Ewing Marion Kauffman foundation for supporting the lecture series tonight. Perhaps you are aware that the Eisenhower Foundation is raising money to conduct a comprehensive exhibit renovation. It is the largest Fundraising Campaign in our foundations 73 year history and it is the First Comprehensive exhibit renovation in more than 45 years. The new exhibits will be unveiled this summer. We have been so encouraged by the response that we have received thus far and am pleased to report that we raise 90 of our goal. We want to finish the campaign before june 6 so we can publicly announce this milestone to all of the veterans who join us at the eisenhower president ial library and museum to commemorate the 75th anniversary of dday. Many of our friends have already made a gift to the exhibit renovations and i would like to thank you for your trust and participation in this project. There is still time to participate and i hope everyone will consider a gift so we can reach our goal. It gives me great pleasure to introduce tonights program. Louis galambos is a Professor Emeritus in the department of history and editor of the papers of dwight d eisenhower. He has served as president of the Business History conference and the economic history association. A former editor of the journal of economic history, he has written extensively on u. S. Business history, business Government Relations and the rise of the bureaucratic state. His principle of the Business History group, a Business Consulting organization and has a historical consultant to merck and co. , at t and the world bank group. Here to share his book, eisenhower becoming leader of the free world is lewis galambos. It is very nice to be here. Lets see if i can get this to stand up. Very good. Okay. The library has been very important to me. It was very important doing the paper. Absolutely essential to do the eisenhower paper. It was important in doing the book. Now, i dont know how much most of you know about editing papers. You do it day by day. You read the subject, in this case ike. What ike wrote and then you read what was written to him. Then you read what happened as a result of what he wrote. And you go on day by day doing that. And then you produce volumes that are about that sick. Now, these are like the big biographies that you may read. These are what i call chest crushers. You read them at night when you are going to bed. And you read a few pages and boom, they come down on you. So, that is part of the problem. The other problem is they produce guilt. Because, i dont know how Many Americans but i would guess many more than 100,000 have never finished war and peace. They take it on vacation every year. And it sits there. And then they put it back in the car when they go home. Because they didnt read it. They went to the beach. They were on vacation. So, i decided to avoid that and write a slim book that could be read by a busy person in two or three nights. And if it came down on you it wouldnt hurt you too much. So, i had you in mind in righting the book. And as i said i drew heavily upon the library and their expert assistance in working on that. Now, most of you, i would say many in this audience know a lot about president eisenhower. And you know first that he was president. And you know roughly when that was. And you wont make the mistake that a friend of mine made in righting a textbook in which she had eisenhower taking office and 52. No, i want to tell you you will never make a mistake except about george washington, they always get elected in an even year and they always take office in an odd year. Well, there is a book out there published by a really good publisher that got it wrong. I wont tell you any more about that. But any rate, i wont repeat some things that i know you already know. He was born in 1890. And that day is important. Im not going to give you a whole lot of dates to remember and i didnt bring any blue books so you dont have to worry about a test after this talk. So, he was born in 1890 and that was just when the United States was becoming the leading Industrial Power in the world. The United States was making a transition. We had long been a labor poor and capital poor country. And we were growing. We were growing capital and labor from around the world because we needed it. We had great natural resources. Well, at this point we started to be a capital rich country and labor had a different relationship to what we were doing. So, that was when ike was born. There were no cars. They had horses and wagons. Dirt roads and dirt streets. It was a different world. In particularly a small town world. I associate with that. I was raised in a town that got to 7000 accounting some sheep. They wanted to be bigger than they actually were in southern indiana. But it helped me understand ike. The United States then started to assert its power overseas for the first time. We became as some say created an empire. I asked if some vacationed in puerto rico and noticed that they speak a different language. How did that happen . They look at me with a blank look. So, every once in a while i once asked about when the First World War took place. Some of them had it in the 19th century, some had it around the time of the Second World War. It was a problem. Most of them were International Relations majors. So, i guess they didnt have to do a whole lot of history. Well, that was very important in america in our country and ikes career of course started just about the time of the First World War and reaches a very impressive climax