Im really most interested in this but it gives you have managed to do in a readable length what many other authors have tried to fit in many many pages and im just curious about your interests and eisenhower. How familiar with were you with his record when he developed an interest in the subject . Guest so i covered the pentagon for six years. Obviously i had a healthy appreciation of general eisenhower. But i didnt really have an appreciation of the eisenhower presidency. Im a college golfer, former college golfers still a golfer and i got the holy grail of golfer down to it Augusta National and i was on cloud nine and went down there and was driving down meg elia lane. Its just such a spectacular place and for golfers as you know its the place to be. So i went in and they told me you are staying in the eisenhower cabin and i couldnt believe it. I couldnt go to sleep then i poured myself a glass of wine and walked around the eisenhower cabin which is just the tech aware. Its a little white house really and the memorabilia on the wall is the books of the statues and the arts that your grandfather painted. I was kind of overcome in the midst of getting ready for my round the next day i realized i did not know and i covered politics a lot about the presidency of eisenhower because our generation and younger seemed like history as the focus started with kennedy Going Forward and i thought to myself is there a way to breathe life into that and to share that experience with younger people so soon after then i traveled to abilene, kansas to the library and boyhood home and that is where i talk to the folks there and they said this moment, this transition while a lot of books have been written about your grandfather that had not been focused on. The Farewell Speech and i went to the library and the great folks there brought out the box and i put on the gloves and they pulled out the plastic sheath and actual speech that he held in red in 1961 with the scribbles and markings and i got goosebumps. I said this is it. Thats what im going to do. Host its so exciting to be studying someone who is predigital age is that there experience, the tactile experience of that. So how long did you ask a work in this book . Guest its roughly three and a half years from the start to the birding of the book and it had a lot of help as far is researched and it was a labor of love and in. I discovered a lot and i think really susan is relevant to today and thats one of the things i love about the book, is that it really can translate your grandfathers messages can translate today. You can read that speech. President obama could have read this speech the other day in his farewell address. Posted on the course of your research on mice fascinated. Were there any surprises for you . Did you have a feeling by the end of this that there were some misconceptions about the way he ran the white house, the way he brought his leadership skills to public life . Completely. My perception of his presidency changed dramatically. I thought it was going in, it was always perceived in the press as quiet time and he was a little disconnected and played a lot of golf. Im a big proponent. And i looked at it and he got us out of the korean war and a booming economy. The first civil rights love legislation since reconstruction, that Massive National highway builds on the interstates that we drive on today under god in the pledge of allegiance, in god we trust is the National Motto printed on our currency and have this amazing ability to keep us out of foreign war where we didnt need to be yet be Strong Enough to hold off an expanding an ominous soviet union. The stat after the korean war, there really wasnt a single combat soldier killed or covert operation but through the rest of your grandfathers presidency is really stunning. If you think in retrospect and finally the bipartisan nature really was something that drove me to him because the meetings that he had with sam rayburn to House Speaker or Senate Majority leader Lyndon Johnson once a week sometimes. I mean that stunning if you think about recent president s. Host actually i was surprised to read out myself. I knew that he made a big priorities of reaching out to members of congress and i knew this he had a drink with sam rayburn and Lyndon Johnson on a regular basis but you have wonderful detail about that. Guest their histories were really something that gave us a lot. Jim haggerty as press secretary, a lot of folks and go whitman as secretary of and she is just chock full of stories and we found documents and things that had not been tapped. The other reason i did a susan was because hes the First Television president or tv anchor. It was a big deal and i was surprised and i did not know before your grandfather no transcript of News Conferences were put on the record. He could get a the News Conference and asked to present a question but you could not quote directly from the president of the United States. You would paraphrase that they would rise happy out to say the president didnt say it that way. When your grandfather came in, he said forget that. I just a campaign where everybody had a camera. But the transcripts on the record and i quickly evolved to record the News Conferences on tv and radio and then he did, the first live News Conference. The first time the American People saw their present being questioned was with president eisenhower. I was quite amused by the story of having makeup applied which he found deeply uncomfortable. How do you think, how would you compare him to other president s today in terms of his comfort with the media and television in particular . I know hes the First Television president but guest he had a lot of good relationships with the people who covered him but they did like to cover his style and his answer is this kind of stilted sometimes than he would stop and start. They made fun of the way he would talk about some things and kind