questions about what is in the book and what they have learned that about halfway through open for questions you may have and we can take it from there but starting off talking about tell us about the broad strokes that you found in the book the main points. >> first-ever like to say to cover the subject matter that is never done totally and that is very true in this book. what we set out to do was to get a sense of how foreign policy was made and why over the last 40 years and not in a dry academic way but in a way that says you did what and why did they do with? we found there were two very large camps of people and in one camp was richard nixon

who was a pragmatist to end all pragmatist when he came into office he would return to the foreign policy of the previous quarter century that went against the former principals to get something done or what he thought needed to be done. throw this point* there's a whole series of people who are pragmatic with their outlook but on the other hand, there are a series of people who were much more in the logical who fell to foreign policy should proceed the by use based in they found a lot of what nixon was doing initially with his attempt to talk with the soviet union or attempt to open red china and the third street and

that he decided upon before coming to office to very quickly bring the vietnam war to a close. he was not able to do that as quickly as he wanted but he succeeded very admirably on the other friends. by doing so he galvanized hold generations of people who were fundamentally anti-a communist. these are people on the right, both with the democratic party and the republican party and any other party who had met the previous 25 years, working their lives out against communism and the idea you could suddenly throw that over and open up discussions and perhaps make concessions to communist countries, this was an amazing thing to them. they coalesced and did more than impact foreign policy.

as we will contend in this book, there is a strong element of helping to undermine the nixon presidency in a way to help to bring it down. the mythology is the nixon presidency ended because of a conspiracy on the left. we think this has to be amended and we show you exactly why in this book. there are many other strand setter in here but one of the most important are the people that opposed nixon because of his foreign policy, not because of who he was but his policy. this war that we call it, i continued on through the ford and carter to administration were the foreign policy was basically nixonian foreign policy and a continuation both with carter the democratic president and by ford who

was the immediate successor. calculus did not change until the early reagan years were those people who were now known as neocons came into power boeing have to say they did not come in the first reich but the second and third right of power that was held by more moderate people we're not used to thinking of reagan as a moderate but with foreign policy terms he was. so much so by the second term the neocons were very angry at him. were you doing going out their meeting with gorbachev and setting new agenda is and trying to get rid of nuclear weapons? this is not what we thought we hired you to do but then the pendulum swung back under george h. w. bush that was extremely pragmatic with

a tremendous sense of what needed to be done in the world to put together a coalition the likes of which we had never seen before in the history of the world to take on a specific enemy at a specific time and place and the neocons were all for that except he did not go all the way to baghdad and george hw bush felt he could not principally because it would have fallen apart so the new kinds went back into the habitual posture which was the greatest -- greatest criticize hours of foreign policy the world has ever seen. we do a terrific job of selling you the alternative throughout the bill clinton years. steadfast all through that time if you want to find an alternative way to look at the world and what ought to be done the neocons were there to provide it and only

during george w. bush for the even able to come to the floor to utilize their power through guys who were not necessarily neocons bush and cheney and rumsfeld who were not in the neocon camp of academics and newspaper editorial writers. this is the art that retrace and the book and great detail and tell you a lot about very interesting people and i think i better stop now and len can fill you in the most interesting character. >> there is one person in the book from many of the characters are familiar to most readers there is one person's name who has been obscured for years it and it you discovered during your research. >> when i finished writing this but i came away with a

nagging question and i did not have an answer and i could not explain in there was another question that me day little bit but how did the republican party go from detente to the evil empire and less than a decade? that is what got me to write the book because that is what 40 years or does it explains how you can go less than a decade and that decade is fascinating because while we were for containment 25 years from 1945 through 1970 once knicks then started down the detente path and enemies coalesced, it took many forms inside the administration outside the administration, after he left the ford reagan primary was part of that war.

sometimes having to back away and reagan pushing hard on the hawkish side and carter comes in and they began again to attack but what is important to know that there is a political revolution going on the democrats had moved left with george mcgovern forcing the scoop jackson democrats who would become the video, and in 1980, they began to try to take the party back when that failed 276 through 80, they moved and coalesced with the republican conservatives. it was the reagan revolution and impact of the next 30 years of american foreign policy in one form or another. that was the key question then there was one of there. because i was intrigued by the way nixon maneuvered out of the warehouse, i kept

