Thing. No matter how long i live i will never be able to repay. Ive been able to achieve things in my life and live a life that wouldve been impossible had my parents not come near that the nation not existed and what we know is not for this to continue, but to reach more people than ever before. As i said at the outset every country in the world has success for people. There have been other countries that have big geopolitical importance. Other nations with large companies. I surely believe a separate not just the other nations on merit but other nations in history is here we have been united by the believe that every human being deserves a chance to achieve their godgiven potential comments go as far as talent than work will take them. If we were to ever lose that we will lose that makes this different. We will still be big. We will still be important. We will still be powerful and will still matter on a global stage but we wont be a special. I for one dont want to be part of the first generation of americans that leaves the next worse off the ration that has to turn to their children and explain when we got to grow up in the greatest century but they will not have the same chance. I know a lot of narrative out there about how divided we are between republicans and democrats how divided we are about political feeling and ideas. It is to repeatedly have always been a pretty opinionated people. That is the benefit of our freedom. I believe what unites us is more important. The matter what your Voter Registration card does or who you voted for i believe theres a unifying principle in america and its the idea that every single human being should matter, that everyone deserves the right to achieve the dreams they have for themselves and for their families and will continue to endeavor to be the country that provides that to people and we achieve it. Not only will this be the greatest era but the 21st century will be an american century. That is why took the time to write the book. I tell real challenges. I describe what has gone wrong in their life and what we do now that we can do better. Youll notice in the book many ideas are bipartisan. They involve my collaboration with people with another party. Politics that chris kearns of connecticut and cory broecker of new jersey. Many policy proposals are part of it at all particularly when it comes to Higher Education. You read how working with mark warner to make Higher Education more affordable. How i work with cory booker of new jersey to provide more access to wifi internet platforms, especially in disadvantaged neighborhoods. These are important as well. They arent easy to put on a bumper sticker. They dont win a lot of elections, but they are critical to the future of our country. We still have time and space and should devote the issues we disagree on. I hope we come together and cooperate on issues of our time because what we have before us is an extraordinary opportunity to usher in the most prosperous era in all of our history and that is saying a lot for a country with a history like ours. I appreciate you all being here tonight. I look forward to talking to in person and thank you for the opportunity to address the book. Thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] Pulitzer Prizewinning author Richard Rhodes tells the story of the spanish civil war through the eyes of reporters writers,. Resources to witness it. Richard rhodes, historian, journalist, novelist Pulitzer Prize winner for the may king of the atomic on short listed Pulitzer Prize for darkside making of the hydrogen bomb. What a 70 is theres also a novel about the donner party, biographies of eddie lamar which is fabulous. The scope of what he does is so fun. Im sure you all have your own personal favorite. Anyway you have seen him on front line. Youve seen him on american experience. He has worked for years with the Sloan Foundation guggenheim fort macarthur, all of those. He and his wife ginger who is a clinical psychologist, dr. Ginger rose dipped in california. Two children grandchildren and so it is a real treat tonight because he status hell and good company the spanish civil war and the world it made please join us in welcoming Richard Rhodes. [applause] thank you very much. Thank you for having me tonight. One of the casualties unfortunately of moving into this space is we dont have my slides. Im going to have to be a serious offer and describe the images onthefly. They are basically pictures from the time of war and i suspect you see most of them at one time or another. I came across the subjects of the book. I should say first there must be 500 books of the spanish civil war. By the time i had acquired used copies they filled half of my library and it was so born when i was finished. But as there always are, aspects of the war never really got covered. Probably a definitive history of the war there is literally just one paragraph about the many medical innovations that occurred during the civil war which is something i write about it some links. There are several books on picasso painting has great painting, but the background for it really doesnt get expressed very often. So as ive often said when i chosen a particular subject to write about, much of the history is there, but some of the most interesting is still buried in the document covered pieces that historians make history from, which is a delight because you want to tell the stories and sometimes it is easy to be defeated by the sheer number of other books on the subject. Theres a lot still left out. The spanish civil war was fought between i. T. And 36 the end of august 1936 and april 1939. Between the legitimately democratically elected government of spain which was a mixed government of different kinds of political parties. Everything from anarchy is at one end with a dominant part really be in the middle democratic conservative liberal, all of that. I think the war has been painted and all