me and from the side henry kissinger said, by definition, the people who cannot hear will not respond. [laughter] you're at the wilson center and today is another in our books at wilson series featuring the latest book by the remarkable james reston who is a wilson center global fellow. the topic of the book deals with a contentious period in the history of the vietnam war, and the book itself deals with the contentious debate over how to mark that war and the american'' role and sacrifice during that period. that was fraught with politics and contention over the appropriate artistic expression to memorialize that dramatic period in american history. the gold standard of book reviews remains "the new york times." they reviewed it this week and described the book as superb and affecting in terms of the emotions it evokes as one reads it. it is a fantastic volume. jim has been affiliated as a fellow at the wilson center. it is remarkable the topics he has taken on in 17 books. the range from the renaissance to the contemporary is remarkable for any individual. his book, "the conviction of richard nixon" was a best-seller and inspired the film frost/nixon. he has won awards for various publications and we are delighted to host today's event to mark the publication of his latest book. the wilson format is conversational, and we cannot have a better moderator and person to engage in this dialogue then jan scruggs, who is the founder of the vietnam veterans memorial fund. the project stemmed from work he did -- he served on the secretary of defense's vietnam war advisory committee. the format will be that jan and jim will have a conversation for 25 minutes to discuss the main themes of the book, then over to you all for any comments or questions, and then the author will sign copies of the book, which are available just outside the door in the foyer. let me turn the floor over to jan. james: i had intended to speak for about 40 minutes, so i will see if i can compress what i had in mind to about four. i am arguing that there are two vietnam wars, there is the one fought between 1959 in 1975, and the second war began in 1979 and is still going on. that is on the question of how this war, the first lost war in american national history and very divisive, how that is to be remembered and how it is to be memorialized. i have been preoccupied in my entire literary life with the lot of my own generation, and the moral dilemma that it faced during the vietnam period, the decision as to whether to serve in the military or not, to avoid it, all my friends avoided service. after my three years in the army, 1965 to 1968, i became involved in the reconciliation movement, especially with vietnam war resisters, and wrote two books about that. this overarching theme of reconciliation after a divisive war, i believe, is an eternal question and one that we will face, perhaps today in relation to iraq and afghanistan and in the future, forever. i remember the choice my generation was faced with, to be involved or not in the ill-conceived, arguably immoral war, to protest and avoid or to serve. i was personally and deeply involved in trying to decide that in my own personal life and therefore very interested in how that extended to other of my contemporaries. this book is not about the vietnam war that was fought, but the memory of that war. how it should be remembered -- that first phase had its most intense time with the fight over a vietnam memorial, whether there would be one at all or if there was going to be one what should it be. that period is totally forgotten now, the intensity of the fight between 1979 and 1984, but i believe it is instructive to go back to that period and to that fight. with the ken burns documentary we are going to get this fight all over again with intensity. the book has two emotional ties for me. one is that i have one friend on the wall who was killed in january 1968 when the north vietnamese came through. i trained with him and knew him well. he was a good friend of mine. it is the brilliance of the vietnam wall that it is by virtue of its black granite a reflective surface, so i believe that almost by accident, the reflective quality of the granite to those who have survived is a magical accident that i came upon. the second emotional tie is the sculptor of the soldiers at the memorial was a friend of mine, and i was not sure when i started to focus on this question as to whether this book would work. i had done dual biographies before, pete rose, a baseball book, saladin versus richard the lionheart, a medieval book. the form of dual biography interested me greatly. whether i could do a dual biography was a question in my mind. i was interested in the artistic process that those artists went through. what should the place be for a lost war, a divisive war? what shape should it take, what went through artist's minds to try to figure out what would be appropriate. what would be the right move to go for? what i quickly understood from searching the library of congress was there was an enormous effusion of creativity that this commission brought into existence with 1421 submissions, all of those designs are in the library of congress. it is a fascinating range that goes from very kitschy to quite interesting, and there was significant competition. there is a very rich historical record at the library of congress of the materials that come out of the vietnam veterans memorial. this memorial began as a veterans memorial about one war and the veterans who fought in it. the magic of it as the decades have