of get away but i think it was transparent. For example when he had a heart attack in 1955 and he was considering obviously whether to run again or not he says to jim haggerty put everything out, jim. Then there is this note about a week later that said dear jim this is all fine but i could do without the once a day update on my bowel movements. [laughter] so i mean theyre a little nuggets of humor. Posted that little notice a keeper, suitable for framing. That is most interesting. I was also trying to read one of his last dinners before he left left office was for the press corps. Guest exactly and they really loved him as a person. I dont think they fully appreciated all the things that were happening behind the scenes. Nobody did that afterwards as a nation and thats why a look at these three days in the speech enabled us to look to the narrative and get back to his life. You know he was a humble leader ante i think got back from his time as general. The huge egos of bradley and patton and montgomery and degaulle and these huge figures that he had to figure out how to get on the same page. Host so im wondering how you see the leadership, his leadership during world war ii and his leadership during the presidency. Were you able to connect those dots and do you think he brought the same set of skills or did he have to learn new ones as president . Guest he had to learn new ones but he definitely tap those skills. The dissenting views and airing out things. He set up a National Security apparatus in the white house much like what he had in his military ability for dissenting views to happen and then the buildup to dday. I think he was someone who had a steady hand and lift people up and empowered them to do their best and gave them credit frankly. He kind of let them have the spotlight, which is an interesting story about the Nixon Eisenhower relationship is that nixon when your grandfather says you know i think you may want to run for cabinet positions on an issue to be credited with changing something if he knows he wants to run for president and nixon sees that as he wants to just kick them off and that wasnt what we found. So there was the skepticism i think that drew a bilk at that moment. Maybe thats one of the reasons he was kept off a trail in nixons campaign. Nixon said it was because of your grandfathers health but when your grandfather gets on the trail in and it turns the tide of that campaign to the point we found kennedy talking about it and he says every day that eisenhower is on the trail i feel like im standing on a pile of sand and the waves coming in and then syncing. I was thinking, and they believed if he was out a few more days that nixon might have won that election. Host thats actually one of the big controversies, isnt it about why nixon used eisenhower and the eisenhower family. There was some discussion whether ike was asked. But you know its unusual for a Vice President to be elected, isnt it . Guest well, it is. If you look back in history Vice President gore did something similar with no clinton. Obviously they were different circumstances and he was trying to distance himself from all the controversy but at the same time clinton was a great campaigner. The same kind of deal if you look back in history. Perhaps it might hit been better for Richard Nixon to own an issue. Host of all if is relationships with the great man which do you think was the most intriguing of them . Guest i almost wrote the book on the relationship between your grandfather and churchill and the letters that they sent back and forth. I think there is a lot to explore that i just didnt go back but its there at the library. They really valued each other in the world and i thought that was the most intriguing. I do think the relationship with kennedy is very complex and we talk about it here. You know this book as you know starts with president elect kennedy meeting president eisenhower after the election and they are talking in the oval office. It ends by the way with president elect trump meeting president obama in the oval office so the relevance is there eisenhower from what we found didnt think there was a lot to kennedy. He was kind of hollow when he was young might not have a lot of experience. What he was saying on the trail was really making him back specifically the u. S. Missile gap charge. The soviets were churning out missiles like sausages in the u. S. Was not. Your grandfather knew that and yet he still used it and that made your grandfather very upset. He finally meets him and in this meeting we have great detail from both sides. Eisenhower is very impressed and says to himself, you know maybe the American People got this right. Theres a a lot to the sky but what concerned him most is that he didnt allow kennedy the National Apparatus that was set up for dissenting views and that comes back about a month later in the cuba situation. Host obviously it was not sought bys favorite National Pastime in the sense that he found politicking and what politicians are forced are willing to do not so inspiring sometimes. Were you surprised by that . He has some natural charm and ability to connect with people. Guest he did. He obviously had that huge megawatt smile. He did like campaigning clearly but he was good at it as who is a relatable. I love the story and i talk about him as a humble leader. I love the story after world war ii he comes back to the ticker tape parade in new york and back to abilene and he is in the car waving and everyone is cheering and someone turns to your greatgrandmother ida and says you must be so proud of your son and she says, which one . So it gave you a sense of grounding growing as eisenhower as he did. I think that reflected itself later on. Host in the book you made the comment that maybe eisenhower didnt want to know what party people came from when they came to the white house. Do you see this, you might say nonpartisan streak in his governance . Guest really nonideological. More practical. Figured out you have to deal with the other party no matter what they said about you on the campaign trail which is the beauty of how he deals with sam rayburn and Lyndon Johnson and in the essence of passing the national highway bill that was so amazing. He had a temper and he tried to deal with it. I love pam wittmann story. She is the secretary, where she says that he went back on the south lawn to swing the club. He did that a lot. He cleared his mind. He came back and he was so angry because there were squirrels in his back swing. Every time he went back there were swirls everywhere. Squirrels so and wittmann says mr. President they have a right to be there just like you do. One day he tells the secret service to take all the squirrels off the white house lawn and transfer them to rock creek park. So thats one of the little jim stories. Host incher helps to be in charge. To have the squirrels sent into exile. You know you very artfully talk about some of the principles that guided his presidency in terms of decisionmaking and his view of the situation domestically and internationally. What struck you the most in terms of being a contemporary way of looking at this challenge . Guest he articulated this in the Farewell Speech, this caution, this balance, this want and need to not jump to things, to really act when you have to, that paperweight on his desk, silent in manner, strong in deed. I think he was all about getting things done and not dealing with the personalities and i think that is related throughout. I found a lot of examples of leadership style that he didnt steer it and he said you dont have to hit people over the head to be a leader. You have to empower them to do their job and thats how we look at it. To go back to the cuban missile crisis, another controversial thing that we really dug into to try to find how that played out. So he tells kennedy that the National Security apparatus and how important it is. There is an operation in the planning stages but your grandfather says there are stipulations that have to be met he makes this clear to kennedy in the first meeting. He says one, there has to be a cuban exile government ready to go off site. Two there has to be some leader thats able to take over for castro and three there has to be significant power to support these operatives that we have trained. It kennedy moves forward and the whole thing moves forward. Its been a disaster obviously in the firstperson kennedy calls is your grandfather. He gets them out to camp david here and this iconic going up the path and a quote is confirmed by both his kennedy turns to eisenhower and says you know you never really know how tough this job is until you were in it. Your grandfather turns with a smile and says mr. President with all due respect i think i told you that three months ago. And you know in retrospect the kennedy folks understandably look back at that that time differently and said the operation started was very going and just move it forward but they were very specific things that your grandfather said that have to happen that did not happen and in fact it was called off at the last minute. He didnt want the world to know the u. S. Was involved in your grandmother said the world will know. Posted the world will know. You hosted a wonderful documentary last night with the same title of your book and i briefly made the point that the green light had not been given by the entire eisenhower frustration and use what was in the planning process. Do you think part of that was a misunderstanding between the way military minds work in civilian minds come in other words he would have any number of agencies ready to go so the president always had options . Guest of course and i think thats lost in time, that is lost in the years that have gone by. It kind of rolled into the storyline that obviously fit the kennedy folks to be able to talk about this is an operation that he move forward but they were real clear stipulations that your grandfather made. He did not actually decided to go ahead. Im curious, there are some wonderful speeches you have given. One of them was called, it was the one to the press. In a way its sort of the book into the farewell address. What was it about the farewell address aside from the balance . You do an elegant job of handling the militaryIndustrial Complex but what was the process that is particularly relevant today . Guest first off it took almost two years. I mean almost two years thinking about his ending message. Thats a long time and 21 drafts he worked at it and work did and worked it and as you know which are grandfather who wrote for macarthur. People dont know that. He was an eloquent writer and editor. His ability to be a wordsmith perhaps was much better than his ability to deliver it but he could craft it and he really take his time to craft it which tells you how significant he thought that moment was. So it was not about his list of accomplishments. It was not about him. It was a out bout of blueprint for america to come his concerns and warnings about not only the militaryIndustrial Complex but he says we cant mortgage our children and grandchildrens future. How relevant is that today . Host i love that line. Guest if you look at that again, bipartisanship. Figure out what you can get done together before you argue about what you cant and i think there were a lot of messages. If i may, one thing we didnt include in the book was bought key of who was a speechwriter. Just brilliant and we talked to him in the documentary. He said at the time i was in technology and every draft had to be retyped by secretary ann whitman. Your grandfather was editing all the time and she tried to preempt things. Bob, there were these letters from ann whitman to bob. Do not use the word merit as a verb. Use it only as a noun and second never use the pronoun i do for two consecutive paragraphs. Third