the years to be basically the communists against the fascist but it was really not bad at all. It was the legitimate government in a country or the generals of which spain had acquired too many, the generals thought the best way to solve any problem politically was to say a coup detat and save their country by being a great general and that is basically what happens in august 1936. Francisco franco was this intense little man, five feet, four, overweight, but dangerously smart as generals go had been essentially exiled to one of the possessions in the middle of the atlantic to get him out of spain so we couldnt cause too much trouble. You as part of a generation that had learnt his trade fighting against north africa. You remember your history and know that colonial wars were some of the most brutal spot by European Countries who thought the third world countries they were fighting as savages, lower than human therefore could be treated in ways that boy that europe was not yet treating each other. So franco in the early 20th in what i think was about the second major battle as north africa was called, they actually used poison gas. It wasnt known until many years later but its very clear there is a great deal of use and poison gas on the berbers. The berbers were muslim. They were very poor. So when franco decided it was time for him to take over spain, he was based posted africa d. Flute player and organized the First Military air lift in history. Thats the other thing about for his medical technology. Youve also got military technology. You organize the first air lift which he had to go to hitler to request and didnt think it was a good idea at first but he adjusted to a performance and was full of music and warm to this subject is the night went on and the delegates from spain and a delegation of spain is sitting there wishing they had not missed their dinner and he drowned out for parttime hours hours three or four more hours. They met at that time because i have argued by the the terms of the surrender treaty. So they cleverly took their military pilots and divided them into liftoff and used aircraft easily converted from airliners to bombers are true carriers. It was those planes that flew over to north africa to pick up the essentially berber army of mercenaries that ringo was pulling together to invade his own country as they flew across the vegetarian nurture balter and what was a slower but he was a slower buddy march towards major as im sure you know is the peninsula hanging down from france and europe, a country that was so dominated by a splendid rural mobility and the roman church. For example Something Like 60 of the spanish population was still a letter is in 1931 when the republican government came in. One of the first thing he did was start setting up Public Schools. They set up 17,000 Public Schools between 1931 and 1936. The people who are deeply embittered by been essentially rural which had aligned itself with the mobility and wealthy and wealthy had surprised in the early weeks of the war when francos mercenaries were fighting towards victory at and there were some battles going on with the fascist side of the army and cities like ours alone in madrid and elsewhere. There have been the formation rather desperately and spontaneously of malicious under various political groups fighting desperately without much military force. They literally had so few that they were forced to wait until someone on the lions were shot on the opposite side and pick up that mans rightful and then start hiring themselves. They were able to keep the fascist forces out of their cities. So franklin was fighting his way up the payment to the towards madrid and because he felt that the people of spain were not much better than the savages he had been fighting in north africa, they were pacifying as the word goes, the towns they took as they march their way up through the peninsula and that meant basically gathering all the men of military age and machinegunning them all. At the same time they were as angry as they were at the church where i think there was some 6000 priests who were killed in these early first weeks of war by the civilian militia fighting against the fascists. Once the government so cold and started to form a professional army, the Army Officers had defected to decide. This is while this was in such turmoil. Once the government started taking control of the military they stopped all the massacres on the republican side but they continued throughout the war because he felt he couldnt just move as quickly. He had to pacify every time he went through so is very much a ground war with atrocities. There is a famous photograph that i would like to have shown you, showing these militia men showing up in it is a huge statue of christ which was part of the very conservative Catholic Fellowship they had built these statues all over spain where people were literally starving. Babies had big bellies. Its a protein deficiency. They spent a great deal of money putting this all over spain. It shows the militiamen are shooting the statute. It was kind of an expression of the outraged the way they had intruded. Frankly, they did arrive at the outskirts of madrid and it was really touch and go for a while whether madrid could hold them off. Just at that time, there have been a gathering for sick people all over europe who were antisub five who were prospain. This is the depression and there were a lot of young men out of work. There was a time when they could act on their beliefs and this group of about the first 3000 Young International brigade terrorist arrived in spain just literally days before the battle was going to turn and im showing that marching through the streets of the trade doing their favorite salute. Theres a lupus like this solidarity. Here are 3000 men on this exciting moment when they turned the tide at least temporarily and were able to keep franco and his men, which had