and then it obviously to the pentagon and white house a very short order. it really works for the secretary of defense and the president. >> and the difference between what j sock does compared to what the cia's special activities or paramilitary division does, what is the real difference? >> guest: there is certainly an overlap between those two organizations now, and you will often find the members of each organization on the same battlefield, as battlefield, as it were, or in the same embassy doing the same work. the obvious difference is the joint special operations command leader who has a lot more, a lot more firepower. the special activities division you would expect to be working and battlefields in which the united states is not at work with, perhaps, slightly shadier characters in the military. and the different authority, different legal authority in the military, but there is not -- increasingly, especially in the last few years, joint special operations command, special mission units have expanded their human intelligence gathering apparatus and are increasingly encroaching on the cia profile. >> it might sound like an arcane question, but you know it is important between what is covert, which is what the cia does father's clandestine, which is supposed to be what they do. how important is that all was that since you just said, they sort of merged? >> the difference between clandestine as i understand it, as it has been explained to me is that clandestine operation is something that the united states does not want anyone to find out about ever. so if you, for instance, sent an operative into a country to retrieve spies for the united states, that would be a clandestine operation. if on the other hand you has an example gave the mujahedin missiles and soviet planes out of the sky in northern afghanistan, soviet helicopters are clearly, the fact that helicopters are being shot out of the sky is not the secret once it happens. happens. what they are trying to do is fight the us independent from the operation. so it is an important legal distinction. i personally think that in the information age it is getting harder and harder to keep those two things separate. >> charged forward and push the limits. >> you know, we send people to the cia farm facility, operated framing pools. and it has special information units expanded out of the number of people were capable of operating undercover command it is also getting in to much more heavily signals intelligence , the cyber warfare side of things. so increasingly there is the behemoth that j sock isj sock is starting to improve on things that we traditionally would've thought, the marina and which the civilian intelligence -- >> the cia is a known organization, and acknowledged organization that will testify occasionally to congress. they are status is still unacknowledged. if you look on the official j sock there are not really websites. it would say that they do training and equipping. you have written a book about an organization that the united states actually says does not exist and wants to keep secret, but you decided that it should not be secret. why did you -- talk about that little bit. why do you think it is important to know about this group? >> i think it is important for a couple of reasons. the main one is in the wake of september 11 joint special operations command has become i would argue the main effort in the united states war on terror. so, while he was conceived organizations that had very narrowly defined missions that counterterrorism, hostage rescue missions, and expanded asthose certainly through the 80s and 90s but was always viewed as, youyou know, an organization that would be if not on the sidelines on the fringes of a major war. the country has been have worn out for more than 14 years. joint special operations command has been the main effort in that work. i think the public is owed far more information about an organization that they have paid for, expanded and fighting with their money, sons, daughters and their name and some small, secret organization that is chasing loose nukes around the forms the beginning. >> and is fighting it in a particular way, the man hunting that it has developed. they really did not have the capability. so. >> i actually think that while general mcchrystal who took over, to command a joint special operations command in late 2003, certainly revolutionized in scope and speed the js oc man hunting capabilities. there are those who would argue that the groundwork had already been laid in the pre- september 11 era. in december 1989 they not only spearheaded the invasion of panama, but then when panamanian dictator noriega went to ground in the media aftermath it was j sock forces that were hunting him around panama until he took refuge and eventually surrendered. following on from that it was forces that conducted or helped in the 1st case conduct the transfer of pablo escobar, the colombian drug lord which ended with his death, and mohammed farhat id the somali warlord , a hunt that did not go as successfully and functionally ended with the october 1993 battle of mogadishu became memorialized in the book and the movie black hawk down. >> host: i remember in bosnia they wanted them to do the war criminals command they did some. but i think it was the chairman of the joint chiefs that said at the time, we don't do manhunts. >> may have said that, but js oc did a lot of man hunting. in