this morning a mild grumble from the loss you are using to adjectives, warm best wishes. Bob, clearly you can make wishes warm or you can make them best but you should not make them warm best. For, never take it for granted the president know something about a national or local organization. Say im happy to learn or i understand that. Fifth, the construction of not only but also is fine as a phrase that please bob not in every message, please. Six, mrs. A wide look ricci had to retype a lot of these drafts on this one particular thing and ann says look bob every time you use the word appreciation you follow it with the word for. Havent you noticed that the boss consistently changes that to appreciation of so pleased for my sake, for god sakes bob, when you use the word appreciation never follow it with four. Always follow it up. He goes in dixie are immature and she immature and shes as you know i just looked at the president spoke and i see he has some free time at 230 this afternoon. Would you like to come over and explain all this to him . And he says no. As he is leaving the white house to get the picture signed by your grandfather to robert s. Key of with best wishes and lasting appreciation of the valuable service in the white house. Those kinds of things are just precious and thats why loved writing the book. Host is going to be so easy to write a book about future president s . So much is done by email now and little bits of paper. Guess who it probably wont be as rich after all these years but i really do think breathing life into that time is worth it. The dedication of the book if you saw the first pages, to our sons paul and daniel and their generation please allow history to inform your decisions. Host thats an interesting question. I have a group of students at gettysburg college. I have a yearlong seminar and i was trying to think of how you might talk to the undergraduate population. What would you say is ikes greatest legacy or his key legacy . Guest he has a lot of them but i think his ability to work with others, the ability to keep the country safe and the fact that he is underappreciated after all these years suggests that we have more to learn. So that gives you a sense that we need to learn about her history because if you look at that speech you would place radical islamic terrorism with soviet communism. You could talk deficits now. Now the dead as 20 trillion. By partisanship arguably the past president could have done a lot of different if he had met once a month with the leadership that i would tell them look backwards. Always look forward but dont forget to look backwards at where you have been. Host do you have any predictions of how some of these principles might be brought to bear in the next four years . Its obviously not just the president who has to adopt certain key ways of operating that congress is a huge factor here as is our supreme court. Its a divided system after all. Guest there are some similarities here. Obviously your grandfather was a really popular figure but he was outside of politics so he had name recognition, not a politician. Donald trump is someone that fits that bill. Your father was not ideological, more practical. People say thats exactly what donald trumps. Your father valued businessman. He had businessman from a outside and the labor secretary was the head of the plumbing association. In his first term but a similar appreciation. He kept generals out of his cabinet because he himself a general did not want to project that. The practical nature of getting things across the finish line no matter party, some of his biggest fights were with his own party. I think that is possible and we will see Going Forward. On the National Security side and russia and the appreciation for the geopolitical sense of things your father was obviously much different and much more cautious and i think he would offer president trumps the same advice he gave incoming president and that is let the dissenting views on the experts fight it out in front of you. Learn everything you can. Take every briefing and then make a decision. I was asked the other day what your grandfather would say about twitter and i said well first of all he would say what is twitter and that he would say get off, probably. He believed less is more and the word that comes out of the oval office particularly bear such weight and importance. Thats why he did all the scribbling in editing and changing. Speechwriter said that look like a dozen chickens with dirty feet had gone over their scripts or the transcripts. But thats why. He believed every word that came out of that. Im just curious when he discovered that is that micromanaging or do you think he was trying to get something bigger . Guest i think he was bigger. I think he had in his mind what he wants to do. Ultimately their job is to interpret how he would deliver that message. Speechwriters can think like be the mind of the president. He was showing them what that was and there were fewer drafts at the end. Host even bob demonstrated that he learned a few things about how the president likes to add live. You have focus now on this book at a very interesting time. I think this book has more resonance than ever but the militaryIndustrial Complex as you pointed out last night on television recorded by many people for many decades. What do you think it is about that speech he keeps bringing people back to it . Guest a lot of people have taken that line and adopted it as their own. I think they fully appreciate the line in the context in that speech. Your grandfather was concerned about this. Obviously the world war ii industry that it turned its efforts to produce for the war had been just continued and continued to produce and then stuck lobbyists and money that flowed into lawmakers that impacted policy up on capitol hill. People who were in government let their positions and went to those companies and it was a circle. That