difd mccullough will give us perspective on the present through the lens of the past. why in the world is not a tiny nation about to skip over a date entirely? i'll explain. next up, a fascinating look inside spy games. both the fictional and nonfictional varieties with columnist and novelist david ignatius. then a look at innovation with the master architect frank gehry. finally, why president bush might have offended some italians on inauguration day. first, here's my take. we hear a lot about leadership these days, mostly in the sense of the failure of leadership, the absence of leadership. certainly that's the view of many people who oppose president obama. but there are also many democrats who believe that president obama has been a disappointment, a bad manager, an ineffectual leader. the conventional wisdom is that obama just doesn't have what it takes to be the kind of leader we need, the kind we have had in the past, someone, for example, like bill clinton, who was just such a gifted leader, a legendary player. now, i have a huge admiration for clinton. i think he was a very good president and he is almost preternaturally talented as a politician. but let's recall what his first few years looked like. he began his presidency with the fiasco of gays in the military then moved to two failed nominees for attorney general. remember zoe baird? then went on to try and failed spectacularly to pass universal health care. two years into his presidency, the republican party won both the senate and house of representatives, gaining control of the latter for the first time since 1952. in his second term, of course, was the impeachment scandal. i'm not picking on clinton. as i said, i greatly admire him. but we forget what people thought of leaders at the time. on the republican side, the air is so thick with ronald reagan nostalgia, you can barely see through it to the actual past. the reality was that reagan was a shrewd politician with some strong convictions who pursued a tough, smart foreign policy -- >> tear down this wall! >> but he was also a president who ran through six national security advisers in his eight years, with a lax enough management style that it produced a major scandal -- the iran contra affair -- in which perhaps the most startling fact was that the president didn't seem to be about a major foreign policy project of questionable legality being run by his own national security council. for all the hero worshipping these days, reagan was often derided on the right for his many tax increases and especially for his dealings with the soviet union. conservative leaders called reagan a "useful idiot." commentators like norman podharetz called it the reagan road to detente. jimmy carter wanted to run -- ted kennedy against him in the primaries. richard nixon seen as a sellout and closet liberal. i could go on. my point is, we cannot really tell the quality of a leader judged from the noise of the present. we need time and perspective, which is why one reads history and listens to men like david mccullough. so let's get started. one way to get some insight into the current mess in washington is to step back and get some perspective. i tried to do some of that at the top of this show. but i wanted to get some deeper historical perspective on the performance of the president and of congress, and few today understand the past and present of this nation better than david mccullough. he's one of the world's most decorated historians, having won two pulitzer prizes for his biographies of harry truman and john adams. welcome. >> thank you very much. >> we have in the white house a president who is clearly interested in history, a writer himself. how do you think about him? >> i admire him very much, and i think that his -- his time in office presented him with problems such as very few presidents have ever had to address. and given the complexity and the gravity of those problems, i think he's handled himself very well. my hat goes off to him, my heart goes out to him. who -- who could possibly do that job? no human being is sufficient for that role. it's beyond human capacity. we all ought to want to help him, we all want to want to help everybody in elective office to do the job the way it ought to be done, to live up to the responsibility. in the old house of representatives chamber in the capitol, what's now statuary hall, over the doorway, there is a figure of clio, the goddess of history. and she's riding in her chariot. and on the side of the chariot is a clock put there way back in the 1830s or earlier, still run perfectly. she's writing in her book of history, and the idea was that the representatives would look up to see what time it is now, but they should be reminded that that's just present-daytime. what really matters is what's being written in the book of history. i've known to a greater or lesser degree, i think, seven presidents. and i guess what's impressed me most is how different they have been one from another as men, as human beings. and some of those that i've liked best as people weren't necessarily the best presidents. and my understanding, i think, of what weighs on their minds is pretty close. i don't think i could sleep at night if i knew what they know and had all of that on my shoulders. i don't know how many people could sleep at night. >> when you look at it, mr. mccollough, what makes a great president? >> the capacity to move the country to do better than it thinks it can with the use of the english language. >> communication is that important? >> the power of the written word, the spoken word, very, very important. an ability to stick to your principles. an ability to work with people with whom you disagree and may dislike. i try to stress that exceptional presidents are the exception. we can't expect every president to be a great president. it doesn't happen that way. life isn't like that. and you can't predict -- there isn't a type. they come in all shapes and sizes. who would have ever thought that harry truman would be one of our greatest presidents? there's no question he was. he said, i never forgot where i came -- who i was, where i came from, and where i would go back to. now, that's a man who knows exactly who he is. he's not creating this adoration and limelight in order to feel good about himself. he didn't want the job. it was thrust upon him. he did not have the gift of moving the country with words the way fdr did or lincoln did. and he did not have the