The war on terror and the soul of the obama presidency, because he finds in the Counter Terrorist reggie lot of revelations about obamas nature and style. Would you like to say a few things . As steve has said these men seem diametrically opposed at least in style and looks. They both confronted a great humbler for president s and that is reality. What you can do and what you cant do. Although it is still the most powerful job in the world there are enormous limits which every president discovers sometimes to their grief and sometimes their wisdom. Sometimes a combination of those two things. We have a lot to talk about. 50 years apart, cold war versus war on terror and yet lots of connecting dots. Let me stop there and turn it over to dan. I started thinking about this little bit when i was reading ikes bluff and i recently finished my book and was thinking a lot about obama and obama fighting wars and trying to get out of fighting wars and as i was reading evans book it came as upgrade surprise to me and it would be these moments where i would think it sounds a lot like obama. The larger frame that these were president s who had become president after the country had been at war for a very long time. Both of whom wanted to end this kind of overextension of global war and bring us back home and start to concentrate on the economy and problems back home and they both believe that one key to a Strong National security is to have a strong economy. They were trying to cut the budget back and do those kinds of things. But then they both also faced a very dangerous worlds. Obama still had to deal with al qaeda which remained a potent threat around world and obviously we were in the height of the cold war and there was a very real possibility of nuclear war. The question was how do you deal with those threats while at the same time do things that could actually spark them, sparkle those wars . And at a certain point in the books, earlier in the book i was reading about how eisenhower studied and what most people know about the bunker auschwitz is the line that war is just an extension of politics but if you read deeper as eisenhower did there was in some ways a more profound point which is little wars have a way of becoming big wars and that was kind of a light bulb moment for me because during the campaign and the transition and early months of the obama presidency, obama was talking a lot about colin powell who was a cheap military adviser. I am not sure he talked about l klawchwtiz the decidua obama over and over again that kinetic activity as he put it has a way of spinning out of control. Very hard to control it. You have to be very careful. You can in paramilitary machine that is very much on the march and you have to watch that carefully and that was a kind of animating idea for obama throughout his presidency and for that, that is where it started. I will toss it back to steven. You both recognize this danger and eisenhower warned us against the development of the National Security state or militaryIndustrial Complex that we ended up with one. At end of his term the National Security state was well established. As for obama i would say he has tried to be careful about the growth of the National Security agency but there is growth and homeland security, swelled immensely during his time so both of these reluctant cautious president s came to a vastly increase National Security apparatus. Eisenhower is fascinating because although he was a creature of the military, spent his life in the military serving as officer. He was very wary of the military. He fought wars, everything that could go wrong, you think of him as a great conquering hero he spent a lot of time disciplineing awol soldiers. At one point in world war ii he wanted to line up all the american soldiers who were rapists and shoot them with machine guns. That is how exasperated he was and this is the guy running the most disciplined army in the history of armies. Chinese historically are about rape and pillage. The American Army was very disciplined but still had a lot of bad actors, young men fracking away from home, do stupid things and things can go wrong in battle. America won world war ii and did it gloriously but a lot of things went wrong along the way and eisenhower as a commanding general had to live with all that day today seeing get firsthand. Whatever he told the newspapers he had to experience it. He has a high and necessary and useful skepticism about force. And how it can get out of control. Teen says i know those boys over at the pentagon. Aside from the divorce part you could see how in peacetime military tried to build themselves up by exaggerating the threat and he would say once or twice i know those boys at the pentagon. I know how they operate and as president , eisenhower, height of the cold war reduced military spending by 20 . We think of building up, the National Security state was building up and the lot of bad things happened on his watch. Eisenhower made mistakes, he really did, and he would admit it but it wasnt for lack of effort and struggled to control it and he cut the hell out of his own service, the army. A creature of the army, from