in the Second World War. There is probably no professional of any sort that i can think of for him one event was a fulcrum for his whole career. And that was dday and the decision he made, powerful. Powerful impact upon his career. So, when i started to work on this book the first thing i did was try to go back to his early life. We had edited from the Second World War on. I have done the presidency and the chief of staff and columbia university. We have done all that. But i didnt know that much about ike as a child. And as a young man. So i did a lot of research on that. And i used two ideas. One is identity. Everyone in this room including me has an identity. That is the story you tell about yourself. You tell your story every day to other people, to your wife, husband, daughter. Sons, some people have sons, i have four daughters. You tell that story to the people you work with and work for. So, your identity is that story. Your personality doesnt change much over your lifetime but your identity will change a lot. And ikes changed significantly over his career. The other idea i want to use is reputation. Reputation is the story other people tell about you. Now, there may be a little incongruity between your story and their story. That sometimes causes pain. I like the introduction today but they didnt tell you that i once failed organic chemistry, did they . No. Some of you may have sons or daughters or grandchildren who failed organic chemistry, so take it easy. You can still earn a living in america after you fail organic chemistry. Now, i started to look at his career thinking about identity and reputation. At first he was an indifferent soldier. He was an indifferent professional soldier. He was indifferent at west point. He was really smart. Terrific poker player. But he had a little problem about authority. And i said where did that come from . I associate ike as being the master organizer. Why would he have a hangup about authority . Daddy, daddy was a hangup about authority. And his big brother. His brother brother was called big ike. And in high school he was called little like. And that is a burden to carry around for four years. And who was the captain of the Football Team . Not little like. Okay, you have to suffer through that. You put those two men together, one young and one older. And you get a real hangup about authority. So, ike rejected his father. He started to smoke cigarettes. At dday he was smoking four packs per day. That means you are liking a cigarette off of the cigarette. I do not recommend that for anyone. I have a strong interest in Public Health and believe me my father died of lung cancer and smoked all of his life. I dont recommend that. He rejected his father. He learned to play poker and his father hated cards. He learned to drink and his father hated that. He was turning away from his family in a significant way and they were pacifists. He went to the military academy. Well, okay. He had a hangup about authority. And he got a lot of demerits. A lot of them for smoking. They werent allowed to smoke. He would sneak around and do things. I wondered about that. I thought well, here is a man who became a professional smoker and he doesnt care as much as some other soldiers who were already there at that same time. In the 1920s however, he finally acquired a mentor. And whenever i talked to other groups who were professional military i make a lot of this because it is a tremendously interesting problem. How did the mentor know, how was it that gerald fox connor met eisenhower and discerned that he had that potential. He took him to panama. Educated him he didnt read these boring books once, he had to read them three times. He had to practice riding orders of the day every day. Until it was grooved into his mind. So fox connor converted him and inspired him to look forward to something more than being a retired lieutenant colonel. So, it is an amazing thing number 1 that he recognized it, and number 2 that he would actually do it. And then number 3 that he followed up. Why did he have to follow up . If he had already gone through this conversion experience . Well, there was a bureaucracy of the army. And the army had a fixed view of what eisenhower was capable of. While he was at west point one of the things he did after he blew out his knee was coach. And he was a terrific coach. He was an instinctive leader with small groups. He was good at that. At the platoon level he was always good. He didnt need to be taught nothing about that. He was respected by his peers. And was a good leader at that level. But, the army bureaucracy said he was a good coach and a good man to have around, but he is not going to go to the top. So, they resisted. Bureaucracies dont change their mind overnight. And any of you who have authority over other people, think about this. They were sensitive to what ike was learning and that he was going to go ahead now that he turned his career around. He turned it around in a significant way and he was being maneuvered to get ahead. It took some maneuvering. He got into a with the former head chief of staff of the army and then that was general douglas macarthur. He was army chief of staff in the 1930s. Ike served as a staff officer and he followed macarthur to the philippines. Now, their personalities clashed. As you might imagine. And ike was enormously better about certain things that happened. Four years he showed restraint with general macarthur. But, finally broken the philippines. Because macarthur cheated him. He sent him to the United States