physical presence that washington -- i think washington is our greatest president. >> why? >> he set the standards for behavior, integrity, and patriotism of the best kind. not the flag-waving kind but true love of country. all of our best presidents without exception have had a sense of history. and i don't think that's coincidental. and one of the things that a sense of history gives to a person is not just an appreciation and understanding of what happened before we came along, but the realization that we, too, are part of history and we, too, are going to be judged by history. and that's extremely important. that today's polls, tomorrow's headlines, are not going matter. what matters -- how will you look, how will this time look in time to come. what are -- what cathedrals are we going to build? we don't ask ourselves that much. >> but you're optimistic at the end of the day. >> yes, i am. i'm optimistic in the long run principally because of what i see in the generation of my own children and grandchildren and in the students that i meet when i'm lecturing at colleges and universities. i'm distressed, i'm sometimes stunned by how much they don't know about the history of our country. but i know how bright they are, how well meaning they are, that they want to do the right thing. i agree with you that we're making a grievous error in not accepting able, talented people who come here for our education opportunities. a big mistake. that is the natural resource of all natural resources, the most important of all, what's up here, ideas, ingenuity, foresight, all of that, training. we ought to be -- as canada is being, we ought to be a place they all want to be. and come on over. we need you. what would we be without immigration? think of who never would have become an american without immigration. that's who we are. thank goodness. >> powerful words. david mccullough, thank you. we will be right back to talk about a time when america and americans were fascinated by france. david mccullough's new book when we come back. in america, we believe in a future that is better than today. since 1894, ameriprise financial has been working hard for their clients' futures. never taking a bailout. helping generations achieve dreams. buy homes. put their kids through college. retire how they want to. ameriprise. the strength of america's largest financial planning company. the heart of 10,000 advisors working with you, one-to-one. together, for your future. ♪ gives you a 50% annual bonus! so you earn 50% more cash. according to research, everybody likes more cash. well, almost everybody... ♪ would you like 50% more cash? no! but it's more money. 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[ powers down ] uh-oh, flobot is broken. the "name your price" tool, only from progressive. call or click today. we are back with the historian, david mccullough, whose latest book, "the greater journey," is about a wave of 19th century americans who migrated to paris. we think of americans as famously uninterested in the world. we think of america today and don't care what's going on with the rest of the world, we don't want to borrow anything from the rest of the world. the americans you're describing seem fascinated by france. why? >> they craved -- craved france, and they weren't anxious to go there because they were disenchanted with our country. they went to find out if the talent they had was really as strong as people were telling them and in order to get the training, experience, they could not get here. there were no museums with paintings hanging in them then. there was not one world of architecture in the united states -- this was in the 1830s. and no way to train as an artist to work or to get the kind of training that one would need to be a sculptor or a painter. and paris was the medical capital of the world. so they went for a multitude of professions and artistic careers. if you were a foreign student in france, in paris, you could go to the sorbonne, you could go to l'ecole for nothing, for free. imagine students coming to harvard or yale or stanford were coming here and going free. it was part of the policy of france at the time. >> wow. >> so if they could afford to support themselves, room and board, then they could go to these greatest of institutions. but american medical training for example was woefully behind. most medical doctors in the united states in the 1840s, 1850s, through the civil war, had never been to medical school. >> the paris that you describe is a place that is clearly the center of the world in a sense. we forget now because the industrial revolution had just begun. so you're describing the last gasp of the great agriculture revolutions, and france was probably the richest country in the world, and paris certainly the center. >> what most people don't realize that paris was the cultural center of the world. and this city of new york became the cultural center of the world after world war ii. but paris was also the center for medical education, medical science, science itself, technology. the brooklyn bridge for example, stands on an underwater foundation system called caissons which was developed by french engineers in paris. so the engineer of the brooklyn bridge, washington robely, went to paris to find out how they do it. that's how he was able to do it. and most american don't realize that, how much we owed to france. >> i have to go on a tangent. you wrote a book about the brooklyn bridge. >> i did. >> here you are talking about the engineer of the brooklyn bridge and what he borrowed from france. how does that stand in your mind? >> particularly a powerful experience, you never forget it. and some subjects, once i'm finished with them, i -- that's it. sort of gotten it out of my system. with the brooklyn bridge, there's something about it, i'm still involved. my wife and i take a walk over the bridge every year. we go back and walk through the neighborhood we lived in when we were first married. and i think it's one of the great accomplishments of our civilization. it's both a work of technology and a work of art. and it stands -- it stands the test of time both visually and technically. it's a magnificent production. and it also rises up out of what was really a very corrupt time. much like our own. and the idea of this emblem of affirmation can rise up out of that swamp of the gilded age is to me reassuring, and particularly in our time. >> our times, though, seem more