west point, army guy, army green. After he left the presidency he wanted to be called not president eisenhower but general eisenhower. And yet as president he cut the u. S. Army by 1third because he didnt think he was going to use it. Didnt want to get into conventional wars. Couldnt what the nuclear war. You wanted to build up rocket forces, Missile Forces and the air force suspended lot of money on that because that is where the technology was, spent a lot on intelligence. But he cut his own service heavily, infuriated his comrades in arms, his great airborne commanders of world war ii were so mad they could. One quick india denounced him. It took some guts to do that. Luckily obama doesnt face any problem with treatment of women in the military. You know that maybe. What about it . Hasnt the president of racine absent the immense increase in spending on National Security and has he done anything like attempting to cut by 20 . He is trying to cut the budget and hasnt been able to do anything like that. I think it is true when eisenhower was president the budget represented Something Like 70 of total spending. Today it is 20 so there is less to cut in a way, but he hasnt been able to do that. Obama could not say i know those boys down at the pentagon because he didnt and he never served, he was a community organizer, not a military man. And so that made the relationship more complicated and he was less secure but when he started, he did find opportunities to signal to the brass that he wasnt going to be pushed around and with some success but not always successful, the afghan surge, some people argue he was pushed around by the military and was outfoxed by it them. But early on, i think it was in march of 2009 there is a kind of constructive moment that goes back to this theme about not wanting to get sucked into wars and you can see him trying to control, keep things under control. He has the meeting in the white house in the situation room with all the top generals. Mike allen is chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. They want to present to him a kinetic opportunity as allen puts it. There is a terrorist in somalia whose a want to go after and they think they know where he is. There is the series of Training Camps and a Graduation Ceremony going on for these terrorists. They dont know exactly where he is in this camp but feed you we will just take out the whole series of camps and get him so obama is kind of thinking about this and he has got his civilian advisers there too, secretary of state, secretary of defense, National Security adviser, he decides he is going to pull the room and he says one by one, what do you think about this . What he is doing is kind of a subtle challenge to the joint chiefss power, basically in biting dissent. None of them are actually willing to say what they really think, but then, against ball, there is the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and he puts his hand up and says i think you need to think carefully before you do Something Like this. This would basically be carpet bombing a country to try to get one terrorist and you dont know where this is going to lead. And obama says that is exactly where i am. That ends the conversation. The operation never happens but it was from that moment on that obama decided, this is really an extraordinary thing if you think about it. That he was going to make the final decision on individual drone strikes. Think about that. A president who is in the chain obviously but making those kinds of tactical decisions in every single case, it would work its way up the system. There was a vetting process, an interagency process and the eventual the john brennan and hoss car right, Vice President of the joint chiefs, pull the president out of a blacktie dinner and present him with this opportunity and he would make the decision and so that was the extent to which he was worried about how these operations could spin out of control, that he would actually take the Political Risk to make those decisions himself. I dont know if eisenhower got involved. As far as i know there was no one actually lost in battle the entire time he was president. There was not a lot of fighting going on. After he got us out of korea which took six months, never lost another soldier in combat for the rest of his presidency. Claim no modern president can make. He was determined not to get soldiers killed in combat because he feared it was getting out of control. How many times has obama had to make a decision, a legal decision like this . Dozens, maybe hundreds. A lot of times. What do you think about that . There were two different Drone Programs. The cia has a program and the military has a program. During the first term which i was writing about the cia was mostly operating in pakistan which they considered an extension of the afghan battlefield. Obama decided to make these decisions outside of conventional theaters of war where the war the law was less clear, we were not in a traditional state of war with another country. That is where he thought was risky and we needed to be more cautious so in somalia and yemen and to some extent in pakistan but