circle is still churning today even more furiously perhaps. I thought it was really telling that your grandfather were so upset when he saw ads in life magazine for missiles, things that go to the homes that were advertisements. He would get so angry and the fact that he wanted to call it the militaryindustrial scientific congressional complex tells you that there were multiple concerns in his mind that there was this thing that was separate of government that was churning its own policy continuing. I think those messages are really valid today. Drain the swamp is essentially what the militaryIndustrial Complex is. You dont have this establishment thats not working for the American People. It has its own policy agenda and it has money behind it. I think that is a message that resonates not only with voters but inside washington. I think you will see currently the trump people say theres an intelligence Industrial Complex and that theyre talking point about what they believe is a partisanship in the leadership of intelligence. People obviously push back really hard but we are dealing with the same kind of broad issues of concern, the complex if you will. Host we are in a period where we are all trying to identify exactly what the system is not working at optimal levels because the public is concerned about the direction of the country. This is one of the reasons it was such a close election. What do you think eisenhower would say about the difficulties we are facing today . Host i think he would take the ball. He would be the one who would try to unify. I think just judging by his past and i asked a couple of people in terms of what you think eisenhower would do today, the person said he would solve it. He would figure out how to get there, unify and then move on. He doesnt get credited for a lot of the civil rights things that obviously later president s took that baton and went forward but the fact that he got that legislation across in the fact that he had the action that he did, you know i think its worth noting. He was a doer and i dont think he is credited in the history books as being a doer president. Most people at back at this time in general and it could be in part some of your grandfathers wishes. When he leaves to tell president kennedy he was struck, he said why do you want to become a general again . He said his wishes for kennedy to get congress to pass a bill reinstating him as a fivestar general as his title and kennedy says why would you want back . He says i want to die as a military man and they do. They passed the bill come he signed it and he becomes general eisenhower. As you know he is buried in his uniform. Host that was the only document that he had in his office. He was hanging on the wall and his retirement, the letter that kennedy had signed for the reestablishment of his commission. Guest wow, so the import of that. The kind of patriotism is sometimes missing in todays environment. Host you said one thing in your documentary and i hope everyone has an opportunity to see the documentary because its very well done but i was interested and i think you hit the nail on the head about doing things for longer period of time, playing for the long game. Civil rights for instance is a judicial appointment as an example of that where you wouldnt necessarily see the fruits of it immediately. The judges who are against segregation in two districts in the south played out over a longer period of time. Having said that whether the parts of his president ial policies that have lasted the longest . Guest first of all i think its exactly right which is why i was so right on with what the Fred Goldstein the political scientist say your file grandfathers leadership with the political hand. As a bridge player the hidden hand, no one knows what cards he has until the game is over and he puts them out there. You are right the long game was a huge part of his leadership style. I think the longest lasting thing was the bipartisanship to get that Infrastructure Projects through set the table for the ability to realize that big things can be done with both parties. I think i was a big deal and his interaction with the soviet union and how he did it open the door to a lot of diplomacy and change in the geopolitical structure in europe. Host can you imagine inviting Vladimir Putin to the United States . Guest i think we should imagine it. We dont know whats going to happen and thats also relevant because obviously that comes into focus right now. Think khrushchev is a lot like putin in the way that he acts in the way he is nice and not nice and everybody at the beginning of their administration wants either a reset or look into their eyes and i see the soul of the man. Think about that. President bush, president obama with Hillary Clinton and now we are on our third reset. There is this want to do that. Eisenhower seemed to do it the best up until the you too spy plane do you too spyplane. Host apparently khrushchev tried to mend fences in the fall of 1960 but it was too late. A new administration was coming in. Surgery kristof who has added so much to American Life as a resident of rhode island. Guest it was great to have his voice in the mix. If i may im humbled by some historians that have weighed in on this and this is jay winik. Magnificently rendered is destined to badly take its place as one of the masterworks on ike but in history. Its too littleknown error marker pull story of enduring lessons of the Leadership Today impeccable research. The book is nothing short of extraordinary. What a triumph. When these people weigh in, i am honored by that i really do think it means something bigger. It means that there are some lasting thing in here. Michael beschloss as general imprisoned by eisenhowers one of the greatest leaders in American History and bret baiers book describes some of his most important qualities of character wisdom and leadership which are so needed in public