parochial. i mean, the people you discuss in the book, they seem so interested in the world and in intellectual currents in france and elsewhere, as well. the people -- >> it wasn't cool to be cynical then. it wasn't cool to be filled with self-pity. people often ask when i'm starting a book, what's your theme? particularly some of our academic friends. i have no idea what my theme is. i make up something to calm them down, but i have no idea. it's one of the reasons i wrote the book. one of the themse i realized was a theme as i realized halfway through this project, is work. we receive such ballyhoo constantly about ease and happiness being synonymous. again and again, people were saying on paper in their diaries and letters, i've never worked harder in my life, and this is the happiest time of my life. and they're struggling as -- as st. augustus, the sculptor, said they're struggling with the realities of life, the mundane, everyday chores of life, struggling to soar into the blue as he says. and i think that's emblematic of that generation. >> do you think that we've lost some of the optimism and energy that you saw in the 19th century when -- >> yes. temporarily. i'm a short-range pessimist, a long-range optimist. i think we'll get through these troubles. we've been through worse. when 9/11 happened, people said, oh, this is the worst thing we've ever been through. yes, it was terrible, but by no means was it the worst we've ever been through. the revolutionary war, the civil war. imagine, 600,000 people killed. the influenza epidemic, the great depression. these were terrible times. the -- i think maybe the darkest time was right after pearl harbor. we had no army. half our navy had been destroyed. the germans were nearly to moscow. britain was about finished. and churchill came across the atlantic, and he gave a speech and said, "we haven't gone this far because we're made of sugar candy." that's the message we need now. >> and that's the kind of historical perspective we all need. david mccullough, thank you very much. we will be right back. ♪ it's easy to see what subaru owners care about. that's why we created the share the love event. get a great deal on a new subaru and $250 goes to your choice of 5 charities. with your help, we can reach $20 million dollars by the end of this, our fourth year. ♪ when the things that you need come at just the right speed, that's logistics. ♪ ♪ medicine that can't wait legal briefs there by eight, that's logistics. ♪ ♪ freight for you, box for me box that keeps you healthy, that's logistics. ♪ ♪ saving time, cutting stress, when you use ups that's logistics. ♪ welcome back. come with me now a long journey to a far-off island nation about halfway between hawaii and new zealand, samoa. its lush volcanic valleys make it a mostly agricultural nation. it has no military whatsoever, and shouldn't be confused with its neighbor, american samoa. now, if you're tempted to visit, do not plan a celebration there on december 30. why? because that day will simply not exist there. the calendar will jump from the 29th of december to the 31st. what in the world, right? why? it's actually a smart economic decision. you see, samoa is just 20 miles away from the international dateline. as the name suggests, it's an imaginary longitude that marks a change in date when we fly over sail or steam over it. that line was created more than a century ago when it was decided samoa would be 11 hours behind greenwich mean time outside of london. that's three hours behind pacific time in los angeles. the theory went that being on a similar time zone to the americas would benefit trade and commerce for samoa. but the times quite literally are changing. samoa now does most of its business with its neighbors. but sydney in australia is ten hours ahead of london, and bear with me on the math here, that means samoa has been conducting most of its trade with a country that is 21 hours ahead of it. so when it's friday morning at a samoan factory, australian clients are already at the beach on a sunny saturday. and when the aussies go to work on sunday, the samoans are at sunday church or whatever samoans do on sundays. then samoa will leap forward a day and be just three hours ahead of sydney. samoans already made one historic change to align itself with australia in 2009. it switched from driving on the right side of the road as we do to the left side of the road. now samoans can import cheaper cars from next door. on the one hand, samoa's shift is a story about how economics dictates policy. but it's also a larger narrative about the quiet success of australia. australia's growth rate has averaged nearly 4% for the last two decades, higher than almost every other rich country. it may be on the bottom of the map, but it's on top of almost every livability index. the unemployment rate is low. the deficit is almost negligible. it has strong education, universal health care. one could go on. so how did it get there? self-deprecating aussies may put it down to good luck. they had good weather, abundant natural resources, and a billion chinese hungry to mine australia's metals and minerals. but that's not the whole story. australia's real economic rise dates back to the 1980s and a series of forward-thinking reforms. the government floated its dollar and made the central bank independent. it maintained a budget surplus and kept inflation in check. state-owned firms were privatized, industries deregulated. when the global financial crisis hit in 2008, australia's banks benefited from a more conservative regulated approach. they were not overleveraged, so they weathered the storm, and robust trade with china soaked up a potential drop in australian consumer demand. australia's been smart on another issue that plagues american lawmakers these days -- immigration. it has gone from 98% anglo celtic population after the second world war to having a quarter of its current population born abroad. asians make up 10% of the population. much of the real growth in australia's gdp can be attributed to immigration and population growth. there's much speculation about a lost decade for the united states economy. all samoa had to do to rev up its economy is lose a day. i wish we had that option. we'll be right back. it's been the case that most cia officers sought what was called official coverers, embassy representatives, and other official international organizations. get the technology they love, on the network they de