to tackle a series of washingtons hardest jobs in a way that actually nobody else had done in this period of time in the modern era. I want to finally ask you all about todays washington and how im interested to know how you think holbrook would be able to function in the washington of today party of power, but what would it be like and jim baker, what does he think of whats going on now . We know this interview will be released in september, so time will pass in another month or so. But george, what about that . I think he would have been at sea for the post war, his dna with an architect of the postworld war i and the influences that he never stopped comparing himself to. Today, first of all, trumps washington would be a mindboggling appalling place for Richard Holbrook, everything the opposite of Richard Holbrook. I cant think of a single move hes made that holbrook would have agreed with and vice versa. He would have been writing columns for the post and denouncing the isolationism of America First and talking about the importance of the Transatlantic Alliance and nato and our allies in asia. During the pandemic i think that he would have been a brilliant organizer of other countries to find a cooperative response. That is the kind of thing that he excelled at. He put hiv aid hivaids as an ie before the security council, so he understood the disease could be a threat to the national security, but i think that he wouldnt have known how to function, social media would have brought out the poorest qualities. The seducing of reporters that he excelled at that so easily done and matters so much anymore i think that it would have been inalienable for him had he felt as if the golden age was gone. Hes watching closely whats going on. I think he finds the trump world maddening. He is tearing down basically the architecture of World Affairs and the party that they spent a lifetime building up and doing the research one night i was actually covering the impeachment trial of President Trump and going through some files one night after the deadline i found a memo i hadnt noticed before and it was one baker had written in his file. He kept at least the appearance meant so much he kept a file of all of the instances so he would keep a record of showing he wouldnt do that and one of the memos they were coming to george bush at the end of the 1992 campaign. You need to ask britain and russia for help understanding the overseas activities when he was young and they said no that crossed the line. We do not ask for the foreign powers and there i was looking at the number and so struck at the contrast of what we were covering today. I think the point is well taken. Jim baker in many ways couldnt disavow him. I sat down with him a few days before the election and he was a man stricken, absolutely in pain and tortured about what to do. He told me donald trump doesnt believe anything i believe when it comes to Foreign Policy and he told me he thought donald trump was not the and couldnt bring himself to reject the nominee. Jim baker came out of his time in washington convinced that the only way to wield power is from the inside. He isnt a man who thinks theres any efficacy being the outside housing and complaining that no one will take you seriously. This is a struggle of the Republican Party under trump, and its been i think a window into the partys sole to watch him wrestle with donald trump on a personal level is exactly the opposite of him and yet baker never brought himself to publicly denounce trump and disavow the turn in the Republican Party that he spent his whole life working in a different direction. Its all fascinating these two men who clearly helped shape washington. The books couldnt be more important right now and again i want to thank these amazing offers, the author of our man and Richard Holbrook at the end of the American Century and cend Susan Glasser and peter baker the man who ran washington, the life and times of james baker of the third. Thank you all for an extraordinary conversation. Thanks to you. Good evening, everyone. Im the director of the wisconsin book festival. Thank you so much for being here tonight. We are absolutely delighted to be hosting larry for his book demagogue about senator Joseph Mccarthy and he will appear this evening alongside john nichols who many of you know from his role at the Capital Times as associate editor from the nation magazine. We couldnt be more delighted to be