The war on terror and the soul of the obama presidency, because he finds in the Counter Terrorist reggie lot of revelations about obamas nature and style. Would you like to say a few things . As steve has said these men seem diametrically opposed at least in style and looks. They both confronted a great humbler for president s and that is reality. What you can do and what you cant do. Although it is still the most powerful job in the world there are enormous limits which every president discovers sometimes to their grief and sometimes their wisdom. Sometimes a combination of those two things. We have a lot to talk about. 50 years apart, cold war versus war on terror and yet lots of connecting dots. Let me stop there and turn it over to dan. I started thinking about this little bit when i was reading ikes bluff and i recently finished my book and was thinking a lot about obama and obama fighting wars and trying to get out of fighting wars and as i was reading evans book it came as upgrade surprise to me and it would be these moments where i would think it sounds a lot like obama. The larger frame that these were president s who had become president after the country had been at war for a very long time. Both of whom wanted to end this kind of overextension of global war and bring us back home and start to concentrate on the economy and problems back home and they both believe that one key to a Strong National security is to have a strong economy. They were trying to cut the budget back and do those kinds of things. But then they both also faced a very dangerous worlds. Obama still had to deal with al qaeda which remained a potent threat around world and obviously we were in the height of the cold war and there was a very real possibility of nuclear war. The question was how do you deal with those threats while at the same time do things that could actually spark them, sparkle those wars . And at a certain point in the books, earlier in the book i was reading about how eisenhower studied and what most people know about the bunker auschwitz is the line that war is just an extension of politics but if you read deeper as eisenhower did there was in some ways a more profound point which is little wars have a way of becoming big wars and that was kind of a light bulb moment for me because during the campaign and the transition and early months of the obama presidency, obama was talking a lot about colin powell who was a cheap military adviser. I am not sure he talked about l klawchwtiz the decidua obama over and over again that kinetic activity as he put it has a way of spinning out of control. Very hard to control it. You have to be very careful. You can in paramilitary machine that is very much on the march and you have to watch that carefully and that was a kind of animating idea for obama throughout his presidency and for that, that is where it started. I will toss it back to steven. You both recognize this danger and eisenhower warned us against the development of the National Security state or militaryIndustrial Complex that we ended up with one. At end of his term the National Security state was well established. As for obama i would say he has tried to be careful about the growth of the National Security agency but there is growth and homeland security, swelled immensely during his time so both of these reluctant cautious president s came to a vastly increase National Security apparatus. Eisenhower is fascinating because although he was a creature of the military, spent his life in the military serving as officer. He was very wary of the military. He fought wars, everything that could go wrong, you think of him as a great conquering hero he spent a lot of time disciplineing awol soldiers. At one point in world war ii he wanted to line up all the american soldiers who were rapists and shoot them with machine guns. That is how exasperated he was and this is the guy running the most disciplined army in the history of armies. Chinese historically are about rape and pillage. The American Army was very disciplined but still had a lot of bad actors, young men fracking away from home, do stupid things and things can go wrong in battle. America won world war ii and did it gloriously but a lot of things went wrong along the way and eisenhower as a commanding general had to live with all that day today seeing get firsthand. Whatever he told the newspapers he had to experience it. He has a high and necessary and useful skepticism about force. And how it can get out of control. Teen says i know those boys over at the pentagon. Aside from the divorce part you could see how in peacetime military tried to build themselves up by exaggerating the threat and he would say once or twice i know those boys at the pentagon. I know how they operate and as president , eisenhower, height of the cold war reduced military spending by 20 . We think of building up, the National Security state was building up and the lot of bad things happened on his watch. Eisenhower made mistakes, he really did, and he would admit it but it wasnt for lack of effort and struggled to control it and he cut the hell out of his own service, the army. A creature of the army, from west point, army guy, army green. After he left the presidency he wanted to be called not president eisenhower but general eisenhower. And yet as president he cut the u. S. Army by 1third because he didnt think he was going to use it. Didnt want to get into conventional wars. Couldnt what the nuclear war. You wanted to build up rocket forces, Missile Forces and the air force suspended lot of money on that because that is where the technology was, spent a lot on intelligence. But he cut his own service heavily, infuriated his comrades in arms, his great airborne commanders of world war ii were so mad they could. One quick india denounced him. It took some guts to do that. Luckily obama doesnt face any problem with treatment of women in the military. You know that maybe. What about it . Hasnt the president