It would soon be unleashed on the japanese cities of hiroshima and nagasaki. The Truman Library institute provided this video. We are at the 75th anniversary of the potsdam conference. Big numbers like a 75th anniversary or a 100th anniversary are always occasions for looking back and for drawing attention. I think theres another reason to look back at potsdam as we are in our own day and age reentering a world of Great Power Competition and reentering a world where geopolitics seems to have come back to the fore of international thinking and International Relations thinking. So its well worth us comiing back to this subject, so im especially glad to have a chance to talk to you about it. I wish it was in person, again, in kansas city. I wish that we were able to do this facetoface, but we will do the very best that we can. The key thing here that i want to return to throughout this presentation is shown by this photograph here of Winston Churchill, harry truman and josef stalin smilin
They gavel it is session saturday morning and ten eastern. Watch the debate live on cspan good evening. Every saturday night throughout the summer, book tv is putting on several hours of a wellknown author. Kind of hard twisted on binge watching. Tonight teacherg author is historian David Mccullough for it is author of a dozen books including bestselling histories, on the american revolutions, and the invention of mans spacefligh for some ofe Northwest Territory in the creation of the brooklyn bridge. Hes a two time winner about Pulitzer Prize and the National Book of board and his appearance he over 75 times. And coming up over the next several hours, we will show you some of those programs. S. First up in 1992, they appear on cspans program to talk about his biography of president harry truman. The book won thepr pulitzer prie biography would have changed the view on the truman presidency. Here is David Mccullough from 1992. You start out by saying im a as far back as nearly as he co
Provided this video. We are at the 75th anniversary of the potsdam conference. Big numbers like the 75th anniversary or hundred anniversary, are always occasions for looking back and for drawing attention. I think there is another reason to look back at potsdam as we are in our own day and age, reentering a world of Great Power Competition and reentering a world where geopolitics seems to have come back to the fore of international thinking in International Relations thinking. So it is well worth us coming back to this subject. Im especially glad to have a chance to talk to you about it. I wish it was in person again, in kansas city. I wish that we were able to do this face to face, but we will do the very best that we can. The key thing here, that i want to return to throughout this presentation, is shown by this photograph here, of Winston Churchill, harry truman and Joseph Stalin smiling and shaking hands. And the point that i really want to reiterate here, is that these three men a
First is paul sparrow who is director of the franklin d. Roosevelt president ial museum and library in hyde park, new york, following a career as a documentary filmmaker and a Senior Executive at the museum and paul has been directioning the Roosevelt Library museum since 2015 and heel ll be talk about fdr and the Manhattan Project and our second guest is Clifton Daniel who is the eldest grandson of president harry truman. He is also a truman scholar where he spent quite a bit of time study being the life and career of his grandfather and currently serves as honorary chairman of the board of trustees at the harry truman president ial library and museum in independence, missouri. So today will give a great opportunity for question and answer. Please weigh in with lots of questions. Weve already been talking quite a bit offcamera, about our topic today, and i guarantee you theres going to be a lot of interesting ideas and discussion. So i will begin, and introduce all to join us on the p
The key thing here that i want to return to throughout this presentation is shown by this photograph here of Winston Churchill, harry truman, and Joseph Stalin smiling and shaking hands. And the point that i really want to reiterate here is that these three men and most of the advisors around them did not believe that what they were doing at potsdam was laying the seeds of a cold war. We know from the scholarship of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond, a lot of historians read potsdam backwards. That is to say they read it as a part start of the cold war. But these three men and their staff came to potsdam not to begin a cold war amongst themselves, but celebrate, really, the end of the war with germany, figure out what the post world war was going to look like, and plan for the final victory over japan in the pacific theater. This photograph very much reflects the spirit of potsdam, which i will talk a little bit more about in a bit, which was happy, which was victorious, which was joyful, wh