proceeded is that memorial has become universalized, it is not only about veterans, but about the entire vietnam generation and its dilemma. it is not only about the vietnam war, it is about all wars. it is not a place only for warriors, but equally for pacifists. even draftdodgers and deserters can go and have a place of reflection and contemplation about a choice that was foisted on an american generation that should never happen again. the story itself has six phases. it begins with one veteran's vision, a veteran who was wounded and then returned to duty, then witnessed a terrible accident of friends blown apart, and openly declares that he suffered, then and perhaps now from ptsd. his sacrifice and his service were something he felt should be memorialized personally and for all who served under these difficult circumstances. his determination to follow this through is an amazing thing. he felt strongly that if there was a memorial, it was not to be stuck away in some hidden place in washington, as if this was a shameful thing. it should be on the national mall in a prominent place, almost in your face. the second phase was beyond the raising of money -- an artistic competition. it was presided over by a handsome, prickly professional who gathered a panel of distinguished artists and architects to figure out how to choose between these 1421 submissions. what would be the best. there were several rules that were laid down for all those that submitted. one was the insistence of the veteran founder that all the names of the dead be on the sculpture or whatever it was to be. secondly, that it must be nonpolitical. the memorial does not state that the war was right or wrong. what happened there after was this remarkable scene in a hangar in andrews air force base where these 1421 submissions were put on display, and the seven or eight judges had to go through and winnow it down to a couple hundred and then 30 and then down to three and then to choose a winner. all of those submissions had to be anonymous. there were major architectural firms and major artist who put forward submissions to this. phase three was the results, with this 21-year-old yale undergraduate, her design was a single chevron in black granite, belowground. all of which were inflammatory and subsequent phases. the actual drawing of that submission was almost high schoolish. it was a black chevron that many people might have done. what won her the competition, and this appeals to the writer in me was not the design, but her description of what she wanted the memorial to be. it was walking through this park-like area of memorial appears as a rift in the earth, along polished black stone wall are merging from and receding from the earth and it goes on in a very poetic way. it was also part of the rules that that description had to be in their hand writing and there could be no print. i hope i have this all right so far. then came the next phase. this was the blowback. it has been described and i believe accurately as the art war. black granite was the color of shame, by it being belowground was shameful. only the dead were on the wall and not anything about the survivors, and this was unfair. it was depressing. there was no glory in it, no honor, no heroism. there had been no vietnam veterans on the panel of judges that chose the final result. this blowback was led by a powerful character by the name of jim webb, subsequently senator from virginia and a very failed presidential campaign. a powerful individual, indeed. very well-connected in washington who gathered congressmen and senators behind him, wrote beautifully written op-ed pieces in opposition, who went around and spoke all over the country against this. it was a powerful effort to undermine the maya lin design and it nearly succeeded. the fifth phase was the compromise where a superb figure was brought in and he was commissioned to do three soldiers, a three soldier sculpture and this was to satisfy veterans who hated that -- of shame as it was called. to hart's credit, he rejected the pressure to create a glorified sculpture which would glorify the experience of the vietnam veteran, or for it to be a heroic statue the way you might find at a place like quantico. when this started to gain legs, there evolved an interesting debate between the detractors of maya lin and the architectural community who felt there was a strong principle here of the integrity of an artistic work that had been chosen in the most professional and fair way. nevertheless, it became a washington story in which the white house became involved and congress became involved and ultimately, it felt to this agency in washington called the u.s. commission on fine arts to decide what to do about this. ultimately, they agreed that the statue would be added, but it would be added as an entrance experience, so as you entered from the lincoln memorial to the wall, you went past the three soldiers. it was therefore meant to not be two memorials, as was argued by the purists, but it was one integrated experience. frederick hart was very much -- bought into this notion of his respect for the winning design and he, too, won the day at the u.s. commission of fine arts by what he wrote with what he was doing with his statues in relation to the wall. he wrote, the gesture and expression of the figures are directed to the wall, affecting an interplay between image and metaphor. the tension between the two elements creates a residence that echoes from one to the other, i see the wall as a kind of ocean, a sea of sacrifice that is