wondering who recommended haig? how did he get to the white house? in searching around in 2006 after bush was reelected i called roger morris who had worked for the national security council and he threw out a name i had never heard before it maybe a fellow named cramer. he went on to explain he was a fellow with the pentagon who was henry kissinger's mentor. and his name was fritz kramer so we have modern technology. google it. why not? rumsfeld cheney will flits, something on the world security network and they are praising this guy like he is a geopolitical jesus christ you would think this guy was everything and

i am saying fritz kramer? i thought he coached michigan football i did not understand there was another fritz kramer out there. he is unique and different preferred not because of his theory of provocative weakness that is showing weakness in and therefore drawing attacks. that is a general theory you never show weakness. you always negotiate at the barrel of a god. so you begin to understand a little bit about the fellow but what makes him unique is not the theory but who he mentored. he has mentored kissinger, when kissinger was going to become an accountant and to harvard, he was like a father to kissinger. when kissinger became the head of the nsc he recommended his other people, general haig when he was colonel hague in those days.

he became henry kissinger's deputy. haig was a true believer in provocative weakness and we will see that cannot live on the same theme as detente. it is impossible so at the very beginning with nixon and kissinger and of the mysterious man who was not at the table but he is at the table and sending memos to the president. about the needed to win the vietnam war. this relationship is really important to understand how everything goes down in the next decade. kramer, strangely enough, this is a broad view, a kissinger never served again and government after 1976 when the ford administration lost to

carter but kramer continued to be a force until the died in 2003. that is what was a remarkable to see the names like chaney, wolfowitz, rumsfeld, saying he is the keeper of the flame and to use the words provocative weakness when he was defense secretary. we even see it today with the back-and-forth between president obama and former vice president cheney. what cheney is really saying is when you don't use like words like war on terror or use of words you are therefore projecting weakness and in 518v attacks. it is no-space and 40 years and during through that journey and a cast of many who started in 69 are 70 and reached the limit in 2009. that is a key element to understand this and kramer's

role is unique. he opens a door to the nixon administration we have never seen before and it allows us to see things we have never seen before and how things were done to undermine the policies and in the end if you think about it and general haig is the ultimate cramer i eighth, if you buy that, then he should protect the president but he doesn't he does everything he can to make sure dickson does not survive. we have looked at lighthouse tapes after the smoking gun tape and we saw a time and time again haig gave a price that was detrimental. nobody else has reported on this it is clear nixon is

guilty you will read that richard nixon was directing the cover-up march 19732 projected gordon strong who he had just learned was involved in the break-in. he was an aide to bob and therefore he believed that would lead to aldermen so therefore he was trying to concoct a phony report saying we will put a public to cover up the involvement. we have broad strokes i think it'll be interesting if you see the journey. >> host: what of the things you mentioned this nixon was maneuvered out of office but he did a lot of things to set up his own downfall can you describe what goes at that? to my personal they nixon reminds me of woodrow wilson who i also wrote about who

simply could not fire his friends even when he knew he ought to. that is one aspect of it. but the problem with nixon when he came to office the foreign policy goals were interesting and good but because of his own history he felt he had to achieve these by a secrecy there is a wonderful transcription of a briefing bendix and gave to the right house staff shortly after the we go to china announcement it is reproduced in the book in part two which he basically says this could not have been achieved without secrecy had we had a free and open discussion, the right wing would have come down upon me and we never would have been able to get to the point* of going to china and you can believe

that your disbelieve that but he certainly believed it. he also believed that in terms of what he wanted to do with the soviet union and how to deal with it the at no more. one of the things we point* out in this book is not quite a revelation because some has come out before, but within four or six weeks of knicks since taking office he and kissinger and others in the administration had conveyed to the ambassador and others from the soviet union that united states wanted out of vietnam and would not mind if they've lost on the battlefield and would not mind if a vietnam went communist. this is a point* where we have 550,000 troops in the country and be a no. i can assure you none of those 530,000 that the commander in chief said it

is okay if we lose the war the reason why it nixon thought it would be 0k which she thought he had already lost was two achieve more detente with the soviet union and felt that was the overriding goal the superpowers must find a way to exist as peacefully court with other configuration but this was on par with the belief in that expressed in articles and foreign affairs in 1967 with speeches to the republican conventions and the movers and shakers clubs and just prior to that, it is not possible to isolate 1 billion chinese and have a say in a world in the future. it is very difficult for us to say he was wrong about that. i think he was quite