and in effect replaced him on his staff. So when ike came back from the United States, all of his jobs had been taken over by somebody else. Where he was sitting and he couldnt do anything. Now, macarthur was he didnt raise a stink with the war department. He just did it very quietly. I call it a machiavellian moment. One of those moments in life, some of you may have had a machiavellian moment when somebody cheated that you respected or you were working with. And you realized how the world operates which for ike was a major machiavellian moment. He was tricked by macarthur. He was better it was the first of two turning point in his career. He learned that sometimes he was going to have to do some things to achieve a major end that he found distasteful. The second came in north africa. In north africa he had thought through his whole career to have command of combat troops. He was dedicated to getting to that point where he would have direct command of combat troops. That was his ambition, major ambition. The british however maneuvered at the casablanca conference in 1943 and cleverly and with terrific staff work, a were very good. They were really good, almost as good as the navy is. The navy is tremendous of achieving their political ends. As were some other people in ikes career. But the british maneuvered. They had brits in between ike and the combat force. Did that hurt him . Yes. He had worked all this time hard to get to that point. He was Supreme Commander in africa. And now he did not have direct command. He had to go through a british officer. You probably already know this, there was a lot of strain within the alliance. The brits were contentious of american troops. The brits were absolutely certain that they had won world war i not us. The brits were absolutely convinced that eisenhower they had no respect for ike and they showed it in a lot of ways. One of the ways he first met a distinguished british officer, monty. The first time he met him ike as i said, he smoked all the time. Particularly he was nervous. If you met with monty you were nervous. Anybody would be nervous meeting with general montgomery. And general montgomery told him to put his cigarette out, he wasnt allowed to smoke. That hurt. When you are in the position that ike was in and it was just an assertion of authority of somebody who thought that was important for the moment. So the british had achieved their end and ike had to put up with it. What is important was at this point he did not throw down the gauntlet. In a career like this people sometimes come to a point where they will tell you if you dont do it my way, i am leaving. And we are going to get to a point where i did that. But not now. In north africa he continued to preserve the unity of the forces. Some of you may remember he sent one officer home because he called a british officer a british sob. He said he can call him a sob but not a british address ob. He put up with monty. All the way through africa, sicily, and italy. And then that brought him to the decision. The big decision which was d day. This is phenomenal when you think back what a giant armada that was and what a narrow window they had and he made that decision to send those people in. And he hated the thought that a lot of them were going to die. He was touched by that. Some military officers are not. General patton in africa told his soldiers the point of all this is to kill them before they kill you. He had a different attitude toward war. He was a terrific officer, particularly on the offense. When you had offensive operations he was great. So, ike made that decision and kept the allies together and he kept the British Working together with americans through all of that time and a difficult time that followed the invasion. Now, by this time he was committed to the concept of unity, unity in war, unity and peace. He thought in a general sense that was how you achieved things. And that had an impact when he went to the chief of staff, went back to washington and became chief of staff for the army. He was upset, enormously upset. This came out later in his farewell address. He was upset by the fact that they couldnt agree on strategy so he couldnt get the services to agree. For years, for several years we didnt have a strategy because the services wouldnt agree on what the strategy was going to be. They each favored one idea. And he looked on the services than as Interest Groups. And he hated Interest Groups. He never adjusted to it. Richard nixon loved Interest Groups, dealt with them and had no trouble at all. Eisenhower hated them and you know why . Because after the decision was made, they kept on fighting. They didnt except the decision that was made. If they lose in congress we will go to the court. If we lose in the court we will go to the people. We wont give up. They paid for doing that relentlessly. So, that irritated ike all the time. When he became president that is the way he ran his cabinet. Everybody had a right to say something. Everybody can get in to the decisionmaking process. After we make the decision, he never left any doubt about who would make that decision, and we join hands and do it together. So, unity was extremely important to him. And he thought in very general terms, not just military but also political. He thought that way about american society. In the postwar period he worked with unity as chief of staff. And that is i think what is part of the military Industrial Complex, that remark. They only read the first part of the speech, he said we must be strong. We