mostly somalia and yemen he was making these decisions, making these decisions himself. Most of the time, he would green light the operation but not always. He would roll them back and have a lot of questions about who are we actually going after . You have to remember in places like yemen and somalia some of these organizations are al qaeda affiliates, terrorist organizations but also local insurgencys involved in civil wars and what he was fearful of was getting sucked into those kinds of local civil wars and not saying as he would put it i q focus. We are going after a member of al qaeda who is as the military put externally focused against the west, against the United States. One last point, we can segway to this part of the discussion because it is important, because obama did not want to get into any more land war is the same way eisenhower didnt, he recognized early on, actually i think before he became president that programs like the Drone Program would be very valuable to him but more broadly, the shadow worse, the covert operations that the cia and their capabilities would be very much in line with his basic approach to keeping us out of big wars but keeping us focused on the threats that still existed and i think he was always right about that, i think he did not recognize all of the potential pitfalls of relying so heavily on spies. I can see that it is an extraordinary level of constraint a president is exercising when he wants the individual colophon individual strike brought to him, signed off, i know that eisenhower showed great constraint too. He watched the bag for assistance, we are not going to do that in vietnam. Yes, he did kept us out of vietnam, that was pretty big but slightly different philosophy about covert action. Country after country, guatemala, iran, syria, overthrowing states, not killing individuals, and if he had a few more months, it could have been on his watch, it was definitely under way. The go to dannys point, think of this in giants terms. If you want to be a great world power and protect your own homeland and have American Power abroad you have a limited number of tools and i cans view is he doesnt want to fight a nuclear war. Doesnt want to fight a conventional war, diplomacy is important we did a lot of diplomacy but there has to be a. The end of the sphere and appointee end for ike was the cia. Unlike obama who is having technical control over these strikes eisenhower had a more handsoff approach to the cia. At the time this is known as plausible deniability. The idea was the political leaders need to be able to plausibly deny the nasty dark stuff that the spies are doing because you dont want the american head of state to be held irresponsible for dirty tricks and assassinations and blackmail and all that stuff Intelligence Forces did and do. In the 1950s the feeling was the russians are the main enemy, they played dirty. The communists were really good at spying. They learned a lot about just keeping control of their own state, how to spy on others and trick them and assassinate them and we had to fight fire with fire because they did it, we have to do it. Amoral equivalence. This is all written down. This part was written down. They played dirty, we have to play dirty too but once they cross that threshold we have to play dirty too. Then they entered this realm of plausible deniability where eisenhower gave a lot of freedom to the cia to do whatever they wanted without a whole lot of control. There is no congressional oversight, not a lot of president ial oversight. The cia on his watch, this is where it gets less pretty, started to get a little hop of control. A Longworth House Office building this is overthrowing the government of iran and guatemala which in retrospect were not great but at the time seemed like successes, cheap ways of containing global communism, leftleaning heads of iran and guatemalans and were celebrated at the time but after that the cia operations started going badly. Hard to do this stuff when you are operating secretly abroad and theres a lot of blow back operations that start and then dont work and low back on you. By the late 50s eisenhower is under pressure from some of his pals who were in formal watchdogs to get rid of allen dulles, the head of the cia and eisenhowers response is it takes a strange kind of genius to run an Intelligence Service and dulles is a strange kind of genius and i will keep him in there. He came to regret that decision because it was a mistake. I guess, let i dont mean to go on here. It is really hard to run a modern Intelligence Service particularly for democracy that believes in transparency and openness and rule of law to run a service that is essentially out law. How do you do that . The proposition is you are morally superior, the difference between us and them we dont use soviet methods except in condo where we the soviets know what to do and university founded for students from overseas was at the university. Eisenhower allowed himself to be manipulated by the cia . Thinking about your eisenhower prided himself on being a pretty solid guy but he lost control of the cia and lost it to Richard Bissell. We like to