effectively correct but the problem was he also felt that the same time you could not have an open at three and discussion of these issues and expect to come out the other end with the goals he had in mind. i think in that way nixon and got his own way quite a bit. >> tom mentioned the disclosures the meetings with the soviet ambassador which you found by going through some records forever they were at the university that was written about 15 years ago and one of the things that i found projector the interesting about the book is how well sourced it is. a lot of things people have not heard about that may sound fiat -- far out that you can see the depth of the

sourcing and describe some of that you mentioned the watergate tapes water some of the other things? >> a vast array of books or material like that there are 600 footnotes in this book. we try to have nothing we could not point to there are websites and all kinds of different things in the footnotes you can hear the type -- tapes. there is one site written by a doctor a new diversity of texas for you can hear a lot of what we reported here. we tried very hard sometimes there is no way. sometimes only one person knows something. agreed to spend a great deal of time pointing to sources you can check. i would like to pick up on

the vietnam issue. what bothered the kramerite most was vietnam because they believe we were giving up arms control power, projected power, and the opening to china but vietnam was the real burr. weaver not going to win the war. nixon eventually east -- send kissinger to deliver the message. that was the toughest parts of the book to write. in order to accomplish the goals, he was in the fact leading us out of vietnam. he could not get the end he wanted and as a result he turned into the of the non is a nation which is the slow withdrawal.

>> was trying 10,000 troops by not definition it was a rapid of withdrawal but there is the element. >> to understand how the opposition galvanized and valhi creamer would be so vocal that the pentagon because he says you have to win the war you can talk about looking week. there is a conversation that we report between president nixon and cramer and you can hear cramer makes the case for you cannot come out of vietnam looking week after nixon has decreed that we would. when he goes to the pentagon and gives advice and spreads his beliefs, it is never again we will never do be a number again it is said genesis that if you go windigo win and win it with

everything you have got. that was a sell and in many quarters after vietnam that rang well with many people so the cramer provocative weakness which i describe when it comes to fruition in the reagan administration the phrase is slightly changed from the campaign they say peace constrain that was the reagan mantra sen that kramer doctrine. needless to say i didn't know that was the cramer doctrine but now things to all of the material and interviews we did and papers we dug up, it is clear this man was a force and what galvanized that force is what i described in the book

power of the military and the argument for the military to affect the decisions of a president. if you look through the last 7500 years of american history, you see the american presidents are not successfully lobbied from the left. it just doesn't happen. a little here and there but there resell them in foreign affairs. but they are regularly lobbied from the right it is very difficult for the iraqi president who was not military to say to the

military you can have more soldiers or equipment. we should make a graceful withdrawal. it is very difficult to say because of the military and the whole military industrial complex, the power to affect public opinion. it is very, very difficult. also you cannot say no, you are wrong because very often they are not. the point* is, it is hard to do and that is the fact -- affecting our capacity for decision-making in regards to afghanistan. we have only come out of iraq in the sense not a single america kin casualty of the most recent month because we have withdrawn troops and because we have gotten behind barriers and because the president said i

am taking the troops out. over the objections of everybody else. i don't see that is possible to happen in afghanistan the next six months it might be possible one year from now and that is why president obama is willing to go along with the 30,000 troops to surge even though he pledged during the campaign not to do things like that it is part of our judgment as the most important pragmatist next to nixon because the outlook is similar he is perfectly willing to do things than you, and then the bush administration was not willing to do do two talk with iran and north korea and with a concerted effort to achieve through diplomacy something we don't have to have military involvement but he is not

strong enough to say no more troops for afghanistan but the basic problem is where it is said decision-making made and how does it get made? the idea that cramer had of provocative weakness is very difficult osama bin laden would tell you that and say when the american at -- americans withdrew from lebanon, that showed me that they were weak and we could attack the americans and not be attacked in return. he has said this in interviews and that is what cramer yelled about for 50 years. it is not a dismissal doctrine and it is not wrong either. but the problem is whether this is the answer and i think it is not. but it is a very seductive

doctrine and one that is easy to have gone to and you can see where its works out an ad is part of the reason it is so provocative it is fascinating to me to see the speeches from donald rumsfeld when he was president ford's chief of staff he would say one thing but then gets to the pentagon 1975 and three year four weeks later he comes out with a doctor in a provocative weakness it is what cramer has said for years but when he left office 1977, the farewell speech was that and when he left in 2006 he said i am sorry 1/2 to go back to the same theme of 19772 not display weakness because that will invite our enemies to attack us. is a very seductive and

important doctrine and maybe simplistic but that does not mean it does not have a certain kind of power. and it fits in with the view of the world that was quite realistic for kramer and general walker and others who were friends of grand morale and spent their life working as anti-communist as opposed to it today fascist and anti-communist in these were great patriots devoting their whole life. they believed more so and civilians did that this was an absolute essentials strand for american foreign policy. it had to be based on military superiority. and on a willingness to use the military whenever needed.