fact, the balkan -- they call it the pathway conference. sit for persons indicted for war crimes. they balkan war hunt was considered the crucible in which at least on the personal level much tighter bonds were built between the cia special activities division and the special mission unit from delta, seal team six. >> talk a bit about the difference between the seals and delta in the types of things that they do. and there decision on the battlefield. >> and that, that, i wouldi would argue that that division has slowly been eroded. delta was the 1st of those organizations to come into being, created in the late 1970s under the command of legendary special forces officer charlie beckwith and posted up and largely modeled on the british special air services, the sas. the counterterrorist unit. and itand it was the force that was at the center of eagle claw, the attempt to rescue the hostages into rent. shortly thereafter, 1980 --dash 81 timeframe, seal team six was created under the command of an officer. and it -- the initial concept i think in the eyes of those who created it was sort of missions that delta would typically conduct, except in the maritime environment. for instance, may be the 1st choice to rescue the passengers, some airport in the third world would be delta force. if cruise liner got hijacked the 1st choice would be seal teams. although marcinko famously said something like, if my teams got water in it that the maritime environment. in the post- september 11 era in particular, those distinctions have started to blur,black, particularly when it comes to seal team six, but they have operated basically almost since october 2,001 in afghanistan which is a landlocked country. essentially in the middle of the last decade he divided the various theaters which is forces were operating at and put a different unit in charge, in particular, seal team 61st got afghanistan while delta was focused on a rack and the larger part of the middle east. a little later mcchrystal put seal team six in somalia and yemen and put the rangers in charge in afghanistan. now, there were units from all of those organizations and the other theaters, so it was not exclusive one to the other. that is largely how it went. >> you talk in the middle of the book about a chapter called js oc on steroids command it talks about using the mohawks were iraqis, and in one passage you wrote that in essence, getting close to a person of interest was possible but would send to thought-- it was too risky for non- iraqi iraqis, so for such missions they sometimes used delta camera cars which were local vehicles in which units had hidden cameras in such a way that an auto manufacturer might have discussed battle cameras. they were using cameras to do what? >> if you -- i mean, i'm just giving a hypothetical here. if delta force had information that a particular building was being used as a safe house by insurgents and they wanted the case that joint prior to an assault did not want to take the risk of putting american and despise they can put an iraqi, a beat up car bought off the street, drive it passed a stream of traffic with everyone else not raise any eyebrows at all and to come back and have a film of the exact objective that they want to solve that night. >> what is the track record working with iraqis. they were rather controversial. >> the track record working with the mohawks call my understanding was positive. several of them got captured and killed. j sock also has worked very closely with the iraqi kurds , and there intelligence organizations to develop targets, both in iraq and in a ran to the best of my knowledge. i mean,, i think that that is considered as a fairly successful set of relationships. >> relationships. >> you talk about a ran in your book and mentioned that at some point they begin what you call a new campaign against an old enemy and say the us invasion and subsequent occupation gave js oc new opportunities to penetrate and that they were keen to get their own people in. at this time when you don't have relationships, how are relationships, how are they getting their own people in, and what were they doing it? >> obviously there are two ways to do that. >> not so obvious. [laughter] >> well, one is to pay non-americans to do it, spies basically. you know, pay an iraqi who might have a legitimate reason to go into a ran, countries that where there is a lot of trade and so forth going on. and do it that way. the other is to send americans, send their own people undercover. it took them a while to figure out how to do that. and it could be that they overestimated how difficult it was going to be. at one point they were amazed to find out. at a border crossing, you could get your visa stamped and just drive in. they planned it for about a year. the mission sort of changed. at 1st they wanted to track some of the al qaeda folks who had been sent -- had taken refuge in iran and the ukrainian sort of had under various forms arrest. trying to see if it is possible to monitor some of the iranian nuclear activities by taking soil samples of that kind of thing and sending them in. they sent in as with the military would call a proof of concept, they sent in a couple of folks. they drove around, came back out, had a very plausible cover reason for being in a ran, and so that gave him the proof. now, obviously the fact that the united states also was, to what extent and per purses they were occupying afghanistan