of racine absent the immense increase in spending on National Security and has he done anything like attempting to cut by 20 . He is trying to cut the budget and hasnt been able to do anything like that. I think it is true when eisenhower was president the budget represented Something Like 70 of total spending. Today it is 20 so there is less to cut in a way, but he hasnt been able to do that. Obama could not say i know those boys down at the pentagon because he didnt and he never served, he was a community organizer, not a military man. And so that made the relationship more complicated and he was less secure but when he started, he did find opportunities to signal to the brass that he wasnt going to be pushed around and with some success but not always successful, the afghan surge, some people argue he was pushed around by the military and was outfoxed by it them. But early on, i think it was in march of 2009 there is a kind of constructive moment that goes back to this theme about not wanting to get sucked into wars and you can see him trying to control, keep things under control. He has the meeting in the white house in the situation room with all the top generals. Mike allen is chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. They want to present to him a kinetic opportunity as allen puts it. There is a terrorist in somalia whose a want to go after and they think they know where he is. There is the series of Training Camps and a Graduation Ceremony going on for these terrorists. They dont know exactly where he is in this camp but feed you we will just take out the whole series of camps and get him so obama is kind of thinking about this and he has got his civilian advisers there too, secretary of state, secretary of defense, National Security adviser, he decides he is going to pull the room and he says one by one, what do you think about this . What he is doing is kind of a subtle challenge to the joint chiefss power, basically in biting dissent. None of them are actually willing to say what they really think, but then, against ball, there is the vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and he puts his hand up and says i think you need to think carefully before you do Something Like this. This would basically be carpet bombing a country to try to get one terrorist and you dont know where this is going to lead. And obama says that is exactly where i am. That ends the conversation. The operation never happens but it was from that moment on that obama decided, this is really an extraordinary thing if you think about it. That he was going to make the final decision on individual drone strikes. Think about that. A president who is in the chain obviously but making those kinds of tactical decisions in every single case, it would work its way up the system. There was a vetting process, an interagency process and the eventual the john brennan and hoss car right, Vice President of the joint chiefs, pull the president out of a blacktie dinner and present him with this opportunity and he would make the decision and so that was the extent to which he was worried about how these operations could spin out of control, that he would actually take the Political Risk to make those decisions himself. I dont know if eisenhower got involved. As far as i know there was no one actually lost in battle the entire time he was president. There was not a lot of fighting going on. After he got us out of korea which took six months, never lost another soldier in combat for the rest of his presidency. Claim no modern president can make. He was determined not to get soldiers killed in combat because he feared it was getting out of control. How many times has obama had to make a decision, a legal decision like this . Dozens, maybe hundreds. A lot of times. What do you think about that . There were two different Drone Programs. The cia has a program and the military has a program. During the first term which i was writing about the cia was mostly operating in pakistan which they considered an extension of the afghan battlefield. Obama decided to make these decisions outside of conventional theaters of war where the war the law was less clear, we were not in a traditional state of war with another country. That is where he thought was risky and we needed to be more cautious so in somalia and yemen and to some extent in pakistan but mostly somalia and yemen he was making these decisions, making these decisions himself. Most of the time, he would green light the operation but not always. He would roll them back and have a lot of questions about who are we actually going after . You have to remember in places like yemen and somalia some of these organizations are al qaeda affiliates, terrorist organizations but also local insurgencys involved in civil wars and what he was fearful of was getting sucked into those kinds of local civil wars and not saying as he would put it i q focus. We are going after a member of al qaeda who is as the military put externally focused against the west, against the United States. One last point, we can segway to this part of the discussion because it is important, because obama did not want to get into any more land war is the same way eisenhower didnt, he recognized early on, actually i think before he became president that programs like the Drone Program would be very valuable to him but more broadly, the shadow worse, the covert operations that the cia and their capabilities would be very much in line with his basic approach to keeping us out of big wars but keeping us focused on the threats that still existed and i think he was always right about that, i think he did not recognize all of the potential pitfalls of relying so heavily on spies. I can see that it is an extraordinary level of constraint a president is exercising when he wants the individual colophon individual strike brought to him, signed off, i know that eisenhower showed great constraint too. He watched the bag for assistance, we are