must be strong. We have to have a powerful military. But he was worried about the military Industrial Complex in the way the Interest Groups worked in washington and in our government in general. So, he was worried about that from chief of staff on and when he was president of columbia university. He spent a great deal of time on the train going back and forth between washington to try to implement that policy. It was very difficult. He tried to implement that as commander of nato. He worked hard to instill unity to get people to Work Together. People who had been bitter enemies and he wanted them to Work Together to achieve a major objective which by this time was the cold war. Now, the cold war had a great deal to do with his presidency. And again, he tried to unite americans to deal with the cold war and he said if we dont have peace, we dont have anything. From 1946 on, he said that if we have another major war it will not be a great tank battle of the Second World War. It will not be the infantry, heroic as they were in the battle of the bulge. We will not have that. The war will be over in three days. He said the war may destroy much of civilization but it will be over quickly. And we have to realize that. So, that had a great deal to do with the way he exercised authority as commander of nato and in the presidency. Now, some people think he had to be persuaded to be president of the United States. I disagree completely. He was afraid he might lose. He didnt like to lose. He was very competitive. He didnt like to lose. He didnt like to loosen football, baseball, or even in politics even though he knew he didnt know a lot about them. He had to learn a lot. He talked to people. He took lessons. He had people repair papers for him. He had to learn how to operate the presidency. And when he got in there he was ready for the job. He had his cabinet picked before he took office. The entire cabinet was ready to go. He was prepared like a brilliant staff officer would be. He was a brilliant staff officer when he was in the army. And it showed in his presidency in the way he handles his relationships. So, he sought peace. He knew he had to compromise. He compromised in korea. He wasnt going to nuke north korea. He wasnt going to nuke the chinese. He was going to get a compromise and live with it. We are still living with it today. We still have it around. You have to compromise. He recognized that he was going to have to cut the budget. Going to have to compromise. He was going to have to cut the military in fact. He developed a new strategy. Was that strategy important . It goes back to that decision about the war. If there is a major war, it will be over quickly. It will be a nuclear war. So, he said the military had to be reshaped along those lines. That is true today. That is still true today. We still depend ultimately from the threat of nuclear war. So, eisenhower was a major factor bringing that about. So he recognized that we had to have not only a good strategy but we had to have Economic Policy to support it. Because this is a long run battle. Ike as far as i know never predicted when the soviet union collapsed. There have been a few people who might have predicted that but it was not ike. He thought the war was probably going to go on for 100 more years. He said we had to be ready for that. And we cant spend our economy into the hole. He kept taxes high, he was a republican president. He kept taxes high until he balanced the budget. He had three balanced budgets in his eight years. Stop to think about what it would take to get a balanced budget now. Okay . He had three. That was an incredible accomplishment. He recognized that he was going to have to compromise another way. He didnt cut what was absolutely necessary. And finally, finally he told his brother off. All these years, all these years fermenting inside of ike and ed kept giving him advice about this and about that. He finally told him about social security. He said ed, if anybody in america wants to get rid of social security, you will never hear of them again, meaning you, ed. He is talking directly. Hes right. He wrote this to his brother in a famous letter. And those are the kind of letters that they have. Those are great things to read. He said we are going to have certain programs. He conducted a military tour of the United States and said we needed roads. Im going to be on i70 tomorrow. I love those roads. I used to go back and forth between graduate school through west virginia. Oh my god. If you have never followed a coal truck in the rain up a hill in a 1950s chevy, you dont understand what rhodes really meant to people. These roads changed our lives in many ways. In many important ways. So, he said he would have to compromise to do that. So he did that. And he did that sometimes a little vulgar. Have a chat. He kept communication open with Congress Even though congress was dominated by the other party. This was extremely important to what ike was doing. He felt that innovation which is a particular interest of mine, one of the things that distinguishes capitalism from communism is its ability to innovate. To produce new goods and services. New ways of doing things and to do it quickly. I thought that would take care of itself if he just kept the government from interfering with people. And that lasted for his policy until 1957. When sputnik came, he suddenly realized that he couldnt just wait. He had to do something politically. So it worked. It produced the internet. Now, some of you may think that was terrible, i