at the same time which has a border with iran as well give them to routes to do this. so -- >> and what did they learn out of their forays into a ran? >> i could not tell you in great detail. certainly, you know, they learned how to get around there. but, you know, people were -- i am not sure how much of the focus that has been because they obviously had other hotter places that they had to invest time and money, syria being a classic example. but they certainly figured out ways to penetrate a ran with there own people and especially with their allies. i think the kurds as well,well, i suspect. >> the whole book is filled with anecdotes about technology that they are developing along the way. obviously one of the most important and probably one of your students in the book is the xbox. can you talk about that? >> yes. so, the xbox is essentially a reverse engineered improvised explosive device ied, basically a booby trap, a bomb that was developed by delta force and seal team six personnel who were basically taking apart ied's that had been found on the battlefield planted by insurgents to see how they were manufactured. and at a certain point in time the light went on in a few brains there that, hey, we now know enough about these that we can build one ourselves. and we could build one out of locally procured are obtained materials so that there would be no way for anyone who found it to trace it back to the united states. and delta force used the xbox is against targets that were very politically sensitive than the strike in iraq. politically sensitive with the iraqi government, the iraqi premier was only too happy to have js oc conduct a withering campaign against sunni insurgents and al qaeda in iraq, but was far less enthusiastic about missions that targeted shiite militants, even though those militants supported by a ran for killing a lot of americans, too. so this was the work around in at least a few cases, to kill those guys without people knowing that it was the americans that did it, and it is important to say that these were not ied's that kill lots of other people. the restrictions placed upon the use of the meant that usually and delta force operator would have to have eyes on a target. it had to be detonated in time that killed the targeted individual but not a whole bunch of civilians. >> and you say in the book that the political restrictions,restrictions, those imposed by malik he actually hobbled the task forces operation which is one of the reasons that they decided to take this on, as you said, to work around it comeau they also work around the fbi. this was something designed so that if the fbi investigated they could not figure out who did it, which sounds borderline legal. >> this is my understanding of that, and i have gone back because a couple of newspapers and publications have picked up on that, and i wanted to see exactly how i worded it. i think the way that ii wrote it is correct, but maybe i was not clear enough. it has been misinterpreted. my understanding, my interpretation of what i was told is that that was a hypothetical bar that they wanted to reach. it was not that the fbi was investigating these things. the fbi had liaisons and personnel. very hard to keep it from them. that was the standard that the folks designing the xbox's wanted to reach. if this ever got handed to the fbi's center that does the forensics on these things they would not be able to tell that it came from americans. they would think it was a locally procured. i don't think it was were hiding this. that was just the technological bar that they set for themselves. >> nevertheless, as the us government has said many times, criticized the use and set up an entire gigantic task force they end up using the same technique come all the more carefully, as you say, where there debates about whether this was ethical or correct? >> i certainly know that there were debates about it because one source and seal team six told me that although they have been involved in the genesis of the xbox, they decided not to use it because, you know, as you implied, implied, the feeling of that just put them on the same levels. i suppose the counterargument, if you are using an explosive to kill a terrorist leader or militant leader and not anyone else, how is that any different morally or ethically from hitting them with an airstrike are putting a bullet percent. a form of warfare for as long as there have been explosives, i suspect. >> certainly if you want to keep the american fingerprint on the desks invisible, then you cannot strike the guy. that is very obviously an american matter. >> how many people do you think they actually did kill in the manhunt in targeted killing. at the height of the war, august 2006, they were launching more than 300 missions in a 24 hour period in iraq. i have never seen or even being told that one exists. a complete rollup of how many folks. still, it is important to note in a lot of ways there were no bullets fired at all. people would surrender or they would not be there in the 1st place. >> a 50% success rate. >> yes. >> yes. but that is a success rate of capturing or killing. you think the target is in that house, to send on the house. specially when you add in the amount of targets that were start from the air, if you want gunships. >> host: what do you think the mixes of close combat versus other things? >> guest: i think it changed. in a rack particularly around 2005 time