taken over and grab the existing government would have been the end of the war. The war went on like this just really give any background before i talk about the people. The war went on like that for three years. The other countries that had an interest in spain of one kind or another is nazi germany and fascist italy under mussolini came in to help franco. Germany particularly gave franco a 5000 man air force called typical hitler flashiness called a condor legion and there was a chance for a hitler first to make mischief so that as he sat in one of his conferences, we can go ahead and do what we are doing in evil wont be looking at us. But it was also a chance to test out other weaponry. People speak of the spanish civil war this relatively small war and a backward part of europe as a test for a trial run for the Second World War. Everybody who got into the war on every side from elsewhere in the world try to test out whatever new equipment they had. The soviet union back to the republic for a while except that they didnt donate the equipment they gave. They sold it for spanish gold. Tanks aircraft, artillery, west end. So there is this kind of contest that was larger than just spain. Time magazine 1937 and writing about the war called it a little world war and in a sense when you think about the fact that there were these other countries involved. France a little bit, the United States state natural. There is such a strong Roman Catholic pressure on roosevelt that he didnt feel he could get into the war particularly when he was being opposed by a catholic president ial candidate. Unfortunately, the United States didnt step in and anyway it all except taxpayers sold quite a lot and sorry to say. So they had access to assistive equipment and support from particularly frank lindh on italy and germany, which meant that every time franco began to be lucid, past time to time he was the germans and italians would throw in more equipment where they threw in about 100,000 soldiers during their course of the war. One of the recent italy was defeated in the Second World War by making 43 is because it had really just overused what it had in money and personnel and material in the spanish wars. So it was really not prepared to fight all the way through the Second World War. There were among the volunteers some people who were particularly interesting and ive read about them in more detail. One of the things that happened during the spanish were wister in the development for the first time in more than stewart lied and frontline blood transfusions. During the First World War there had been some lead transfusion, but it had been arm to arm. It had even been basically you collected it here and carried it over they are and then you put it in the wounded soldier. The soviet union, which is such a big country, was such a big country figured out how to treat the bloods that they collected in hospitals in moscow with sudden features to prevent it from plotting and then it could be refrigerated for a couple of weeks before it was no longer useful. They did that so they could ship it out to their country. So this technology with bair. In between the two wars there is not much use for blood storage if he needed a plan that the Emergency Hospital needed a donor, needed some blood. They just pulled from their list of donors, came down in donated blood. Here was this useful technology weighting. When the spanish doctors found that their soldiers had to be brought back from the frontline all the way to the hospitals in the rear and were bleeding out by the time they got to the hospital, they realized they had to find someone to transfuse the front nine before they were wounded from the frontline station. And so the spanish doctor who is a volunteer doctor and the spanish word developed a system of collecting blood a canadian doctor came to spain and didnt know quite what he was going to do, but quickly realized there was a place for blood collection and delivery so he developed a blood service. He had a thousand in nigeria and in that blood would then be treated and stored. He had a big fish delivery truck that was refrigerated to carry the blood in. One of the things that i was amazed me is the photograph in his book. A photograph showing a table covered with autos of blood ready to be delivered to the front lines. So there was the technology that the bottles are sterilized. Milk bottles of wine bottles. It was only later that they standardized bottles for delivery of blood. But it saved lives. The other thing about the little world war that fascinated me when the Second World War came in the spanish civil war in april of 39 and of course the war started in europe with the german invasion of poland in september of 39. So there is just a small gap between the two wars. When the Second World War came along you resolve the benevolent medical Technology Ready to go for the much larger theater were so poor and a lot of lives were saved of course with things like this stewart lead transfusion that was developed originally for this little regional civil war. Another aspect of the medical developments of the world with the invention of triage. Those of you with any medical background note that triage was a way of sorting during a time of disaster when you have a lot avoided going i asserting them to get maximum use of the limited medical service and not technology with software, if you will was developed as well during the spanish lawyer. The doctors realized if they always worked on a seriously wounded first that some of the more likely wounded might get words such as bleeding and there are some among the casualties who were going to live whatever you did for them who entered those conditions simply needed pain relief being set aside. That is triage and that was devised by some british doctors who had calmed to help out the republic during the war. Interestingly one of these doctors he remembered later went to see the