to withhold the use of the military was not only a demonstration of weakness, but might result in certain dominoes falling. >> a lot of this is material that has been written about over and over, over the last 40 years but there are some things that are new. do documents, tapes, tell us what are the new things that you found and how you are able to get them when they were hidden away for so long? >> i don't think they were headed l.a. but we did not understood the context but not until we understood the players come we could not interpret properly. in number of things that we looked at that we did not have full information from when i wrote my first book the white house tapes were not released but now we can go back and the steady the white house tapes. we learned more about how

the military moved against president nixon and form to the espionage ring formed by a thomas more. and the secret diplomacy and also jack anderson would undermine that we would find out because the tapes existed we could hear president nixon saying what he is told this is what has happened this jury has moved against you. if you listen closely or watch closely to the investigation, he would have learned that general haig was facilitating. . .

just so they could gain knowledge, not true. not true. they wanted to undermine those policies. they didn't believe in those policies and so, they were doing exactly what the president said. we didn't know that. we know it now. we have not been able to put that defend in the context of

the war, that we described in 40 years war. you can understand who the players were, why they would do what they did, and how they would come to full fruition. it also was very important that the forbey could write this book that had to be a george w. bush administration. because we never sought a pierre kramer administration where they follow the doctrines to 80. it wasn't a john bolten india the administration who was, who hated the u.s. but it was harry ambassador picket they were theory clear both the academic neocons and those in power and those who follow the kramer doctrine hoover not neocons. they believe in it and they used the words over and over again, so it is because there is a whole new setting that we open a whole new panorama for you to view the last 40 years of foreign policy, the demise of the knicks the administration,

the rise of obama and i caution you, we are in the 41st year in the war. it does not end with the book title. it is going on. cini is articulating those positions and it is important to understand that cheney has an ideology. if you listen to people on television, some of these cable people, they attack him for being a republican while the job. he has an ideology that he firmly believes in and firmly believes obama is weakening the country by doing some in the things he is doing that violates the kramer doctrine, so it is that no window we open up, old stories, all that surrounded by new facts in the stories and a new context. and allows this to nav debate morph burly what we have been debated ever that i know of in a political sense, this debate between the ideologues in the pragmatists and what it was really all about, so there's a lot new and 40 years war.

>> mayeth add a little bit there? one of the things that we did relentless in this book was to go back to the document in one of the documents we looked at was something i don't know how many people ever read it in the first place and that is the republican party platform of the year 2000 and the foreign policy plank which ones do 95 pages, and it lays out in great great detail exactly what the administration was going to do when it got into power. and i say one of the most interesting times in the history of the united states was the nine months that the bush administration was in power prior to 9/11. when they began to put into practice many of the things that they had promised to do in these republican party platform in the year 2000. there also many other documents we looked at. we believe that even in the digitized age there are still

plenty of documents there for people to look at and it is not really a good idea to try to write the history based on your ideology or your liberal leaning for your non-liberal bleeding or anything like that. go back to the documents and interviewed people. you might take a look at what actually happened and then try to get a sense. we have, run and i have been pleased with many of the recuse of the book which have basically said republicans don't get off easy in the democrats don't get off easy because that is not particularly our objective but our objective is to look at the material, try to evaluate them, understand is that war that was going on as a grand umbrella for what it is and then get into the details, it get into the week. most people don't know any more than six or eight weeks after president reagan came out and

called the soviet union the evil empire, he stuff that phrase back into his pocket. because it found that in the negotiations with the soviets, it was getting in the way. he could recall that in evil empire again. it was not a phrase he kept repeating in public. others kept repeating it but he didn't because he said it is a problem for me. i can't talk the soviet leaders and our negotiations are totally blocked out so we will take that back. years later he finally said to gorbachev know, though he were not really an evil empire but six weeks after he uttered the phrase it was out of his vocabulary. you only find things out like that if you really are in the weeds of the documents and stuff, and that is what we have tried to do. >> if any of us had been following something called the new american century in the 1990's we would have known exactly what they thought and exactly what they wanted to do.