frame there were a series of episodes in which js oc operators were killed by what became known as house borne ied's. entire houses rigged to explode with insurgents inside of them often knew they were going to die, but they wanted to lower js oc operators into the house in a raid and then blow the whole place up. once that had happened on a number of occasions js oc became more reluctant obviously to conduct those sorts of rates and resorted to just blowing up the house using aerial fires. the downside is you don't get anyone to interrogate. and it is much harder to find intact laptops and that sort of thing to exploit as well. >> host: and most of these happen at night time. at a certain point general mcchrystal puts a hold on night operations because of some mistakes that were made or something. .. you have, perhaps, even more extraordinary mission to rescue jessica buchanan, american hostage and the danish hostage in january 2012 from somali pirates that are gone, but this was on land. and i think that was one of the more extraordinary missions that i described in the book where seal team six conducted a high altitude, high opening freefall. >> can. >> can you explain what that is. >> you're flying in a high-altitude. opening at high-altitude sailing on the wind with gps devices they had to in midair switch from their primary job zone with a plan to land to a different up some which they were able to do perfectly, sneak up on the pirates camp where the two hostages were being held, shoot online pirates and rescue the hostages unharmed without taking any casualties themselves and getting them out of the country that became the gold standard of hostage rescue in js oc. they have been at work on and off in somalia for most of the post- september 11 period, yemen the same way. >> a couple of forays into pakistan. there is a rivalry developing between the cia and js oc over who will do what. >> guest: i believe so. i mean,, in the end jsoc conducted a series of cross-border missions and the p. they had others that they wanted to do, but they were not approved, missions they got called off of the last moment. they conducted a number of direct action missions to either kill or capture personnel and some airstrikes. i talk in the book about one airstrike by an f-15 jet that was aimed at what was suspected to be an al qaeda safe house.house. some dispute as to how important are not the people who were killed in that operation more. and then of course as everyone knows, the may, 2011, mission against osama bin laden compound in a bona fide that ended up with his death, interestingly one of the things is that seal team six had kept a unit had kept a unit in afghanistan for years prepared to do a freefall mission into the pakistani tribal areas to kill bin laden. .. . . . . they're making all these lethal tactical advances, strategic, mission is not going so well? do they get involved in discussions about this? >> guest: i'm sure military, and defense department level, jsoc has input into what course the united states should take, whether certainly has opportunity to give its views. its commander during the mcchrystal was raceraised from two-star commander to three-star commander, most powerful three-star in the united states. >> host: mcchrystal had questions about the missions he had done and how effective overall they were to the fight. >> guest: it is obvious question that needs to be asked. and, my, i think, my take is that jsoc is a brilliant tactical, maybe even operational tool in a policymaker's tool box. but, it is not substitute for strategy. it needs to be employed most bang for the buck for the united states. you know, as part of a coherent strategy that involves the less of the united states. i don't think that, it works necessarily to be given a difficult strategic problem and for policymakers to throw their hands up in the area, just throw jsoc has it. jsoc has the ability to holden my at arm's length for indefinite period of time. the challenges with al qaeda and islamic state and even what are sometimes called iranian threat network that the united states faces are a challenges that, jsoc may play very important role in solving, or bringing to resolution, so can't be only tool you -- >> host: you do talk about them coming to washington, you know, it is a task force but a task force in the national capitol region. >> guest: yes. >> host: it is a maturing point in the evolution, correct? and some people in washington didn't like it very much. so explain why they come here and how big after presence they have and what they do? >> guest: they want it to be much closer i think to the intelligence agencies and to the other arms of government you know, are stakeholders in these challenges. and, they felt that, you know, it was more advantageous to locate a center here, you know, same sorts of folks that they have staffed their other headquarters, task force headquarters with tracking, you know, they had the ability, supposedly to track individuals around the globe and, you know, this was, target folders, put them together but also to get one of the things that mcchrystal and then mcrave en, admiral bill mcraven who took command of jsoc after him were very keen on was leveraging other government agencies, authorities, budgets, capabilities, to go after targets that maybe jsoc had a hard time going after on its own. >> host: they have to do that politically, right? they can't take budgets or