complain about bureaucrats, risk averse and all that. Richard bissell was the most confident bureaucrat there ever was. Was a brilliant yale guy, yale professor who taught a course of black market economics, all allied shipping and world war ii. It took a human being to do this and there was a lot he would get promoted behindthescenes. Nobody knew who Richard Bissell was except for the smart guys inside and he writes the Marshall Plan in europe. That was as much him as everybody else. The cia, the agency for the smart boys, 1950, and want to do good. In 1950 it was liberal, for liberal democrats who were internationalists and promoting and protecting democracy. It was a democratic organization. Nobody knew who he was. And some before you know it he created the spy plane, one of the great triumphs in intelligence because we had a plane that could fly over the soviet union and count their missiles, important for stability if you are guessing that when your enemies have destabilized if your enemies have more than they do. This biplane allowed to soviets dont have so many icbms so abyssal is our hero. The ancient greeks were about all this and so was shakespeare. He is filled with cougars that he can do anything. He is warned that soviets, the soviet union has antiaircraft missiles that can fly high enough to shoot down the you 2. He does not tell the president of the United States. Egos that is just some study. He wants to keep this they are known as the Richard Bissell air force. He worked out a deal that doesnt need president ial authority. Unbelievably extralegal. Because hes a brilliant, egotistical, still fulfilled guy and doesnt tell the president , getting shot down on the eve of a summit meeting where eisenhower spent his whole presidency trying to work towards getting along with the soviet union, arms control, Nuclear Test Ban treaty, defused the cold war which was a dangerous thing and about have this summit meeting, the end of the summit meeting. Eisenhower said you should have fired allen dulles, get rid of him. The most confident guy in the oval office says i want to resign. He is so upset, tells the secretary. You had a scene in the book which made me think of a scene in my book. He goes out to eisenhowers farm in gettysburg and if i remember this right he wants to show how effective this you 2 is. They fly at 70,000 feet over the farm so that eisenhower can see his cows feeding at a trough. That is pretty impressive. When i read it, not as colorful as dramatic. A few weeks into obamas presidency leon panetta, the new cia director, he realizes these drones are pretty cool. A lot they can do with them but this guy, a new president who is not antiwar but he is trying to end these wars. He brings the Counter Terrorism military guys, people who run the Drone Programs with him into the oval office to give obama a briefing, charts and pictures and video off and he goes through he is trying to reassure obama that how careful and precise the program is and they dont kill civilians and this very intricate set of permissions they have to go through and show this video of these drones flying many thousands of feet above the target, with their camera watching very carefully the patterns of light this cia calls it to make sure they have got a right person and then patterns of light. Then they show the target is with his wife for playing with his children and we will watch patiently for hours, days or weeks until we have a clear shot and then we take the shot and then, you know, if a civilian enters the frame at the last second week can divert the missile to a predetermined destination, some field thousands of feet away where they know they wont be any civilians. Just no chance that we are going to kill any innocent civilians. This is pretty impressive stuff and we know where this story ended. The program is reasonably precise but a lot of civilians have died on his watch and he started to get nervous about it over time and now they are in this process which is not working very well where they try to transfer the Drone Program from the cia entirely to the military where theres more accountability and more transparency but that has been a tough thing. I am very sympathetic to our leaders on this kind of stuff. I am sure the military really was trying to protect civilians. Because eisenhower had had a het attack. And noted, snyder noted that theyd played golf the day before and that ike had made a bad shot into the sand trap, and trying to buck up his spirit, dr. Snyder had said, oh, good shot. And ike said, good shot, hell, and threw his sand wedge at the doctor and nearly broke his leg. [laughter] so this was all in the diary. So i checked back, on that same day, eisenhower changed his mind twice about a u2 flight over the soviet union. Okay, he threw his golf club, but think about the pressure hes under. Heres trying to control this and not screw up. And in the end, he does view up, or he screwed up by business el, and they take one flight too many, and out blows up the peace process, but its not for lack of effort. Hes trying, its hard to get it right. So what do you think he approved that . When bissell has told him one in a million