bit of freedom and give up the nukes? it s going to be very hard, but he has to feel like it s a possibility to start on the road of, number one, not threatening people with nuclear weapons. number two, after that we then turned to the humanitarian situation in his own country. to everybody who says that we haven t gotten anything so far, ari fleischer made a great point earlier today they have to test those ballistic missiles in order to be able to use them to hit us. so, selfishly, we were talking about how that missile could hit hawaii. now that s not the case, because they are not testing those. so i know that s not nice for anyone else who is in the neighborhood, but it s an accurate to say that nothing has been achieved because americans are safer. we want that for everyone else. but that s just a point to be made. harris: it s very true. what you were saying, about the humanitarian situation of there, kennedy we haven t been able to impact. in fact, we have been able to pu
springboarded from all we could learn from eisenhower s two terms in office. basically our generation, younger, it seemed like history started with kennedy and there s a lot to learn from eisenhower and specifically from this address. yeah, and the transition that happened between those two, so many things were happening, changing parties, some thought a generational change between these two. there was so much going on and a smooth transition was really necessary. right, he, eisenhower was commit today having the smooth transition, he had a rocky transition between truman and eisenhower when he won in 1953. it was so rocky that on inauguration day the eisenhowers chose to stay in the car and then the trumans came out and road in silence to thish ago vale on capitol hill.
so he was not going to have that happen. he we wanted to make sure kennedy had a smooth ride and also deal with the national security implications of the cold war. you think back on how dangerous the time was, that was the message he was delivering in the farewell address. of course, everybody is going to wonder how you find time to get this done, there were things that you learn that had surprised you as you dug into this? a lot surprised me. i didn t know a lot about eisenhower other than the broad strokes. he was always portrayed as kind of sort specially towards the end as this golfing kind of not with it president who dealt with the press in awkward way. he was actually he had his hand on the till the whole time. he empowered his people to debate issues in the cabinet. he all the accomplishments, the highway system was a bipartisan win, something that
maybe a trump administration would look to of how to cross a big infrastructure project. the things that happened under eisenhower s administration are forgotten. the most surprising thing was how concerned he was about giving this message to kennedy and to the american public about the deficit, bipartisan and the military industrial complex. do you see any parallels this time around or do you look at this transition differently knowing what you now know having to do the book? bret: kennedy just won the election and they meet president eisenhower and the bookends with president elect trump meeting president obama and the meetingg in the oval office and the whole book is in narrative form so it s not like history book. stuff that s never been out there before. so i think there s a lot to
in 1961 he passed power into a young democrat john. kennedy. three days in january looks at the high stakes presidential transition between i and j and k. the subject matter, the timing of this couldn t be better, tell us what we will learn from the book? thanks, three and a half years in the making and i started to think about, you know, covering politics, you always are dealing in sound bites and little snippeds and tweets this time around. but to look back at history and really dig in, i started to find at the eisenhower library a lot of nuggets about this time and i foe questioned on the farewell address, delivered january 17th, 1961, three days before kennedy s inauguration and looked at that and kind of