overwhelming and incomprehensible in its sweep of names. i place these figures upon the shore of that see, gazing on it, standing vigil before it, reflecting the human face of it, the human heart. that won the compromise and i would think won the day for frederick hart. it was still a shotgun marriage. the last phase is where we are at now. with this remarkable embrace of this work, and its place, it is the most accessible monument in the district of columbia, 5 million visitors every year visit it. it is copied all over the world. interestingly to me, when i was in north vietnam in december, it is also copied in the memorial to the north vietnamese dead in vietnam, the black granite with the names of those who were killed. it is a place for all of the vietnam generation, and it is a place for all generations to come. if you go there, it is a fine place to take a child. with this ken burns think we going to relive the vietnam war and get ready to see the fight start all over again. the rift of the generation is going to be on display, but at least now we have a place of contemplation for what is the ultimate cost of war. the brilliance of the black granite to reflect the experience of the survivors, beyond that, to celebrate the key players, the modest vietnam veteran whose vision and determination made this happen, the white-haired manager of the historic competition, but also the artists who are not here today, maya lin and frederick hart. thank you. [applause] jan: can everyone hear me? i'm the founder of the vietnam veterans memorial, born in the nation's capital and i grew up in bowie, maryland. ended up in the vietnam war at age 18, seemed like a good enough idea for me to serve for two years. got the draft out of the way. at american university i did research and i did become an authority on posttraumatic stress disorder -- to become an authority all you have to do is write an article for the washington post and appear in front of a senate committee. i figured that out quickly. i had some credibility when i came up with the idea for this memorial, which flowed from the idea of survivor conflicts. a lot of work has been done on survivor conflicts, people who have survived the holocaust in world war ii, tortured people, why did i survive and my children to not? people who survive wars, their life is different, even car crashes and so forth. i became interested in thinking of carl jung who was a student of sigmund freud who had this idea of the unconscious mind. he talked about these historical archetypes, what is the hero. who is the hero to jung? the hero is the man or woman who faces the dragon. he fights the dragon with a sword, he wins or he dies, that he is the hero for facing danger. flowing from this archetype came the idea of a memorial with names, names of the fallen from vietnam. the memorial would honor all. the trick i came up with was to separate the war from the warrior. that became a mantra. the vietnam war is one issue, service to your country is a separate issue. we tried to keep the vietnam war out of the vietnam veterans memorial which is not possible, but held off the lions at the gate for a while. in order to get this memorial built, i was very lucky. some graduates of the u.s. military academy at west point, who also went to the harvard business school, descended on this project early on and made the vietnam veterans memorial into a harvard business school problem. i owe a lot to the harvard business school, i owe a lot to west point for getting this done. this book is fantastic. it should be the official history of the vietnam veterans memorial. it is also a history of art and art history and washington, d.c. this is not the first time people have disagreed over a structure. i wonder if you could tell us about the fdr memorial. many of us have been to it, but we do not know about the one that was not built. james: you are putting me on the spot about details of the whole thing. for something like the vietnam memorial or the vietnam war, which left -- the number of dead were a lot less than world war i or world war ii. and the memorials for fdr and for george washington -- and we know that general eisenhower continues off with terrific tension between the family and the powers that be here in washington. for this memorial of yours to become a reality is absolutely amazing. even something like the george washington memorial, the design itself was totally different initially than what was built. there is a connection between the washington monument and the vietnam memorial in the sense that they are both indeed quite scaled down. it's one of the surprising things -- surprising to me and all of this was going into the way in which the vision developed for this thing, it was originally a very deeply antiwar design where it was not just the chevron she presented in her class, but it was the chevron were there were a series of stones coming down to that chevron. and the stones going down are meant to be the dominoes of the vietnam war, as if those who died, all 58,000 serve down the stones of the dominoes to their depth. it became clear to me that talking with her professor from yale that in the consideration of her design they said, what are these stones with the men surfing down to their death, get rid of that. the memorial was scaling down. putting a memorial on much less than five years is an extraordinary accomplish. corrects some people are very good at writing -- >> some people are very good at writing. there were important far-reaching questions over this contest. what population