soviet general who was running that particular battalion of the military kind of tentatively told them what they were planning to do in terms of how they were going to stop casualties than the fact mortally wounded were not going to be treated basically except for pain relief. The general rather than say i guess that make sense, was furious and says the savages. I will put you in the front lines if you do that. Get out of my tent. They were able to work around the general and use this basically like saving technology not only to sort in a way that allowed them to return those that need it the work first, but also to put men back in battle were lightly wounded once they had been treated with their wounds. Of course they were constantly short men. So another part of the story that intrigues me was the great painting. When i was an undergraduate in college and had come from a farm in misery for the first time in my life i had a chance to look at art. I was near new york and was able to go to the museum of modern art to look at to me what was simply the greatest painting in the history of the world, which was the cost is great painting. Its 25 feet long and about 10 feet high up the sides of the movie screen. It is solid black and white. All of the creature is, of course, all the various women. All the figures in the painting are women. It is a painting that represents the binding of a small town in Northern Spain in april may team 37 at a time when picasso had agreed to provide a narrow for an exhibition spanish republic and exhibition in france at the Big International exposition that was opening in the summer of 1937. But he couldnt figure out what he wanted to paint. He had just gone through a year and didnt paint at all. It isnt quite clear why except he was going through a terrible divorce from his russian ballerina wife and she had quickly pointed out that there were Community Property laws entrenched that she would be getting half of everything he owned. That didnt make him happy at all and he certainly didnt want to create anything. So he just stopped painting for a year. She wrote of him that he seemed to be a very happy man. He would sit around Paris Holding forth about politics, didnt have a care in the world because he wasnt working. Eventually finally when the spanish war started, she became very engaged and was chosen by the spanish republic to be the director of the product, the great Spanish Museum and participated in moving all the painting to a safe place outside of madrid insider than old castle that was so thickwalled that bombing wouldnt even phase it. Hed donate its money to the war did everything he could. He really didnt like the idea of being bombed. He was rather afraid of being bombed. The fact that ended january 37 garrity spent the next three months scratching his head. He did various paintings, but they were all one of his two mistresses as if somehow he just couldnt get it going and then came the bombing when they deliberately tried to see with explosives if they could burn down an entire city was just one day of bombing and of course famously succeeded. Perhaps eight or 9000 killed at least 1000 people in one afternoon of bombing. The beginning of the fire bombing of cities that we all remember or have read about for the Second World War. Writing about gershwin nagasaki is the very direct line to the bombing of europe to the bombing of those two cities. But it started they are. Picasso was immensely incensed that they should have been. He started this huge mural of a painting and he painted for about a month. This is a man who could finish a major painting that early in the day. Theres a reason why he has to say recently read his legacy was some 50,000 paintings, but this one was i think i would play his greatest work. He was certainly deeply engaged in it and he painted almost nonstop for weeks and weeks to get it right. I have a whole chapter in my book devoted to how he did that how he worked at the various aspects. One of the things you will see is everyone in the painting is looking up and screaming because that is where its coming from. Theres a photograph that i am lucky not that im not standing in front of this huge canvas, painting with what looks like a bomb. Sometimes you have to get up on a ladder to do this painting. It is an extraordinary work. Today if you go into the primus sofia where its now located you walk into the room. My wife was with me and ive never seen the painting before. She burst into tears. She doesnt cry easily, but its just such a powerful depiction of pain and suffering and horror that you know one of the things ive noticed is that his stories to great that they seem to comment about it. It looks like a movie screen. It is a movie screen. It is black and white and it seems clear that the crossover love to go to the movies the Motion Pictures as an art form potentially, that he was evoking the sense of a newsreel and the patterns on the bodies of some of the figures are of little marks that from a distance looks like lines of type on a newsprint page. He worked into this painting an extraordinary set of aleutians to previous painting and then i spent several pages in that chapter just tracking some of them down. At least one spanish historian comments in a rather secure modern art in 1846 track down a transcript is that you may remember there is a head of a woman coming out of a Window Holding a torch. Actually, i think she is holding a lamp in earlier versions of the painting she was holding a torch. Its the statue of liberty. Youd think shed never went to the United States. How do you know that . Turns out or six versions of the statue of liberty around paris. The original model that was made. Its a statue of liberty on the same river in the middle of the city. Theyre not as big as the final version, but some of them are pretty big. He had plenty of chances and yet coming out of the window, one of his mistresses anything stood