leaders in our own era and Douglas Brinkley bret baiers Susan Eisenhower eliminates eisenhowers historic farewell address written with deeply researched dissecting that from myth a landmark achievement in u. S. President ial history. Host you were being way too modest because i thought the book was terrific myself and when i say you are being too modest you really did pull a very long career into a very readable book. So i think that is all well deserved. Having said that your comment that may mean something bigger and what do you think that bigger thing is . Guest well i just think of the next generation read Something Like this and can be intrigued by it in the form that it is, the kind of narrative that brings to life a president that i know people have not focused on, i think that enables us to learn the lessons from that time and maybe the next leader who is and his teens right now were her teens i should point out, maybe those things stick with somebody to the point where they think about it when they are the person with her hand on the bible and are going to lead this country down the road. Thats really the reason that i wrote it. Host strikes me that a lot of what people havent uncharacteristically in this book is that the war in the presidency together. Guess who has you talk about it, it was him. It was who he was. Host what influences do you think the warhead on this presidency . Guest i think heres a man that ran the war effort who most craves peace and strived for it. It goes to show you that for all the people who said military man would be war mongers or we have to be careful about a general in civilian clothing. Their real issue is the other way. Its somebody that doesnt see the frontlines of the war and i was struck by that. Before dday each individual soldier, i mean paratrooper he meets with and talk to them and ask them questions about their hometown and he was impressed with the size and the scope of the military. He said its the size of the fight in the dog, not the size of the dog and he believed america was about the spirit and i think it drove who he was. The military was a big part of his life. This was certainly was. He had a special on is that the 181st and 82nd. Guess who he certainly did and your take if i may ask you one question and thank you for your quote on the book as well. It means a lot to have the family way in and we didnt talk before. I started this effort and i discovered it and im honored. What is your thought looking back . Host well i think the war did have a very big impact. It was devastating really when you think about it. Its hard actually to tell the Younger Generation how transformative world war ii was in the minds of the generation that fought it and the immediate generation after that, maybe my generation. We with data not necessarily coming from him. It was everywhere, world war ii was so this deep desire not to get into fights all over the world that might not end up the way they started. He didnt believe in a manageable war. Things that start out a small things can get two big things really fast and the atomic age is Something Else altogether. You deal with the atomic question quite a lot in your book. I guess some generations will have a hard time understanding bomb shelters and all of that but was there anything about the nuclear part of your book that surprised you . Do you were pentagon correspondent. Guest i knew a lot about the weapons but i guess what surprised me was how much it was on your grandfathers shoulders at all times, everpresent. He saw the scope and power and deadliness of that weapon and he knew if the world didnt get control of it that it was going to be devastating and the world potentially. I think the story about him meeting with bipartisan leaders and they are talking about how many missiles they are going to make that year and back and forth for five minutes and your grandfather comes in and slams his hand on the table and says, gd how many times do we have to kill a man . Because he knew we had many times missiles that could destroy the world. It drove him to his peace speech at the United Nations in a drove him to reach out to the soviets and that is what made him give the warning he did to his successor. Host maybe thats the thing thats hardest to convey to Younger Generations. I once gave a speech to a group of women from ages 18 to 70 and i had spent a fair amount of my career and policy focused of course on nick lear issues and i described the number of productions and now we will only blow up the world seven times instead of 15. She said mrs. Eisenhower does have a question or you, why it wasnt one enough . There was an illogical part in a way to the cold war. How do you think we are going to explain this in the future to young people . Guest its not easy to explain. Its something that doesnt happen is not easy to put on a chart or a video or something. That is the brilliance of your grandfathers presence that in one of the most dangerous times no one knew was a dangerous time. It was a happy time for somebody in Middle America and the show happy days goes back to the fifth these but it was a dangerous time. We were on the precipice of not knowing what was going to happen. As i go around the country it is unbelievable in these book signings people come up to look at personal experiences with your grandfather. This is president eisenhowers guard, a marine who brought me pictures from all different, that i havent seen. And i met someone who landed on the beach at normandy. Host oh, is that right . Guess no just the other day and someone else who dealt with your familys finances after he had put them in a trust. Host a blind trust. Guest i guess and he said its a real honor that i interacted with them. It too is a pleasure for me to meet folks that have some connection. Host i have to tell you quick story. One kenema came up to me and he had been on that granddads Cardiology Team last year of