would ultimately controlled memory of vietnam? would be the veterans, would it be the artists looking for a stylistic statement? would be rule -- would it be war resisters? would it be politicians that would want to allay the political pressures on them and put vietnam to arrest? maya lay at the time was at yale. individual teams competed in the largest architecture in maybe the history of western civilization, later quipped by the quibble memorial in world memorialed by the new york. tell us about professor andrew burr. he became infamous for giving a b to my lynn -- to maya lin the good news is in this book you can see what was turned in by -- >> it's hard to imagine a mess you have extraordinary skills. tell us about angela. >> a joke about the gentleman, his name is -- he deserves a tremendous amount credit for managing those 1421 submissions with fairness and professionalism. andrew burr's this very jolly young professor at yale in 1980 who goes to france in the summer and looks at world war ii memorials in france where hundreds, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands were killed and memorialized. he was very interested in that, came back to yale and to the dean of the architecture school, a famous architect in america now with a notion of having a course in -- memorializing the dead. the course had eight students, including this young asian-american girl who was a really rather bad student, prickly and difficult, and was not doing all of her homework. when it came to the announcement of this vietnam memorial competition, he changed his programs and asked his students to go ahead and imagine what they would like memorialize. the student came down with a couple of friends to look at the landscape of what is known as constitution gardens as part of the national mall. pretty much on board for rolling quality of the landscape. competing with the landscape itself. she went back and famously, as legend has it, had her initial design done in a plate of mashed potatoes. she then presented this design and he brought in three judges to replicate normal architectural competition, and it was in those three judges they came back and said the idea of a granite chevron with low ground is very appropriate, but what on earth were the steps going down, and to get rid of those. that is what she did. ultimately she got a very good grade for that project. when it came to the final grade, he gave her an incomplete. she came in tears and in anger saying i'll never get in the harvard architectural school as a graduate student. and was so powerful in all of this that her ultimately acquiesced gave her this famous b plus. it is the most famous undergraduate grade in the history of higher education. she was a very persuasive and tough woman. there was someone else tough and extraordinary, who referred to her as an ingenue. the young woman who is the archetype of everyone comes to save her. this fellow is frederick hart. why don't you tell us about frederick hart and then we're going to open up for questions and discussion. >> went to artists get together on two competing projects you can be sure there will be blood in the water. where maya lin and frederick hart went after one another, a statue was being added to her design -- you referred to a statue being added to her design as a mustache on the mono lisa. -- the mona lisa. there was an important principle of the integrity of the piece of art from the artist. hart was no shrinking violet. he was a very good insider and artist, and also very good with words. they went after one another in an article i have milked for all it's worth, them detracting one another's work. frederick hart had agreed booster in tom will -- tom wolfe. maya lin had a tremendous cadre of boosters who felt strongly her work of art should not be violated. >> ladies and gentlemen i'm sure someone would like to add something to our discussion. there is a microphone. gentleman right there in the white shirt. >> john mcauliffe. congratulations, what you did is phenomenal. i'm also with a group called the vietnam peace commemoration committee, which is antiwar folks trying to lift up memory of the antiwar movement. there is a comment or question about what is not in the memorial, and there is no way negative about it that it has come up in discussions. those 58,000 were not the last of the american casualties. there are the people who then died from ptsd related psychological issues, suicides, agent orange, and a variety of long wounds that ultimately led to their deaths. there are also the americans who protested the war, the kids at cannes state or a jackson state orkids at kent state jackson state or a lot of others whose names we don't know that are not recognized in that memorial as explicitly. we are doing a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the pentagon march what we will do is walk to the vietnam memorial to point out that if the memorial included 3 million cambodians who died, the wings for of it would stretch for miles. it's not to say america memorial should do that anymore, i don't think it diminishes what you accomplished to point out how much is not memorialized. >> i'm going to let it stand right there, you are next. >> bob hathaway here at the center. congratulations on yet another extraordinary book, a very rich entertaining presentation. i would make two very quick comments. jim started out by describing the vietnam war in a way that no one in this room at least visibly to the exception to it, but it used to be a controversial statement. i don't know any historians