guard at from the fact in his country had they lived outside of paris when people came to visit at night they evidently didnt have a front porch light. She would go to another window and pulled out a lantern and see who is fair. This kind of weaving of associations of all kinds to make a painting is just dead with aleutians and parts of life. Another painting that was done at the same time by one bureau at the same exhibition in paris is another that i describe and i i describe in a local into detail about it except to say after this is another huge mural but it was in it was never an angry peasant. You will see the black and white in my book which is ready to kill someone. It is an allusion to a revolution that happened in spain in the early 17th century as a matter of fact. It was painted on a kind of a wallboard and after it closed in 1948 sadly, no one knows what happened to it. It is one of the really great paintings that just disappeared forever. All that remains of it is three or four photographs. I have one in the book. So let me quickly attest to the other part of the story that really engaged me and i think would engage you. Among the doctors and nurses inevitably people fell in love and i found an english nurse, tall blueeyed quite beautiful, one of the angels of mercy nurses. Even though it was wartime they all wore caps. It is that kind of world. Her name is patience. She was an uppermiddleclass english woman whose fathers had been in the Publishing House in failed. They were living on rather hard times. She had done midwifery as well as nursing in the slums of london and developed a real social conscious and when she heard that the spanish republic needed medical people, she volunteered and went. Eventually, in the course of moving from hospital to hospital and the spanish hospitals were a disaster. They were basically the nurses in spain were all nuns. Therefore they couldnt undress cetaceans. So these poor soldiers covered with fleas and worms and dirty uniforms they had been wearing for three months would be hauled into a hospital bed itself is not very clean thrown onto a bed and just given food and water and thats about it. Patience, who was not very patient as a human being would go to one of these hospitals with a Court English nurses and just clean out the place. She described one plays were for at least a generation the doctors and nurses had been throwing all of the waste from their surgery and Everything Else out some windows into a yard. She said when you open the window there is this what bush flies coming up from the godawful pit of material. She got all the young doctors but they just grabbed everything down and since then the nuns were prepared to handle the bodies. She got a young cheat us the young spanish girls who were usually illiterate, but who were not and wanted very much to be of help. The english nurses caring for the wounded and sick also trained them to do at least some of the things that are sincere. Ultimately, as franco brutally moved down and try to make it to madrid madrid held him off. He left some artillery they are to show the city constantly and moved up to the north to take over the whole vast region of spain and that is when the bombing occurred and when she had back, he came back towards madrid and by this time by the summer of 38 basically cut the country in half. There was a huge river that ran along just basically eased of where francos forces were and kind of was the entrance to that part of spain where forgetting the name of the city i was talking about earlier. Its that wonderful town . Yes, thank you. Ursula and it became the capital for the republic and there is going to be a lastditch effort to keep francos forces out of catalonia by sending a surprise attack across the river, which is kind of a dividing line. Everybody trained for it. The spanish had everything adding to the site. They needed a place near the frontline to deal with the severely wounded. They didnt think it was a very mountainous part of spain. And theyve found a cave up in the hills above the river. Not as we maybe think of the cave is a little opening. It was like a stone shelter. About 150 feet across, halfway up the mountain with a huge mental list overhead and kind of a mouse shaped opening. This stone above that protected it from bombing because they were routinely bombing hospitals and so forth. Because it was facing onto a very narrow valley the german planes couldnt diovan. It was too narrow for them to diovan and come back out. So it was hard to get there. We had to drag him up the mountainside basically. So they built 120 inside this nihilistic shelter. It went back. It is a memorial now. Went back about 50 feet and miraculously there was fresh water coming out. So it was a nice place. But their patience the nurses, doctors set up a hospital to deal with the wounded from the battle. But me just read to you what she wrote. The cave was very uncomfortable. It was very dark very low and all i mean then. The metal bed throughout higgledypiggledy over the floor and you could rarely see. We had lights are the Surgical Theater run off of one of our ambulances that was down in the Little Valley below the tent. But we hadnt gotten my family had to do work by little tiny oil lamps, ordinary sardine cans. It isnt much light and you couldnt see across the cave and you kept having yourself on the iron guys. We had a lot of artillery on the sides then we had and we were near to we were obviously near a lot of good mortars because we had a lot of mortar was and am much, much more smashed up and make a great chance that of people if they survive at all. Huge lumps hurtled out of bed, much more than bullets which goes through you. We tended to get people at night because the shelling was so enormous it couldnt move in the day. For the first time i got people rather applaud after battle and some of course we couldnt save. So she goes on talking about the almost children