chance itll be shot down when he knew the chances were much greater than that. Right. He did. He also told him that the pilot would kill himself because he had a pill, actually it was a pinprick with shellfish toxin on it. Hidden inside a silver dollar. Weird. Thats how they were supposed to kill themselves. And the plane had been wired, there was a selfdestruct button. Theres some law about this murphys law. [laughter] none of these things the plane didnt selfdestruct, the pilot didnt kill himself, kruschev captured the pilot, Francis Gary Powers for those of you alive in the 60s, and made a field today out of it. So that blew up u. S. soviet relations. And also eisenhowers caught in a lie because at first they denied, and so cruz alcohol was able to say kruschev was able to say what kind of weather plane [laughter] and, you know, make a big show of the whole thing x. It was just terrible. I mean, its kind of funny, but it wasnt funny at the time because the cold war entered its worst period in may 1960. You look at the timeline until about the cuban missile crisis is when the cold war was in danger of turning us all into radioactive dust, and that really was a dangerous period where we could have had a mistake. So you think eisenhower was trying to map out all of the sights . If you can see your cows, you can certainly see the pig hold in the ground big hole in the ground. They werent finding the holes in the ground, that was the thing. Talk about military Industrial Complex. Some of you may remember missile gap, it was sort of standard procedure to talk about the bomber gap and the missile gap. And this is the way planners and Intelligence Services and politicians work. You exaggerate the strength of the enemy. Be youre a planner if youre a planner and you thinking about, lets see, if i underestimate the strength and the enemys bigger than i thought, im in deep trouble. But if i overestimate, well, we took the proper precautions. Planners are more likely to overestimate, and thats what happened. The air force now, especially if theres an economic motive. The air force wants more bombers and more missiles. So air force intelligence, air force intelligence said and leaked to joe alsop and the papers and various senators including john f. Kennedy that the soviets had a couple hundred icbms, and we had none. Remember sputnik . Oh, my god, if the russians can put a satellite over our head in 1957 and we cant, it must mean that they have icbms, and theyre going to be raining atom bombs on new york city next month. They were, they had a lot of they good some good german scientists who taught them how to do throw weight and get large objects in the sky. But they didnt have the scientists who taught them how to target and be with precise and put warheads. So by 1961 they had four icbms, they were liquid fueled, probably would have hit canada can, not the United States. I mean, still dangerous but not, there was no missile gap. At least the u2 once it finally got going was not finding any icbms, and that was stabilizing. Things kind of calmed down there for a little bit, and we saved some money because instead of building all those atlas missiles that the air force wanted, ike said, no, were not going to do that. His famous military Industrial Complex speech was at the end of his term, and it was after hed been fighting off the unsurprisingly, the lobbyists for Atlas Building the missiles was the guy leaking [laughter] same guy, world war ii hero who shot down admiral yamamoto over the pacific, same guy had been leaking all this untruth from air force intelligence to the senates. And jack kennedy ran on the his sill that was one of his platforms in 1960, the missile gap. There wasnt missile gap, it was all our way. Basically 200 to 4. Right, right. Well, you talk about perception and management. In this guy, eisenhower, i think, was systematically training us all to underestimate him or at least his speeches were not impressive. I mean, obama is so much more articulate. When i look at old speeches of eisenhower, its painful. [laughter] yeah. Well, theres, i mean, we should talk about this because the this, like all things, thats complicated too. Right. Yes, ike was, bumbled his syntax, but theres a lot of evidence that he did it intentionally. For one thing, he didnt its not a bad idea. He said, he said i got ahead by disguising my intelligence and my ambition. And in the military, you know, in all walks of life sometimes showing off too much is a problem. And eisenhower worked for general macarthur, one of the great show offs of all time. And eisenhower learned what not to do by being chief of staff. He was chief of staff for mac arthur, but mcarthur referred to eisenhower as the best clerk i ever had. In fact, patronizingly well, thats another story. [laughter] but ike learned to be modest. But he had a good kind of modesty. He had, i like to talk about this, the confidence to be humble. He was so confident, he perceived early in his life and, boy, talk about life lessons im still working on [laughter] that people who are arrogant are, you know, when you think about it, usually insecure. Theyre covering something up. Theyre