dont know. , some of the impact on our children is probably negative. But the internet certainly is extremely important to our society. If you remember, the transistor was released in the 1940s. And the integrated circuits which is key to the digital revolution. You have been through two revolutions in your lifetime. Yes, too. You have been through the second Industrial Revolution which gave you the giant automobile companies, the giant steel companies, all of that. Now we are in a bio digital revolution. Biology has changed the way we live. We stay alive. I am a walking testament to the effects of biology. But digital. It is also digital that has changed the way we do things. It has changed the way i do things almost every day and it has changed the way most of you do things. We have been through a bio digital revolution that follows sputnik really. And the results for ike for his policy was a low rate of inflation, moderate growth approaching but not reaching 3 per year. And brought many new people into the workforce including many, many women. Now, icad a blind spot. He understood men a lot better than he understood women. But, if you ask me and his family who was an important person who shaped his life in the end in his whole career, it was his mother. It was his mother and not his father. She was the one who preached compromise, reconciliation and the professional effort that shaped the family. We got the middleway from ike. I dont know if we could have the middleway now. I dont know. A lot has happened since then. And maybe we are past the middleway. But it looks pretty good to me. And i think i would have liked to have seen a little more compromise, a little more communication and a whole lot more unity. We need it. And ike gave it to us and i think that is the important point about his presidency. Thank you. We are going to have q a and you have to come up and use the microphone to ask a question. If i dont get any good questions out of this group, i am really going to be disappointed. I want some really good, hard questions. Dont fool around. Can you talk about how ike with all of his knowledge and experience you might say got misled by dulles of the cia and got involved . I can elaborate a little more on that and probably should. I dont think he was so much misled by dulles and his brother as he was looking for easy solutions. If he had a blind spot in Foreign Affairs it was the revolutionary process. Americans have had a lot of trouble in our own revolution remember . But we forgot about that. And we had a hard time dealing with other peoples revolutions. We had a hard time at that time recognizing for instance the vietnamese and the chinese were different people and the russians were different people and there were going to be differences. It was not just a big red blob. I think in handling revolution in iran was probably the weakest point for him. I think he had trouble anti look for easy solutions. And given the amount of pressure he was under, im sym that, but i think when we look at it in terms of history, that was a mistake. That was a good question. Yeah, the thing that always amazed me about eisenhower, first of all he was a german extraction. Yes, my family on one side was named hindbering and i got my cardiovascular genes from them. Im ever grateful. Anyway, we fought germany twice, world war i, world war ii. Whats mazed me ive studied, not as much as you have of course but ive studied eisenhower and ive never, ever come across any situation where he faced antigerman prejudice either in world war i or world war ii where the brits think we might want to put someone named eisenhower in this deal. Did he bring any as far as you know antigerman prejudice coming up through the ranks becoming commander in chief against germany . Because his name is obviously ethnically german. Did that cause any problems that you know of . He hated hitler. He hated the holocaust. He wanted american soldiers to see those camps and what happened. He hated that. He had soldiers respect for the german army. The germans fought well even when they were fighting with 16yearolds as they did late in the war when they ran out of men. He admired their discipline and skill but he hated what the country had done. So thats my answer. I dont see any of that in his early career. So i cant find that there, but i know ultimately it was very important to him. Was his ethnicity something he ever talked about or he didnt really talkabout that, no. It was not a big subject with him. Im just going by the long written record and what we see there, and you go by whats there and you dont see it. Dont see it, thank you. Over here. Yes, i admire are i have such admiration but i keep coming back to the question of iran and guatemala in the first two years of his presidency and an Interesting Data point of the First National security confidential meeting that he had with the cia where they proposed a coup and the iranian leader the first impulse was why cant we lend him a Million Dollars and help stabilize his government which is from the declassified minutes from that meeting. But by the end of that meeting hes steam roll squrd the outcome of that is a nightmare for iran that continues to today. In the following year guatemala the poor president just said plainly i want to make guatemala a capitalist country, a modern capitalist country and, you know, the yistages a coupe and, you know, those poor people are theyre still reeling from the bloodbath from all that. So theres the initial moment of pure decency why cant we loan a