who are now drafted into the Republic Army to fight hopefully against the fascists. We saw what happened to the smashed a people. To people. To hear the case singing as they went up, it was terrible when i thought what was going to have to see them. So the fourth time she had met a young german antinazi and they had fallen in love. They had fallen in love and manage to meet in various places all over spain. She wrote or actually give an oral history after the war where she talked in a wonderful way about how much they loved each other and how she learned about what all of those things people in love talk about. She said whether they are angels on White Flowers bloom wonderful description of how she felt with robert. He was a german whose family had moved to palestine in the night and 30s to start what became israel and then had been drug out and back in germany and volunteer to fight but the spanish republicans during the war. One of her, the doctors who worked for her, in the next few days, the vietnamese physician hearing of patients aggrieved and exercising wars curious compassion arranged for transfer to the battlefront. She said the move to the front is like a sort of therapy. Before she left the hospital, however, santa lucia, which was the name of that the waters of which are said to heal afflictions of the eyes, patients wrote parents and palestine with news of his death. She wrote of her love for him and of his former. She told them he had loved them and a cherished the photographs they had sent. She ushered them quote these last eight months were full of joy for him. She changed her mind about the worth of war, of that war at least for as one man she knew had fought it as she was fighting it. For me and for many, she wrote of her husband, and heard now and common grave among his comrades. He was a revelation of how to live and fight against the things that its trying to ruin the world. So thats just a few of the stories that i found about this extraordinary little war in the middle of nowhere that claimed a million lies in the country of 21 people. I hope you enjoy. I hope you have a chance to read. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible] i would be happy to talk about any of my other books. I know some of you have read the making of the atomic bomb. Thats an appropriate subject too. Could you fast forward a few years. Why didnt franco help you are during the Second World War . Particularly in regard to gibraltar because the spanish forces had taken gibraltar it wouldve been a series problem for the british. Franco really had shot his bolt during the spanish civil war. He didnt have anything left for the Second World War. He knew that andy was a canny little dictator fellow. So he found ways to put hitler off until too late. Hitler was not happy about it needless to say. But thats why he had his hands full elsewhere. It was just franco thinking i dont need this were. Ive already had a war. Hed used up what he had. The spanish had an incredible story the government held doled the government help from south america but all the gold have been shipped back and does is pretty much gone by the end of the spanish civil war. Editing either taken by franco or they had used it to buy material they need for the war. Spent a couple of comments come a couple of question. I was just saying when franco died and the were visibly thousands and thousands of people crying as i said, so on the other side of equation he was greatly adored by a lot of people. And i confronted one of those, he was a franco soldier during the war and i kind of gently confront him about franco and he said, franco brought the longest period of peace in spanish history. I guess we been saying that, whether its true or not i dont know. But also why did franco bring back the dynasty upon his death . Well, i know less about that period, but as far as i know he wanted, thered been a long tradition among the generals of supporting a monarchy, and he wanted to do that. He insisted on being allowed to educate the young teen, teen. Somehow some kind more liberal conception of his country carry through for the young king for franco armada is simply europe itself had transformed so much after two world wars and moved in the direction of governments that were more responsive to the people of europe. Theres a reason why they have socialist governments with lots of benefits. Basically because those governments didnt want to have another world war. Im not entirely sure why franco supported a young king who basically stole the democratic monarchy, but he at least did the king part. Thats as much as i know about that. He was not a nice guy. Hed knocked off 100000 people after the war. If you had a union card you would be taken out and shot, and most of the men who fought for the republic were basically slave labor for the next 20 years. They built all these grandiose monuments all over spain to the valley of the fallen in spain is sort of a pair minutes of franco and his pyramids. And his fellow generals. It was not happy place. They were have stored in the 1950s and franco cleverly realized he could sign up for United States if he promoted his very sincere anticommunism and got a great deal of money for many years to support his government. Just as a follow on to the gentleman that was up before it seems to me like the spanish civil war was a very divisive for, and one that created a lot of family splits. And that carried on through the war and carried on after the war. And that is a wound that i dont believe has healed yet. Youre right. And from that standpoint, what i heard before about what he saw in madrid in 1975 its true and its spain, and its a divisive. The same is true for the other side. You mention art, and to meeting which he described, the same art was produced in spain during the franco years by artists like you look at those frames and you look at those paintings, and they depict the franco years. They