they take advantage of clinton's impeachment. they pushed on him the mbeki liberation act in 1998, which he signed. they pushed monies to go to freedom fighters in the racks of the stage was set. if they took the presidency there was no doubt there were going to iraq. every which way they knew. 9/11 did not matter to them. it was the good old reason to go. and they left afghanistan much faster than they should death. they did not achieve their goal. they created a mess for us, it blunder, it magnitude that we will not know for maybe decades. we will be paying for that blunder but it was the ideological blundered so the 95 pages should not surprise anyone because we went over all of those including the document the cini put out the last year he was secretary of defense. where he projected the future and literally talked in kramer

terms. of the defense policy so it wasn't new and while cini was saying well, i backed the president h.w. bush and not going to baghdad, that is not true and if you look at the signatories on the project from the new american century they are all there. the whole cast of characters are there, said they did not hide it but they never discussed it with the american people. george w. bush said to the american people, we will not nation build. i am opposed to nation building. apparently president cheney sought a different view of the world of president bush did so you have to step back a little bit and that sort ahold era. that is why the think the 40 your timeframe is so important. and not to take something out of context, not to look at one event and think it is related to other events that preceded it so we looked at document after document, went through things that each side was saying and we

tried our best to present them to you in a theory toned down clay savitt you can feel what it is to make your own judgment. it is very important that we use it as a history, our opinions, we try to keep them but we also try to tell the story the way it was. >> you talked earlier about the spy ring run by the chairman and the joint chiefs of staff. i'm not sure how many people who are in this room were watching this are familiar with that. it sounds kind of far out. tell us a little bit about that and when these tapes come of these white house tapes became available to attend-- >> in a very strange way when i was writing my first book i focused on something sy hersh had written about in his kitchen jerboa which was the military-- and it was called the moore radford it there and reckford being the yeomen and moore being the chairman of the joint

chiefs. and while i was doing this, i was interviewing john erlichman in great detail and john ehrlichman had a letter that president nixon gave him that the bowden to go into the archives to get things out of his files. to use to write a book. so he said to me len i am going to washington, i'm going to the archives. i have admiral wellen dare's confession. wellen there was the admiral under moore who was inside the white house directing the entire operation. he said i want to try and get it for you. and sure enough he came out with a transcription of the confession in which he lays the whole case out, what they still, briefcases they broke open, and he also says and al haig cut is in on their plans. and he goes on to talk about they in some detail. that document is still

classified. you can't get that document out. we have that document and we have now put it on line. i have it in my first book. ism pork in this context. to understand the military while the republicans and democrats come and go the military stays. and i want to talk about the military as though they are one because they are not. their people in the military who don't agree with the kramer deal of things that these folks did. and they saw this is a very dangerous. machen to the point that they were willing to steal documents. they sent this yeomen when kissinger went to set up the media in china and he broke into that into kissinger's bright cason and stole all kinds of things come import documents that nixon did not want the military to know. ois john mitchell, why did you have to write for foreign policy in secret? kiera i happen to disagree with

john mitchell. i think when nixon plans to do these things he should have told come had a discussion with the republic. he hinted that things that we had no idea the mentions of the radical turns he was calling to take so quickly and without consent from the congress or others, so there is a lot to that, but do not think in terms of spy rings. think in terms of espionage. think in terms of that. this wasn't one bureaucrats buying on another. these people were not only leaking and they were leaking for a purpose. >> i think i have to add their that the joint chiefs began its espionage operation because they were being cut out of the loop, because nixon was so upset with the secrecy that the whitney and tell us joined chiefs that is going to go to china. the first they knew it was that the yeomen came back after yet

been on the triplett kissinger and he briefed admiral wellender in admiral worm before they were about to go into the meeting with the president, in san clemente where he was going to tell them the kissinger just spent some time in china. this was the first that the military knew about it, which is really not just simply a breach of protocol. how can you undertake something that is going to be so tremendously affecting of the foreign-policy of the united states in so many ways and not bring your military leadership in on it? astonishing. for reasons, that's going back a year-and-a-half, that they have begun this espionage operation. i just learned to make one comment, that nixon when he came into office, most presidents get a chance to pick the portraits that want to have on the wall. one of the portraits that nixon

picked to place was woodrow wilson because he considered himself an international as wilson had then. but he absolutely did not believe in wilson's basic tenet of open covenants, openly arrived at. he thought this was the bunk. speedbump are there is another point here. if you were fighting the war in vietnam could you think the enemy was it wasn't the chinese? in many ways and i think it was bill buckley and described it this way. it was as if roosevelt had got to berlin and poston hitler in the middle of world war ii. that is how strongly it was perceived by those in the military who were giving their lives to see the commander in chief toasting mao tse-tung. we might have a different view of that but it is understandable that you could understand somebody who put their life on the line. how they might interpret it and i think buckley straka near when he said that.