personnel. they have convince them? >> guest: yes. became very, very dependent on human relations. mcchrystal understood this very early in, 2004, once he realized that a couple of things hadn't gone way he expected them to because he didn't know enough about what had been going on in this head headquarters or that headquarters he invited a lot of organizations to put liaisons in his headquarters at one point he push ad lot of people out. they had about175 jsoc personnel functioning as liaisons in headquarters to represent jsoc and keep mcchrystal aprizeed what is going on in headquarters. >> host: they were the best of jsoc. they well-rounded. >> guest: these were highly regarded individuals. these are not people jsoc said, we don't really need this guy, make him a liaison. mcchrystal would only keep them four months at a sometime so they wouldn't get going on with jsoc and become divorced from realities of battlefield. >> host: reading one passage, someone explaining to you a brief they got inside of the national capitol region about a man-hunting mission. so he is saying, what he was told was, mohammed so-and-so, gets on a plane. you get all his travel documents immediately up there on the screen. now they give you manifest of every flight he took over the last six months. you get the complete manifest of all five flights and find out five other guys were on the same five flights. then you cross reference them and somehow you find out that, three of the five are from many same village in yemen. two or more were in prison together. it is multiple agencies, feeding in information, and, this person is telling you. i was fascinated that jsoc was able to be in the lead because 890% of what they were putting up there was -- 80% of whatter this putting up there was domestic stuff. that is so interesting because the military is supposed to be outwardly focused. how are they convincing and what authorities can the domestic agencies give the military organization that sort of information? >> guest: not being a lawyer, i'm hesitant to say how legal that is or not. my, my sense is, simply sharing the information is different than acting in the united states on that information. i think if they felt that hey, that, that guy is back in the united states, and we need to, sweep him up before he does damage. you give that to the fbi or similar, domestic law enforcement organization. i don't think it will be seal team six that seizes some guy at logan airport but, but if that guy goes back to morocco, let's say, and then you work possibly with, maybe you do sort of a special operations mission there, perhaps with or not perhaps with the local government knowledge, or more likely, with, if it is an allied country of any type or country that is friendly to the united states, you inform their security forces and their security forces they can -- >> host: during this period of time the united states also stands up the northern command, which is focus on the united states as well as canada. are you understanding jsoc had plans to operate under certain circumstances within the united states? >> guest: i think jsoc has always had part of its 0400 mission, which is sort of a counter proliferation mission focused on weapons of mass destruction, its always had certain responsibilities in the washington area what they call the national capital region, in particular. to, if there was literally sort of, ticking time bomb. some kind of a nuclear weapon. and they have, because of their expertise in that area, they have responsibilities. i'm unaware of any sort of other authorities that they have to conduct any direct action missions. >> host: or plans for targeted killings here? >> guest: they are highly trained law enforcement organizations that have responsibility to do that, as i understand it. >> host: you write near the end of the book about the black squadron and the growth of that. >> guest: yeah. >> host: leads you. talk about that. >> guest: black squadron is seal team six. they're a reconnaissance squadron that grew out of a, a smaller element, was largely, modeled on delta force's operational support troop, as it was called at the time. and then that as well got turned into a squadron. a squadron is bigger than a troop. and, it, is one of those organizations i was discussing earlier that puts people undercover and, you know, conducts low visibility missions in denied areas, or in country ies that that the united states is not at all. so they have been operating in somalia, in yemen, in other praises, and -- places and it has become as i understand it, the largest squadron. so it's a larger squadron now. and, even more prestigious, some people would say, to for instance, the command for instance, than the, the assault squadrons. red squadron, blue squadron, gold squadron and silver jawed drone. >> host: its mission is to collect intelligence, correct? >> guest: yes. >> host: how is that different from what the cia is doing? you described some of the black squadron participants are in for long term in a place. >> guest: yes. >> host: they're underdeep cover which not all cia operatives are. could you describe both of those things? >> guest: so i think, the way that the pentagon has, particularly in the post-9/11 era, sort of gotten around what some people might think would be the legal restrictions on military personnel spying, call that operational preparation of the battlefield. okay? >> host: which means what? >> guest: another praise you hear is traditional military activities. well, we may have to send the military in here to do something and we need to conduct sort of reconnaissance, if you like, in case we do that. and that's what these guys are doing. >> host: not against another military necessarily but against small numbers of people, terrorists? >> guest: exactly. or we may have to some day, conduct counterterrorism mission in this city or, so we're going to set up the networks required. we may be renting, facilities where we can store vehicles. you know, we may be doing all sorts of things. but, they somehow group these under the rubric of traditional military activities. sometimes it will be a, and that, in theory falls under 10 covers part of the military. title 50 covers espionage and intelligence activities. sometimes there will be title 50 missions but one of the things that the jsoc and the pentagon sort of learned or decided, if you like, in the post-9/11 era they had much greater room to manuever inside of the legal authorities than, maybe previous administrations had, had decided. so, you know they took a look at laws and this gets very complicated. i couldn't pretend to be expert on this, you know, inside of this authority we can actually do this we actually put people undercover. we don't need to ask the cia's permission to do this. maybe we just need to inform the cia that we're doing it. >> host: their overseers in congress, went along with it. they wouldn't be able to do it otherwise? >> guest: one has to assume that's the case, yes. >> host: would you expect the black squadron, to be able to be, i don't want to say be known to go into other places but to go into other places in an increasing number, in the future? >> guest: i think, well, yess. i mean i don't know about increasing number. they're doing it now. you know, that can be anything from, say, living in a safe house in northern somalia to putting a individual under a commercial cover so pretending to be a businessman or scientist or something, in yemen. >> host: what about the fight against isis? do you assume there are, jsoc components of that? >> guest: i know there are, yes. >> host: can you describe it? >> guest: there is jsoc task force operating out of iraqi-kurdistan. its mission is largely targeting islamic state leaders. it uses, i presume, all sources of intelligence to do that. so from running spies into the islamic state, interviewing people that come out of the islamic state territory. signals intelligence, imagery intelligence and then, it has its own fleet of drones as well with which not only to conduct that surveilance of targets, but also, killing them. when you hear senior islamic state leader has been killed in a drone strike there is strong possibility that that was a jsoc mission. >> host: what about syria? >> guest: i think that is certainly going into, that's happening in syria. they're in iraqi-kurdistan but running missions into syria. i talk in the book about through the height of the iraq war some i think some of the most dramatic missions that, that small jsoc elements to include single individuals ran was undercover missions into syria to keep tabs on the foreign fighter flow, that was going through syria. into iraq, beefing up the al qaeda in iraq organization. >> host: any indication that they're now operating in europe as well as those foreign fighters flow back and forth from parts europe. >> guest: i haven't been told that. i finished writing the book about a year ago so a lot of what's happening now in europe is beyond the scope of the book but i think that, it would be difficult to imagine that at least, in the embassies jsoc didn't have some people working with the intelligence folks there and with their counterparts in european security forces. >> host: do you, do you see jsoc slowing its growth or do you think this is the force that we will continue to use as much as we have to do discrete targeted operations? >> guest: i think, i don't see jsoc being cut down in size anytime soon, partly just because, in the u.s. government it is much easier to grow organizations than to make them smaller. but also, because, successive administrations now have come to rely on joint special operations command for things that are too difficult in their mind or too sensitive for other organizations to do. i think that you're going to see a change perhaps in, how jsoc waits its he -- weights its resources and its efforts. as i mentioned already the intelligence squadrons, or the reconnaissance squardrons are becoming more, more important in some ways than the assault squardrons, and bigger and more highly resourced. i think that, you're going to see more cyber warfare conducted by jsoc entities and perhaps in different geographic locations. clearly, if, if u.s. forces are, have now pulled out of, of iraq, not counting, sort of the 2 or 3,000 training iraqry military and the jsoc task force in iraqi-kurdistan, then you've got, and you've got a shrinking presence in afghanistan, although the, the question is still open whether that is going to completely disappear, you're not going to have the size of task forces that were in those countries at the height of the wars there and the height of the american presence there. but that will probably lead to a, jsoc getting a little rest, but you might see, just more diffuse presence around the world as well. >> host: so one final question, and, what did you learn other