who would disagree with the adjective lost. for a long time you couldn't get away describing it in that way. strikes me as a step toward enlightenment. the other brief comment i wanted to make was you referred to this -- this basic being -- basic template beingh copied around the world. i remember how struck i was when okinawa years ago. there is a monument there that list the name of not only the japanese defenders and the american invaders and all civilians. it is on a scale, the number of names is on a scale which dwarfs the vietnam memorial here. i found it a very moving memorial. it also invoked memories of this memorial. my question is i recall the fact that maya lin was young, the fact that she was woman, the fact that she was asian were all points of controversy and given as reasons why this was the wrong selection, my recollection is that this was a very scarring experience for her, notwithstanding the great honor. can you bring us up to date what has happened to her since. where is she today, where she has been for a decade since. >> i had a literary question for myself in writing this book as to whether i wanted to develop a deep relationship with her, to tap her memory of the thing. i decided i did not want that, what i wanted to do was capture the passion that had brought her into international fame, which she basks in to this day. she has done subsequent to that memorial some wonderful work. most people remember her memorial to the civil rights era. she's a very interesting woman table outside the sterling library. she has done an anonymous enormous range of artistic works since. you can see books that have been done about her. she will always be defined by this amazing and that has happened to her when she was 21 or 22. i get a sense in facing this literary question in the beginning that i didn't really want to push her. it was clear to me that despite the importance of this to her international fame, it is a very unpleasant experience for her to remember. she did write to me she was happy to talk about the design itself. but she did not want to talk about the controversy that surrounded the design. that's my experience with her. >> yes we haven't had a woman speak yet. >> i'm very eager for all of this and i think it is genuinely important for younger people to understand. i vividly remember you and your compatriots in fatigues at the wedding kiosk in constitution avenue and i would love to hear from you about whether you feel your goals at that time for your daily 24-hour presence, whether you accomplished your goals and what kind of reactions other veterans have had who were involved. >> i am a simple man with very simple goals. my goal was to build a national memorial for military veterans of the vietnam war. you're not going to do any better than that. i was never with any of these kiosks. because of the vietnam veterans memorial, and this is why i'm so unpopular among the establishment, we had something called the korean war veterans memorial. a few years later the world war ii memorial. and now with any luck next year there will be a world war i memorial near pershing plaza. i created this need for a national memorial. i didn't mean to do it. i think there's is absolutely fantastic. one thing we did have to face is the allegations that was communist involvement with the memorial design. one of our design team had taught a course in landscape architecture of the california labor school. maybe there was a congressman -- communist running around the these guys were after us. they had all run political campaigns and had access to senators. the day that the groundbreaking permit was issued, 25 members of congress called secretary watt and said, do not give that away. do not give them the permit. we have to stop it in its tracks. a fellow was working for james baker, secretary of state at the time. on behalf of the secretary, you will issue that permit, mr. watt , because you have problems with the beach boys and other difficulties and you do not want this problem. you will issue it an issue it now. he bluffed his way into it. i got a bunch of construction equipment there and i said, make this place look like a b-52 just came through with bombs, make holes everywhere. one of the great men of all times in terms of architecture design competitions, he wrote the book which may not be the only book that certainly the best book on architectural design competitions. [applause] much for very acknowledging the earlier. i wanted to make one point and ask you one question. the point i would make is, we look at this whole process as one of great controversy. i want to tell you that if it hadn't been for the full cooperation of the fine arts commission, the national capital planning commission, and the park service, and a number of other federal agencies around town later, that memorial would never have happened. normally, we look at federal agencies as obstructionists. in this case, they protected the integrity of the design all the way through. i think carter brown is really principalle hero -- hero. this discussion 35 years after the memorial and all of the aspects and issues that it arouses, i think is a token of how, of what a touchstone it was. now jan, you have had for some years the idea of building a visitor center where these kinds of ideas could be further discussed. it could be a forum for doing that. i know there has been some difficulty getting that done that i would like to ask how it is coming. >> i retired from the vietnam veterans memorial fund. i do not know much about how the visitor center is coming along, but i am now the principal adviser to the global war on terrorism memorial. we will build a memorial fold the people -- for the people serving today. there are people who have been fighting for the past 15 years. that is what i am doing now and i wish the best to the vietnam veterans memorial fund but i have moved on. you must be above average intelligence. .