not going to do that in vietnam. Yes, he did kept us out of vietnam, that was pretty big but slightly different philosophy about covert action. Country after country, guatemala, iran, syria, overthrowing states, not killing individuals, and if he had a few more months, it could have been on his watch, it was definitely under way. The go to dannys point, think of this in giants terms. If you want to be a great world power and protect your own homeland and have American Power abroad you have a limited number of tools and i cans view is he doesnt want to fight a nuclear war. Doesnt want to fight a conventional war, diplomacy is important we did a lot of diplomacy but there has to be a. The end of the sphere and appointee end for ike was the cia. Unlike obama who is having technical control over these strikes eisenhower had a more handsoff approach to the cia. At the time this is known as plausible deniability. The idea was the political leaders need to be able to plausibly deny the nasty dark stuff that the spies are doing because you dont want the american head of state to be held irresponsible for dirty tricks and assassinations and blackmail and all that stuff Intelligence Forces did and do. In the 1950s the feeling was the russians are the main enemy, they played dirty. The communists were really good at spying. They learned a lot about just keeping control of their own state, how to spy on others and trick them and assassinate them and we had to fight fire with fire because they did it, we have to do it. Amoral equivalence. This is all written down. This part was written down. They played dirty, we have to play dirty too but once they cross that threshold we have to play dirty too. Then they entered this realm of plausible deniability where eisenhower gave a lot of freedom to the cia to do whatever they wanted without a whole lot of control. There is no congressional oversight, not a lot of president ial oversight. The cia on his watch, this is where it gets less pretty, started to get a little hop of control. A Longworth House Office building this is overthrowing the government of iran and guatemala which in retrospect were not great but at the time seemed like successes, cheap ways of containing global communism, leftleaning heads of iran and guatemalans and were celebrated at the time but after that the cia operations started going badly. Hard to do this stuff when you are operating secretly abroad and theres a lot of blow back operations that start and then dont work and low back on you. By the late 50s eisenhower is under pressure from some of his pals who were in formal watchdogs to get rid of allen dulles, the head of the cia and eisenhowers response is it takes a strange kind of genius to run an Intelligence Service and dulles is a strange kind of genius and i will keep him in there. He came to regret that decision because it was a mistake. I guess, let i dont mean to go on here. It is really hard to run a modern Intelligence Service particularly for democracy that believes in transparency and openness and rule of law to run a service that is essentially out law. How do you do that . The proposition is you are morally superior, the difference between us and them we dont use soviet methods except in condo where we the soviets know what to do and university founded for students from overseas was at the university. Eisenhower allowed himself to be manipulated by the cia . Thinking about your eisenhower prided himself on being a pretty solid guy but he lost control of the cia and lost it to Richard Bissell. We like to complain about bureaucrats, risk averse and all that. Richard bissell was the most confident bureaucrat there ever was. Was a brilliant yale guy, yale professor who taught a course of black market economics, all allied shipping and world war ii. It took a human being to do this and there was a lot he would get promoted behindthescenes. Nobody knew who Richard Bissell was except for the smart guys inside and he writes the Marshall Plan in europe. That was as much him as everybody else. The cia, the agency for the smart boys, 1950, and want to do good. In 1950 it was liberal, for liberal democrats who were internationalists and promoting and protecting democracy. It was a democratic organization. Nobody knew who he was. And some before you know it he created the spy plane, one of the great triumphs in intelligence because we had a plane that could fly over the soviet union and count their missiles, important for stability if you are guessing that when your enemies have destabilized if your enemies have more than they do. This biplane allowed to soviets dont have so many icbms so abyssal is our hero. The ancient greeks were about all this and so was shakespeare. He is filled with cougars that he can do anything. He is warned that soviets, the soviet union has antiaircraft missiles that can fly high enough to shoot down the you 2. He does not tell the president of the United States. Egos that is just some study. He wants to keep this they are known as the Richard Bissell air force. He worked out a deal that doesnt need president ial authority. Unbelievably extralegal. Because hes a brilliant, egotistical, still fulfilled guy and doesnt tell the president , getting shot down on the eve of a summit meeting where eisenhower spent his whole presidency trying to work towards getting along with the soviet union, arms control, Nuclear Test Ban treaty, defused the cold war which was a dangerous thing and about have this summit meeting, the end of the summit meeting. Eisenhower said you should have fired allen dulles, get rid of him. The most confident guy in the oval office says i want to resign. He is so upset, tells the secretary. You had a scene in the book which made me think of a scene in my book. He goes out to eisenhowers farm in gettysburg and if i remember this right he wants to show how effective this you 2 is. They fly at 70,000 feet over the farm so that eisenhower can see his cows feeding at a trough. T