his life in the discovered every time Arnold Palmer played golf that his Blood Pressure went up. At the conference as to whether or not they should continue to allow him to watch Arnold Palmer and i guess the doctors reluctantly concluded that his life was probably coming to an end anyway so they would allow him to continue to follow it. That was a good one. Guest thats classic and as is a golfer i love that connection as well. He clearly had a love for the game and i have a friend. At some auction somewhere there was a plank of wood from the oval office and it had cleat marks from your grandfather coming in from the south lawn. Host what do you think g did for him because we are always critical when president obama goes on a golfing trip. Guest you are right there was a lot of criticism about how much he played golf. I dont begrudge any president for playing golf because i doubt frees the mind and it has enabled your grandfather, he talked about it in oral histories to focus, the outside, appreciate nature and to be able to clear his mind of what was going on. President obama speaks of it in the same way. I havent looked at the number of rounds but its close. President trumps to be is probably going to be a golfer. I mean he is a golfer. Hes probably going to golf as well and i think its interesting that president s played goss golf. Host did he use goff to interact with his colleagues or was he a quiet goffard . Guest hugh often told stories on the course. He played over it running tree here locally and to choke up on capitol hill is eisenhower was golfing and he was was obviously always connected but he had those moments that he got away and augusta was a very special friend as you know. Have you been there . Guest i took my first golfing lessons at augusta so i could gautama course of him and after one short round i thought you know probably golfing was not in my future. I tried Something Else after that. Guest my wife says on the sixth hole do you ever get bored playing golf . I say no, never. Host no, never. You have had experience of meeting people who come up to you at your various events and you have this tremendous feedback and congratulations again. I love asking people about surprises i cant help myself. Have there have been any surprises that you found the book to her . Guest yeah. Im surprised at how many people didnt know anything about eisenhower. I mean im talking anything. After reading it had this renaissance of his role and so im surprised about that. I am surprised at how much attention its getting because they think history book sometimes they can get lumped into this is going to be a chore to read. This is kind of a narrative pageturner and i think its going to be fun to read. Im surprised about that and im happy. Im really excited about going back out to abilene. I will be there for poor second in people there have been really spec tech layer. They have been tremendously supportive. The researcher i worked with and Catherine Whitney who worked with me, tremendous. Host it certainly helps understand his origins in his worldview and again its a treasure trove that library. Guest its amazing that you can find something new all the time. Like i said some aspiring author out there but churchill letters are sitting there and its vibrant for someone to dig into that relationship. Guest . Host you have the warrior and the president figures at this library so its a wonderful focus on world war ii and the cold war. Guest there are still some stuff thats classified and you have to go through the channels to get it declassified. Host did they ask you to file a freedom of information act request . Guest i had to go through all the chains, through the process but we found some Amazing Things and people talking, even your grandfather talking that had not been in mind before. Host that was one of their request to his family near the end of his life. He said please try and get this archive open, get this declassified as quickly as possible. Guest wow. He was about transparency. Clearly from the time he started in office and obviously afterwards. So from a journalist we welcome that. Host exactly. This has been an amazing opportunity to have the chance to talk to somebody who has read so many accounts and have gone through these files. I hope you saw the Queen Elizabeth file where she actually gives some of her cooking recipes because of course he was a cook, which really sort of rearranges your brain, doesnt it . Its a wonderful book that you have written here. We have a little more time and i would like to just ask you to see if you can summarize if you will or actually the research did for your better understanding of the eisenhower years but also what its added to the way you look at our challenges today. Guest i think what the research told me was we have a lot that we can learn from the past. I think our current leaders could look back and say this has happened before and this is a dangerous time. This handover is a very dangerous time. The world is watching at this moment as we hand over to the next president of that the world was watching as the 34th candidate to the 35th as well and i think, i think what eisenhower would say on a number of fronts is that the steady hand on the till, not to be over the top, let all views work inside the white house sounds cliche but he did do it and he enabled those people to speak out about various views on any issue. He had this open door policy in congress. He said if some congressman or senator wants in make sure they get a time. Think about that. I dont know if thats possible today with all the things we deal with but he had an open door policy. And i think there are differences obviously. The technology has gone in a much different place but there are truths that come through from the 34th to the 45th. Plus the thank you very much. He. Guest thank you very much. Its been a pleasure. Host it really has been a pleasure. It was great