> i do not know about that i am chris davenport, former fellow at the center. one of the things you wrote about in the iraq war in an op .d is that we all own that war it did not matter if you said, i am against it or i did not vote for george bush. there is a similar scene in the wall, that it had to be in a prominent place. one of the things that strikes me about the wall and that you see in this beautiful cover, is the reflection of the people looking at it. interactivee, it is . it is not just a memorial and a tribute to the names, but it forces the viewers to shift their gaze and see themselves as if you were looking into a body of water. i was curious if that was part of the design from the beginning , what the designers thought about that. >> that was absolutely a part of it from the beginning. it was always to be black granite. in her case, whether she really understood in conceptualizing it that way, a, the reflective sheity of it and b, certainly could not have imagined what blowback would be about the color of black being the color of shame and all that. here isresting point that the detractors that jan is talking about, most especially webb, when they started to realize they could not undermine this entirely, they made some demands. one of the principal demands was that it not be black, but it would be white. and if it was a white memorial, it would not have that reflection to it. you get no reflection from white granite. that is an extraordinarily important point in all of this. >> thank you, james. earth,", "a rift in the just a fantastic discussion of the history of the creation of the memorial which was as contentious as the war was itself. congratulations on this accomplishment, james. copies of the book are available for purchase outside. we thank all of you attending today. for those viewing on c-span, please thank me -- join me in thanking them. >> just briefly, i have got a friend, one of my neighbors is a navy pilot. american history tv on c-span tv is in prime time, starting at 8:00 p.m. eastern. monday night, from the national constitution center in philadelphia, discussions on landmark supreme court cases including brown versus board of education. tuesday night, the life and influence of william f hello bill cody on the 100th anniversary of his death. -- of his death. little rock high schools integration with president bill clinton. the lead up in response of the -- fromced -- 67 american history tv's oral history series, interviews with prominent photojournalists who documented major events throughout american history. watch american history tv this week in prime time on c-span3. since 2011, architect and jobyric preservationist hill has been compiling a database of former's lay of slave dwellings. we travel with her to the former brandon plantation in southern virginia to learn about the saving slave houses project. here is a preview. here to do the understanding and documentation of a slave house here. this is part of an independent project i am doing that is called saving slave houses, which is a database of all the known slave houses in the united states. is a central repository of information and documentation of slave houses in the united states. i have partnered with the company that makes the survey to do godthat i use of the highest level of documentation that is available to us today, 3-d laser scanning. important to do this because one, documentation is preservation. slave houses are buildings that are disappearing from the landscape and so by documenting them, that is one way of preserving them. these buildings and the people that lived and worked in these buildings are a very important part of our history, so i think it is important to tell their stories truthfully and one way of doing that is through the architecture. the architecture is part of the material culture that still survives today that you can , and, you can experience it is kind of a vehicle to tell their story. that is how i am using the architecture. the work is also important because when i started doing this research, i found that there is information both about these structures and these people, but it is kind of everywhere. there is little bits of it everywhere and it has taken a lot of time, years, to compile it. i want others to be able to benefit from it and have access to it so they can move forward and produce meaningful research studies from it. >> watch the entire program about saving slave houses on american artifacts, sunday at eastern. and 10:00 p.m. on american history tv on c-span3. >> next, on the civil war a panel of authors and public historians talk about how to make the civil war era relatable for modern audiences. the state ofd civil war studies and battlefield preservation in the wake of the recent 150th anniversary of the conflict. the gettysburg heritage center hosted this talk. it is a little under an hour. >> good evening, everyone. my name is tammy myers. i am here with the gettysburg heritage center. i operate this facility and i am pleased to have you here. this fine panel of authors. are brought to us by a publisher based at of california. we refer to them as publishers of historical distinction.