blustering and showing off. Whenever im a blustering jerk, its usually because im afraid of something, im fearful. Right. Just a human truth. Whereas people who are really confident can afford to be humble. And eisenhower had that confidence to be humble. He was so confident that he could have bad syntax, and he could sound stupid, and it was useful to be underestimated. Not always and in all situations, but his letters. I mean, in the press conferences hed be stumbling around. Then hollywood hed go back and write these memos that are brilliant and clear as a bell written by a smart lawyer. Yeah. I think, actually, theres an interesting contrast and comparison here with obama because we talked about in the other day, evan, that obama does, obama has a different kind of personality in that sense in some ways. Hes not, he doesnt always come across as humble. [laughter] hes, you know, he can be a little bit strutting, a little peevish, a little hes the trash talker on the basketball court. And i think thats all true, and that is an important contrast. I do think hes also very confident, and i think in a kind of more important way in terms of his leadership and how he does his job, he actually is much more humble and restrained. He gets criticism for that because when putin seizes, you know, crimea, you know, people say hes not, hes not tough enough because there arent, he doesnt do the sort of blustery threats. You know, someone i was reading somewhere we give credit often to the people who sound tougher. So when reagan says, mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall, everybody remembers that and and he gets credit for it. George h. W. Bush gets less credit for carefully and deftly managing the end of the cold war. And i think thats a kind of important distinction for obama that, you know, he is, he is kind of quietly quiet and restrained on the world stage, and when hes approaching these very, very difficult and fraught Foreign Policy and National Security decisions. We should have time for a few questions, i think, if somebody would like to step to the microphone. Here we are. Good amp, everybody. Thank you so much for, ive read both your books, and i like both of them. Im iron to iron to connell, and ive been listening to you speak this morning, and i hear a number of analogs between eisenhower and obama, particularly on uses of covert force. Id like to ask you to grade them, the best you can, these president s, on whether or not they have strengthened or weakened or International Rule of law and the norms, International Norms such as sovereignty. I know you with mentioned, dan, you say its odd that obama would have tactical control over these drone strikes, but these are immediately Strategic Decisions when you are deciding whether to violate air space of an ally or of a country with which you are not at war. And whether its u2 spy planes that certainly degraded a summit or covert operations in guatemala and iran or covert operations in pakistan or drone strikes. All of these things have cost. So, evan, to you its a history question. Did eisenhower strengthen or weaken the International Norms, and dan, yours is, unfortunately, more predictive. Whether its listening to the prime ministers phone calls or calling in drone strikes, will the longterm effects of these destabilize the very rules we use to keep countries at peace with each other . You go first. [laughter] the its a really good question, aaron, and its sort of one of the reasons i struggled so much writing my book, because i had to kind of grapple with that question, and its really complicated. And so i think as a result, im going to give you not a terribly satisfactory answer. You know, the first thing i would say is obama and maybe theres some irony in this but obama really brought lawyers back into the National Security or Decision Making process. So first of all a, a lot of the damage that was done, much of the damage, much more of the damage that was done was done during the Bush Administration when you had warrantless wiretapping when you had a legal doctrine that said that president s could actually violate federal statutes which which, you know, sort of hearkened back to president nixon saying its not illegal, you know, if the president says its not illegal or whatever the quote was. So i guess the fairer way to judge obama would be did he make good on his promise to reinstate some of the kinds of legal norms and values that had been, you know, sort of the traditional legal norms and values that wed had. And, you know, i think in some ways, yes, in some ways, no. I think hes really grappled with this and really struggled with it, and its been and im like evan, very sympathetic. If you go back and look at the series of speeches hes given, you can tell that he wants to do this, otherwise he wouldnt, you know, the last one was the defense, National Defense university back in may of 2013, i guess. Hes spending Political Capital to say that hes going to be doing these things, and i dont think he would be doing that if he was not sincere this his desire in his desire to do those things. Unfortunately in the case of drone strikes, theres just this kind