I am the archivist of the United States. It is a pleasure to welcome you today to the william g. Mcgowan theater in washington. And a special welcome to our cspan audience joining us from around the country and around the world. Today, we have the latest in an ongoing series of Nixon Legacy Forums. Which we cosponsor with the Nixon Foundation and the Nixon Library. When asked about his library when it was first being played planned, president nixon said i have insisted that the Nixon Library and birthplace be not a monument to the career of one man, but a place where visitors and scholars will be able to recall the events of the time i served as president and to measure and wayeigh the policies my administration pursued. I hope the Nixon Library and birthplace will be different, a vital place of discovery and rediscovery, of investigation, of study, debate and analysis. Those words will be our touchstone as we begin a major renovation of the permanent exhibit at the Nixon Library this
Affairs. He is those things but much more. Those further attributes are the reasons why youre here tonight, here to listen to one of the truly great minds working the field of history today. Let me be more specific when i call fred one of the truly great historians of our day. He is in my opinion and i am biased but i have the microphone nothing less than a foremost historian of vietnam working in the country today. Vietnam, of course, vietnam that word which has come to mean so much in american society. It means a war, an era, a period when the United States was perhaps ripped apart at the seams internally more than any other time in recent memory. It is a moment and bloodshed seemed endemic. Vietnam looms large over the field of american contemporary history. There are three basic types of american historians. Those who study the civil war. Those who study the vietnam war. And then there is everybody else. To be at the peak of one of these Three Pinnacles i think is no mean thing and