Million Dollars, what happened to that guy . We hear him again, you know, in his fair well speep, but i just think about half a dozen democracies in the emerging world that suffered horrifically from the wrong turn it took. Well, i agree with you. As i said i thought that the revolutionary process was the hardest thing for him to understand. And particularly if it was on the left. And he tended to emphasize the communist aspect of things rather than the National Aspect of things. And so i think that led him into what was hindsight being a historian i am told repeatedly by people hindsight is perfect. Actually it isnt. Historians disagree like everybody else. But i think that was one of the weak points. His response to that i think would be we had eight years of peace. We had eight years of peace and prosperity, thats how he would answer. And so he would say, yes, and i would agree with this. Were not saying hes a saint. He was a president , a president , okay . And hes like other men and women, they make mistakes. And so i see the iranian policy and the guatemala policy as a mistake myself looking back. But i have a tremendous advantage in knowing how things turned out. Yes, and you do, too. I agree with you. Im in kind of my element here. Im going to ask several questions if i may. Well, lets do one at a time. I have a limited mind and i do think sequentially, so ask one first. So my first one is dday the same as doomsday . Well, it was for germany in the end, okay. And then the balance budget the day before dday and this is going to go in the eisenhower memorial is all of those young soldiers, the paratroopers and he hated the thought they were going to die, so he was acutely aware of this and knew that that was the present victory, but he didnt go see the generals. He went to see the troops. Go ahead. Oc, and was this the era because this is not my era, was this the era of the north and the south, the Confederate Flag and the dixie lines . Okay, civil rights. Where was ise on civil rights . For both his entire military career up until 1945 he seemed to not be bothered at least he didnt write anything that suggested to me that he was bothered by segregation in the military and segregation in american society. So i would say in 1945 he changed his mind why . We were running out of men, too. First the germans ran out of men, then the british ran out of men. And now america was running out of combat soldiers. So he decided to give africanamericans some first opportunity to engage in combat equally. And that was a turning point in his life. When he returned to washington he was much more vigorous about civil rights. As chief of staff and he worked with Linden Johnson to get a weak forum of the civil rights. Thats all he could get to. Congress was a weak forum of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s. The Tuskegee Airmen was that before or after him . That was in the Second World War, yes. I will stop and talk a little bit about the air force just for a moment. Hang on. And he that was the only time in his career that he said he would leave. He told churchill if i dont get the Strategic Air force support at dday im not your man. Churchill recognized thats an ultimatum. You dont do that more than once with someone like churchill. He did that and he got the support he needed. But thats the only time in his career that i know that he actually did that. And then was Industrial Power versus the farmers of america . In 1870 agriculture and commerce produced more National Income than industry. By 1890 the sides were reversed. We were becoming an industrial urban society. And farmers were holding on politically and theyve been very good at that, at improving their position. We work out all the way through the 20s and all those bills. We work through the 20s to try to get some way to deal with agriculture. It gave ike fits. We were in the midst of an agricultural revolution in the 1950s. So all kinds of new green techniques, new crops, new things were emerging that were extremely important. And he thought we could be getting rid of some of the subsidies. But by the end of eight years of fighting they were right where they were when he started. So he didnt win that fight. He fought for eight years but he didnt win it. Again i was not born in that era. I was twisting it around like a politician. I thank you for that. But i was wonding your insight, take us back to when president ike versus a Running Official stevenson. He ran against stevenson and one he was a national hero. He came to kansas and gave his first speech in the rain. Ooh, it was awful. It went really bad at that point. So what he did was typical of ike, he was flexible. He knew he could be educated and he got instruction and help to teach him how to run the political campaign. Stevenson was i would say moderate in the middle of the democratic party. And he was running uphill because of ikes popularitypertpopularity partly as a person. People trusted ike, and they looked at him. And that had been true right from wept on. His colleagues trusted him. Lastly, you mentioned something about scarlett. Thats not an association about scarlett fever. And then is the baby boomer generation after ikes generation . Which generation . Baby boomers generation. The baby boomers come out in the postwar period. Thats the first baby boom, yeah. When the soldiers came home. They had more on their mind than education. Okay. [ applause ] there you go. That light is right behind you thats why i keep ducking down like this. I was wondering if you could