of grinding, inexorable momentum toward more violence, threats that are out there that hes had a hard time resisting dealing with in the context of the national, the nsa, you know . Well, look what hes just done. He appointed this commission which studied the policies, did not determine, obama has never said that what the, this sa was doing nsa was illegal. In this some ways he said something more important which is if the American People have lost the trust of our intelligence agencies, then we have to do something anyway. And hes now proposed at least to congress that we end the, you know, the metadata collection program. So its a work in progress, and i think its too early to judge him. I dont think things are worse off than they were when he became president , but im not sure theyre as much better than he would have liked. Just quickly, i think empire is by its nature p tragic. All empires always overreach and undermine themselves, ultimately. Having said that, the american empire has been the most benign, the most principled, the most honorable empire if history in history. And we have screwed up to a fare three well lots of places and inflicted harm on all sorts of people. But relative to all the other empires in history, weve been pretty good. It goes with the territory that if you project power, youre going to break things. And if you do it secretly or accelerately or with overtly or with indirect warfare, youre going to break things. And people dont like to be occupy toed by you. And they, you know, imagine if we had afghan troops walking down our streets. We, you know, wed resist. And so it kind of goes with the territory. In eisenhowers a case, they did a lot of they broke a lot of rules. The cia, people always think of the cia plot now long after the cia stopped doing those plots, everybody just assumes it was the cia. So that was a longterm harm x. Some of those plots were stupid and wrong. On the other hand, the western alliance and europe, the seventh fleet in the pacific have kept a kind of International Order to that has kept us from world war not little wars, but kept us from world war created a fairly free global trade zone and permitted the advance of democracy not everywhere by any means, but in many parts of the world. That is a great legacy. We have three minutes. I will take less than that for my question. Good. Can could you both place put this in the context of the times of what was going on when eisenhower was president following world war ii, it was basically the collapse of the major colonial empires who had conquered and divided the world. Particularly, i guess, particularly the french and the british. And much of the world was sort of there for the taking. And at the same time, you had people in these Different Countries, many of which youve mentioned, who were trying to take advantage of the situation and to basically to gain their own independence. So how does that situation there compare to 60 years later what were dealing with . Your turn. [laughter] im not can you im sorry, i know you only can you just restate the question . Because i wasnt quite sure i in eisenhowers case, youre following a major world war yeah. Where the major powers are crumbling. And their empires are totally falling apart. Right. They cannot control them anymore. And during that same time youve got people in those Different Countries when are demanding their own independence and fighting for it. How does that situation compare to the time of barack obama 60 years later where the world has changed greatly . Yeah. Well, its, you know, i think obama, obviously, inherited a very different world. Its interesting to pose that question now when were talking about the revival of the russian empire. [laughter] and so he, obviously, has not been, he inherited a world that was more complicated in some ways but less, less dangerous in the sense that we werent dealing with, obviously, the, you know, this epic struggle between the United States and the soviet union. And, you know, i think obama has, when he first became president , he saw an opportunity to do Different Things on the world stage, to try to deal with nuclear proliferation, to try to deal with Climate Change as an issue, and he had all sorts of grand ambitions to be that kind of player on the world stage and saw that as how america could continue to lead in the world while at the same time retrenching. And they, of course, thought that they would be able to bring the troops back from the middle east and not be distracted by kinds of wars that have a colonial legacy. And that turned out not to be the case. They were going to make this pivot to asia, they havent been able to do that. So its been complicated. Complicated, indeed. I appreciated the two portraits. Identify got to say ive got to say, we didnt get the chance to take advantage of some great reporting by dan about how the debates went between people like jeh johnson and harold coe, chief lawyer for state and now the man who runs homeland security. Trying to figure out practically working with a set of playing cards where the generals would ask can we kill this one . Can we kill this one . They call them baseball