than, other than the stories of its effectiveness and its evolution? did you learn any political lessons from what you discovered? >> guest: i think the -- >> host: small p. >> guest: i think i didn't really approach the book looking for political lessons. there were certainly lessons to be learned organizationally in how jsoc, a, reorganized itself. largely under stan mcchrystal and then continued by bill mcraven, from an organization -- a large part of the book is really telling the story how it went from organization that was fairly small and designed for epsoddic operations and, and, then, you know became an organization, had to turn itself into an organization that was capable of year-long, multiyear long campaigns, 24/7 in multiple parts of the year simultaneously, so there is certainly organizational lessons there. how it, how it engaged with the u.s. government and, or another set of, sort of lessons learned. but i think going back to what i said earlier, from the policymakers point of view, the lesson is, you know, it's very important, for a country, like the united states, that has the interests of the united states to have an organization, like jsoc that can do what it can do. we should be very grateful we have that. however, it is probably a mistake to rely on that organization to do everything for you, absent more coherent strategy to solve your problems. >> host: thank you, sean naylor. congratulations again. >> guest: thank you. >> that was add words, book -- "after words," booktv program. watch past "after words" programs on line on booktv.org. ♪ [applause] >> good afternoon. i'm tom putnam, director of the john f. kennedy presidential library museum. on past of the heather campion and ceo of the foundation and i thank all my colleagues for coming. thanks for those watching on c-span, and you generous underwriters of kennedy writers forum, lead sponsor bank of america, lowell institute, boston foundation on our media sponsors, "the boston globe," xfinity and wbur. in reading kate clifford larson's new book, "rosemary, the hidden kennedy daughter." i was marked by sister margaret ann, one of caregivers later years, rosemary had magnetic personality. as others we too are drawn to the story, perhaps like greeks attending a theatrical tragedy. we know in advance the tragic ending to come. and watched the actions of two of our protagonists. first rose kennedy and her tireless efforts to educate and protect her eldest daughter. later joe, the patriarch in his unending search for a cure that would not come. then for the right placement where his beloved rosemary go and field production r productive. she was born in age, intellectually challenged and learning disabled children had few options. bleak educational opportunities and limited prospects to lead independent lives. joseph p. kennedy, if anything obsessively protective of his children. so fearful one of his sons might die should the u.s. go to war in europe, he did everything in his power, including disobeying the very president who appointed him ambassador to prevent the outbreak of world war ii. his greatest fears would come true of course, losing his first-born son, jo, jr. and his war widowed daughter, kathleen. rosemary might also be considered a victim of that war, one setting where she most flourished under the care of mother isabelle of the assumption sisters at belmont house outside of london which joe described in the letter to his wife, as providing quote, ideal life for rosemary. the school used the montes sorry method. since she was older than other students she was the kindly assistant. kate larson notes that rosemary's favorite story to read to younger children, winnie the pooh, one of the few books she could read with confidence. as storm clouds of world war grew, rosemary pleaded her father not to move her from belmont house. thinking he was protecting her safety he chose to send her back to rejoin the rest of their family in the united states. much as a few years hence he would make a similarly fateful medical decision. if we know the contours of this saga, kate larson unveils them to us in a refreshing manner, trained as a historian, in the author of three books, including a biography of harriet tubman she is the first biographer to have access to many of rosemary's letters as well as newly-released family materials here at the kennedy library. "the new york times" describes this volume as quote, a valuable account of a mental health tragedy and influential family's belated efforts to make amends. the book is on sale in our bookstore. there will be a book signing following the forum. our moderator this afternoon, eileen pick that mayor remarks is professor of journalism at brandeis university a former "boston globe" columnist, she won 1997 pulitzer prize for commentary only 18 months after she began writing her twice weekly column. she became a columnist after 20 years as reporter covering everything from the night police beat to the united states congress. as a sign of the times in which she lived and challenges she overcame, it should be noted that she began her career at the globe as a newsroom secretary. she is currently working on a biography of eunice kennedy shriver. speaking of mrs. shriver, last time she spoke heroes mary was very much on her mind. i thought it might be appropriate to share a brief excerpt of her remarks as part of this introduction.

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