comment on indo china and vietnam and then the nixon trips, the soviet union okay, yes. Ikes policy towards china was it seemed to me pretty much set by the fact that america had a strong sense it never had we thought we had china. We never had china. But we thought that they were because of the Second World War, that they would be our allies. So we were very disappointed when the revolution took place and when our side lost and the communists won. And once again i say that ekes tendency was to see communism as one thing, unity. A kind of all encompassing and i think a lot of us were influenced by that. I was alive, you know, in those years but i think a lot of us were influenced by that. To see communists everywhere as the same as one thing. So i think that eisenhower was influenced by that. I think he was influenced to think in terms of dominos. Remember the dominos falling, when one falls the whole row falls . And he was very worried about that. So i would say his problem was that he didnt give the credit to nationalism that he should have and he should have not just ike but also the people who gave him advice, look deeper into those societies because a lot of them have changed now. You talked about ike and his brother, ed. And you might tell us more about ed because the brother we all remember was milton who was president of your university, your john hopkins. You might have even known him. Well, i remember milton very well. I used to think down in the basement we were in a bunker. Down in the basement, the l library, and i would walk home. And at that time milton was living right on charles street and we would sit and chat. And he would always make a martini for me and for him. And i wanted to tell you that was back when i drank. I havent had a drink for 20 years, but i remember those. Whoo i had 3 1 2 blocks yet to walk when i left there. It was not always easy, but i loved milton and talked a lot with him and ike did too. What was eds claim to fame . Ed was superior intellectually. He was older. Remember he stayed out of school for two years and so he was in ikes class. So youve got somebody whos two years older, stronger, faster, smarter. And thats hard to deal with, okay, right in your class. In high school he was an extremely great athlete, great golf player and great lawyer from everything i know. And so he and ike disagreed about whether there should be a middle way or there should be eds way. And so thats where they parted ways. But ike was in the white house and ed was out on the west coast. Yes also good questions. You got an aplus today. I even grade the pilots when we land. We had a cplus landing. Ive never had an f. Did ike consider that one of his worst mistakes since it was u2 spy planes, reconsns. His mother told him to stop reading those books in the bookshelf and he snuck them out. The little boy got caught and he got caught. The important thing about u2 it was the measure at that time of our tech logical speuperiority. Ike knew that, so did the so soviets. It showed their weakness and they were unable to do anything about it until that time. So ike ike just as with the cia, he was dreadfully, dreadfully concerned about a surprise attack. Why . Pearl harbor. He thought about pearl harbor. Remember he had been in the philippines all that time. Working on that issue. So ike was dreadfully concerned about a surprise attack, and the u2 was the best defense against a surprise attack. It gave us this incredible information. We were right at the tech logical turning point where we could do the whole thing with spy sal lites and they take these incredible pictures. But ike ike took a chance and he clue the dice and thats when they lost. It hurt their relationship. Did he consider that that tarnished his reputation as he was leaving the presidency for several years after that at the time . Well, at that time i dont know if you ever read these polls they put out in newspapers. I personally use a 50 discount on anything in the media. If they say its going to be great, i say its going to be half great. If they say its horrible, were going to lose the war tomorrow, i say well probably not tomorrow, its about half that bad. So ike when he left office didnt have a very high ranking among president s among most active in mission. If this is the center most active missions i know are to the left of center. Some of them a lot, some of them a little bit, but most of them to the left of center. And they at columbia, that new York Intellectual Group really despised ike. They thought he was a military officer and so what . And they didnt appreciate that. So his reputation was down here. Then we kept getting other president s, and any time we other president s his reputation goes up a little bit. And so now hes in the top five. Theyre competing with george washington, abraham lincoln. This is man he was told he could just be a football coach. Yes, remember. So his reputation went up. He thought he would be the wise man, and in fact i deal with that right at the end of the book. He thought he would be the wise man for america i steal that from the title of a book by isaacson, a great writer. And he thought he would be the wise man and he would give counsel, but they ignored him. They were going off in their own direction, doing their own things for their own reasons. And so they talked to him, yeah, but they didnt do what he said. And so he did not turn out to be the wise man in retirement. Yes . This better be very good. This comes directly from the military, from the army. Nothing official. I wanted