are blood, dark. So im not so clear that it was franco was a bad guy and the republicans were the good guys. I think theres a lot of gray areas there because you didnt hear about how the republicans burned churches and things that were so they did. That when that happened i think it created a lot of uproar in the people that yesterday look at the Catholic Church may be as oppressors of rich but all of a sudden they are burning my saints. They are not. They are really wounding me and i think that may be overlooked to a degree. There are certainly other perspectives besides mind. But, you know, what i found to walk the battlefields, we met really tall, handsome, vigorous spaniards who lived on the very edge of the battlefield, one of the larger battlefields of the war. It had never been take a. I mean, franco really detested the republicans, and there were no republican monuments when he was in power. Similarly, this battlefield have just been left the way it was. Our friend was actually a dental technician but was fascinated by the history of his country and, of course was born long after the war, a man of about 35 or 40 years old, theres a picture in the book of me talking within. Ernesto got out a metal detector one day and started going out on the battlefield and collecting old pieces of all three shells pashtun artillery shells, bullet casings, everything he could find medal, and then he started digging around just by hand and he retrieved broken skulls, femurs bones eyeglasses. His basement in his house which he showed me slowly filled up. He had these white shells running up the entire walk all over his little basement and they were all full of this material. Well, eventually when it was all he thought well, ill donate this to the local museum in the little town. It was still too controversial and 20102011 2012. Still too controversial. He couldnt do that because that would be described, what would you say . Its kind of like the American Civil War. I mean one of the historians of the American Civil War famously said, it takes 100 years before you could really talk without powerful emotions on both sides about a civil war. There were wars between brothers, wars between people who know each other and even more bloody and, therefore, an even more bitter, therefore. And the spanish so our nest of hope that someday to be able to donate this extraordinary collection of material to a museum that can curate it and take care of it, but not yet. Good evening, thank you for coming to dallas and opening this up. In the wall street journal last saturday you were featured in the best five picks of the spanish civil war. What process did you use to choose the five books of speakers im sorry, im having trouble understanding. What process did you use to pick the five books that you featured in the wall street journal last week . How did i research the book . How did you pick them . How did i pick the subject . Really just because i didnt anything about it. I mean, i published, this is my 25th book and i am really very free at this point in my life to choose whatever subject interests me assuming i can sell it to my editor. There are several ideas before this one that i couldnt sell to my editor but when i found this and realized what was still missing from the history. I was a medic in the air force many, many years ago and had a certain amount of training as a surgical assistant, so i know a bit about medicine and thats why the medicine thing interested me. So it just all kind of came together into a subject that i thought would be interesting and that readers would like to read about. And it is because it was full of not only all these pathological things, but these wonderful love stories, tragic stories people dying, human beings living at their most extreme. One of the things that offend at the New York University library was this large collection of manuscripts, letters and memoirs from the war. One of the doctors i wrote about is a man named edward was a nuke a surgeon, prominent the surgeon who volunteered to go over and help out in the war on the republican side. After he came back to the United States wrote a complete 400 page book about his experiences with the help of a woman journalist he found. That manuscript was never published. Here it was sitting all these years later in the library at nyu. The pages typed pages so brown that we couldnt scan them. I had to get someone to photograph each page and then type it out by hand basically. Why wasnt the book published . It was readable. He was a literate, compassionate man. Well the Second World War came along and that swamped this little war in spain, and after the war since youve been a member of the communist party in the 1930s, he got caught up in the Activities Committee which cited him for contempt of congress because he wouldnt give them the names of some of the people with the publication he wrote for. He ended up spending six bus in a federal prison, had his license renewed for six months, wait it out, went back to being a doctor, participate in things like the medical aid and some of the guerrilla wars around the world, helping out there as well. And lead a good life. But to have this complete book of manuscripts to be able to draw on, and it was one of many partial or complete book manuscripts that was just a treasure. So one of the ways history gets written is from whats there. I always tell people if you want to be remembered in History History doesnt remember the victors. History remembers the people who kept a record. One last question. Final question. Thank you much for your books. I especially i read the making of the atomic bomb twice. What struck me about that book, those books and this is they are about a such a pebble the air that change everything after. Have you considered writing about world war i . I have but i kind of missed the window. This was the year to publish a book on world war i. I would love to go back to do