cards. Baseball cards, amazing. Theres some great debates in there to help you figure out the ethics and the sense of National Purpose and what youre doing for and against your country when youre carrying out this kind of an execution system. But then also theres some great material if your book about eisenhower. Tell us just for a we could this guy who played hands more a second this guy who played hands of poker so well, how did he get on with his fellow officers . I had the sense he had to quit playing poker because he was taking all their money. [laughter] i think were done. Weve got to go. Thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] well be back with more from the 2014 Annapolis Book festival in about ten minutes. The next panel is about the process of high volume hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking. Cspan2, providing live coverage of the u. S. Senate floor proceedings and key Public Policy events. And every weekend, booktv. Now for 15 years the only Television Network devoted to nonfiction books and authors. Cspan2, created by the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. Watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Heres a look at some books that are being published this week look for these titles in booksts coming this week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] well be back with more live coverage from the Annapolis Book festival in maryland in just a few minutes. [inaudible conversations] it really gets to me because i get to know these young men and women when im out there, and i keep seeing some of them killed or amputated, and i want out of there as fast as anybody else. And let the afghans fight their own fight. I just think we have to do it in a prudent way. But what i try to say to the ghost gold star mothers when im talking with them is we cant get too hung up on the defects in, of maliki and iraq or the defects of karzai and the afghan politics. Of we do have to keep a larger perspective that those who have died did not die in vain. If, begin, ill go back. Again, ill go back. If i had said to to anybody in 2001 that ten years later there wouldnt have been an attack on the United States, most of you listening would say, no, youre wrong, its going to. Its because we did take the war offensively to alqaeda. And, sure, a lot of mistakes were made. But if you stand back on the particulars, we are safer today than we were in 2001, and we are well on our way to crushing alqaeda and crushing the jihadists. And so i think overall that we have done a successful job with our military. Vietnam vet, assistant defense secretary during the reagan administration, analyst and author bing west will take your questions in depth, live for three hours sunday on cspan2s booktv. Last year the politicians got wind of the excitement. Weve learned more in the last five to ten years about the mind than in all of Human History combined. President barack obama last year got wind of this, and in his state of the Union Address announced the Brain Initiative. Just like the human genome project changed the course of medicine, giving us a disk with all our genes on it, obama announced the Brain Initiative with the europeans. 1 billion thats billion with a b, not an m will be devoted to creating a map, a map of brain. Just think of it, we will have the genome and the connectio to ns of the mind on a disk. The shortterm goal is to cure mental illness. Mental illness has been with us since biblical times. Even the bible mentions mental illness. But if we have a connectome and the genome on two disks that in some sense if you die, you live forever. You live forever in some sense because your personality, your memories, your wants and desires are encoded inside a disk. So when i was a kid, i was fascinated by telepathy, reading minds, telekey me sis, moving objects with the mind, recording hems, uploading memories, photographing a dream. Believe it or not, we can do all of the above. And you will see that in todays slide show. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] our live coverage of the Annapolis Book festival continues now with a panel on fracking. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon. We are here, my name is elizabeth geltman, i am a professor at the Cooney School of Public Health where i teach environmental and Occupational Health sciences. I am here to moderate the panel on fracking with my two authors, Seamus Mcgraw and tom wilber. Were going to start the afternoon with my giving a brief overview of fracking and defining terms, then each author is going to give their discussion of it, and were going to, hopefully, open it up for questions. When we have questions, were going to ask that everybody come up to the microphone here in the center. So if you think you have a question, you probably want to go and get set up before the question and answer period so that we can do it quickly. First slide . Okay. These are the books. Met me go to the let me go to the second slide, im sorry. I want to start off by defining what is meant by fracking. The term is short for hydraulic fracturing which is a technical term used by the oil and gas indu