to ask you about the relationship between eisenhower and academics which you were just speaking to and in particular the book president ial power and how they cast ike for two generations of scholars as a prisoner of his staff system. And i know eisenhower scholars today use that interpretation, i was curious about your opinion of what ike thought about the academics and thought about the scholars he dealt with from the universities in the course of his presidency. Well, he got along at columbia with a select group of acti active admissions. He was very upset by the number of people who had been whittled out and unable to serve because of various either health or mental aspects and he wanted some study of that and why that had been a problem in the Second World War. And so he dealt with academics on those grounds. In his personal life i think he was inclined to like businessmen, golf players, power players, people who he thought made the kind of decisions that he made. And i think he was and that showed. And columbia is the nexus of it because he wanted to get the budget balanced, he wanted to do good things for the university. And remember he replaced a president who had tremendous ties to the departments. So he never dipped down into the departments even though he liked history. He liked history, liked to read history, liked to study history. But i do not think he really had to kind of respect that other some other president s have had. He did not have a, quote, brains. Thats with an s, brains trust as fdr did. Okay, fdr recruited intellectuals to give advice about policy. And ike was not really inclined in that direction, although he would listen to economists and try to understand. He was converted to some extent to a view of the economy. So in that regard he was worth it to people. But generally, no, that was not part of his personality. Just getting back to the 1960s president kennedy ended up taking responsibility for the bay of pigs. Hes such a great military strategist, did that sort of disappoint ike . What was your understanding of ikes position in the bay of pigs and helping planning and getting it going . Well, he never i think would have launched the bay of pigs in the way it was launched. You remember dday was done with overwhelming power concentrated. Concentrated overwhelming to the point where he attacked. So i think he was he was skeptical of it as he was ske skeptical of the french in vietnam. He was skeptical of their ability, and he was skeptical of our ability to handle the situation at the bay of pigs. And he didnt make any he was not inclined to come out and make the announcements to gloss his own reputation at that time. I think he thought it was intact. But theres no question about it being an illplanned venture. Thank you. [ applause ] all week were featuring American History tv programs as a preview whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Lectures in history, american artifacts, real america, the civil war, oral histories, the presidency, and special event coverage about our nations history. Enjoy American History tv now and every weekend on cspan 3. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Wednesday, a look at a recent Conference Held at Purdue University titled remaking american political history. Well feature programs from the gathering focusing on u. S. Politics and government from the earliest days of the american republic. American history tv airs wednesday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan 3. Sunday at 9 00 a. M. Eastern a washington journal on American History tv live special callin program looking back at woodstock a 1969 cultural and musical musical phenomenon. Drugs matter but who takes those drug and why the drugs had the effect they did in the early 60s and 70s is again something were still wrestling with as scholars to understand. The technology of drugs is imperative as understanding i think not just of the 60s but of the production of history. What drugs we use in a given period and place have an incredible ability to change the direction of a given society. Collin to talk with david fasher about the social movements of the 60s leading up to woodstock and its legacy. Woodstock, 50 years, sunday at 9 00 a. M. Eastern on cspans washington journal. Also live on American History tv on cspan 3. Sunday on q a, New York Times Staff Photographer doug mills talks about photos covering president trump. Obviously he enjoys having us around. I really believe despite his constant comments about fake news and the media and so forth, i really feel he enjoys having us around because it helps drive his message, it helps drive the news of the day, which he can do every day and does every day. Hes constantly driving the message. And therefore having us around really allows him to do that. Sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans q a. Now American History tvs lectures in history series hears from Purdue University on political advertising in the 1950s highlighting Dwight Eisenhowers president ial campaigns. She compares radio and early televised ads and examines what components made them successfulo her class isliti about an hour, minutes. Nothing perhaps captures the popular memory of the 1950s like the slogan i like ike. This idea that this pin that so many people wore around the campaign of 1952 and 1956 conveys a notion of nostalgia and simplicity. It emphasizes the 1950s as this era of prosperity where america. Was a world leader and the american p
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