news anchor on his more than 50 years of reporting on world events. that s this christmas day on the c-span networks. for the complete schedule, go to c-span.org. each week american history tv s american artifacts takes you to museums and historic places. i m don richard, the senate historian, and we re in the senate caucus room which is in the russell senate office building. before c-span started covering the senate in late 1986, this was the most famous room in the capitol, and in the capitol complex, because this is where the major hearings had been televised going back to the well, newsreels covered it back in the 1920s and 30s, but television came along in the 1940s. in 1941 a senator from missouri named harry truman says that we re getting ready to go to war. we re spending millions of dollars on defense. we need to look into the way the defense contracts are being allocated. we need to make sure that money is being spent wisely and we re not being gypp eped by u
they were a love story if one ever was and absolutely devoted to each other. elizabeth monroe had a very well-developed sense of style and image, and her jewelry is a reflection of that. this is a woman who knew how to carry herself with great elegance. she always warranted your respect. it was one of the most splendid white houses that ever existed. it was called the era of good feeling. this is a woman who spoke french, and my goodness, what she could talk about. elizabeth was a very great beauty, described in one letter as a rose petal beauty, but mrs. monroe received very seldom anything at the white house. she was a recluse, absolutely hated it. hospitality, decorum, dignity, civility those are the civility, those are the words that come to mind. elizabeth monroe served as first lady for her husband james monroe from 1817 to 1825, during a time known as the era of good feelings. coming up, we ll explore her life and what were not always happy times in
and it really is. american history tv is featuring c-span s original series at 8:00 eastern on sunday nights throughout the rest of the year. c-span produced the series in cooperation with the white house historical association through conversations with experts and questions from c-span s audience, we tell the stories of america s 45 first ladies. now we look at two administrations led by widowed presidents and the women who serve as first ladies. we begin with rachel jackson and emily donelson. this is about 90 minutes. rachel was not a fan of anything that took andrew jackson away from the hermitage. her preferences apparently didn t strongly influence him but rachel was always the thing that he would come back to. she ran the plantation or the farm and kept everything in order. everybody loved her who worked there or was enslaved there. she might not have been like abigail adams but she could write a nice letter and she had nice jewelry. she was not as frumpy as s
maybe tried, maybe failed, maybe aborted? i do not, sir. there is the general threat that we make every effort to safeguard against. i m not sure if my colleagues are aware of any attempts to produce a dirty bomb using our sources. if you want to follow-up with a classified briefing on the topic, we could go into that in more detail. okay. good enough. and i m going to ask a follow-on question. if this is not appropriate to answer in this space, just say so, but people can go on the internet and learn all kinds of things, including how to build weapons and nuclear weapons, pressure cooker bombs, and i presume dirty bombs. given the access to that kind of information, why do you suppose no one s done it, at least to our knowledge, and certainly not been successful in doing it? maybe it s because of the security measures that we re talking about, in this country pretty good, getting better. maybe it s because that s true in other countries. maybe the it s not as easy
with their archrivals, if not enemies, the iranians. that also holds true, to a large extent, in iraq, even though it has a shia majority. they re not persians. they re arabs. iraq fought a bitter, brutal eight-year war with iran from 1980 to 1988. hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides. most of those casualties on the iraqi side or iraqi-shia arabs. so again, it is a great phrase. our enemy s enemy may still be our enemy. we have to be very, very careful here. thank you, sir, for that question. i d only add to the previous two comments that in syria, iran continues to support the regime of bashar al assad and bashar al assad needs to go and allow a transition for our in-state end goals and security. so this is a problem. thank you. i yield back. thank you all for being here. thank you, mr. chairman. you stated isil was both formidable yet vulnerable. can you list the top three things that make them that? absolutely. they are very well funded. they have got s