>> there is a lot of things in the book that show how certain items such as the party platform are out there but ignored. what would you advise journalist now for looking at foreign policy and the military to do with your experience in mind? >> i think you have to say we don't know what all. we don't know it all to finish the book that covered four years and we don't know it all but it is time to sort of step back and not be so reflexive as we are in foreign policy. it is almost knee-jerk is to what each side is saying or not say or what they are doing are not doing so my advice to them is open your mind and that is not just to journalists. it is to everybody that deals with that, because i lived through these things. many of you that these things that had no idea what was going on behind the scenes in the power fights that were going on of the context of the fence he would see and why they took

place. so i think that is the message of the book. wikified kramer, this force that none of us could see, then how much else is out there that we can't see? and kramer opens a whole new window for us to look at, not for just myself, because i know there are others out there. i know there are historians out there right now that are standing in freedom of information act to get kramer's papers, and i am told there substantial and i'm sure based on what we know, we have got tell cons in the report on the book between kissinger and kramer. you can see the relationship, you can feel the relationship in the book as you read the book of these two men and how they finally split and don't talk to each other for 30 years. hey was in an interview with james rosen for his don mitchell book, the strongman and he describes to james rosen who doesn't know who kramer is but he asks a question about salted

how the military deal itself. and he begins to go on paraphrasing, describing how kramer was the father of hendrick kissinger, made him what he is and that he turned his back on him. he says kramer the test kissinger today. he used the word detests kissinger today because of china, because of arms control, because of vietnam. he spells it out and that is now available also of the nixon tapes, that quote is available to use, so this is a very strongly held feeling so you can imagine, if you have never read the reality of the hague kissinger split because we did not understand kramer and i will say this to you. if you look only at the kissinger and nixon relationship you'll never find kramer, except as a mentor to henry kissinger. you need to look at that relationship to they because

they guess the key to understanding what was really going down and his relationship to kramer. nixon never ever understands the relationship. he is putting stars on hage as could, the fastest in history to reach for stars and he doesn't understand. he thinks the relationship is a friend kissinger who is a right-winger who sends memos. he does not know that clamour is actively working with hage to try and implement his ideology or to slow nixon down and then there's the kramer who is part of the bush administration in the defense department. kramer's son plays an active role with the nsc during all this and he will be able to follow his role. i am not 100% sure, i think he was, maybe the source of the words evil empire in that speech. he went and the times to get on with general hannig and had exactly the same views as

general heggs so there's a lot new. there is a lot new for you to read, a lot of for you to learn about it more discovery down the road. all we did in "the forty years war" was open the window. >> i've got one more question for tom and then i will open it up for questions from the audience. you are familiar with this, have been familiar with these topics for a long time. what was the one thing that surprised you the most when you were working on the book and the one thing that said we have to do this book? >> the thing that surprised me the most was the more that we uncovered, this younger aref visas became. we seldom if ever came across a piece of evidence that seemed to say you are full of baloney in the concept you are talking about are not there. i found very surprising the degree to which kramer and kramer's influence were filled during the nixon years and after

that. we have snippets of conversations in the oval office that are not usually a book that because they don't have anything to do with watergate. were kissinger says well, i have a paper from a friend of mine and he sends it into a nixon says, oh yeah i recognize the writing even though you took the name of. that is the guy whose paper you sent me last year on another subject. so nixon is very smart. there is wonderful odd combinations of things that happen. nixon had a small group of journalists that he really liked. there were people who had been with him in the years between his vice presidency and his presidency, people had not abandoned him, who continue to talk to him and one of these was a guy by the name of nick tennis and naked than the pentagon

correspondent. eventually became a columnist, and he was close to kramer. andy wrote a wonderful article about kramer in the fall of 1972, which placed him as kissinger's mentor and nixon did not read most newspapers but happen to read mick's article and said to take, do you know this guy? get him in here. let's talk to him. i know i have been getting his memos and have been for years and henry is out of the country and maybe we can talk to him when henry is not here. henry came back and said to take, oh no, i am going in there with grammar and then he says to kramer, please to not lecture the president. he says to the president, now mr. president threats is going to disagree with a lot of their policies so they get in there and they start not to commit out that all. there is tremendous respect for one another, and indeed kramer

the start lecturing the president and it is wonderful to uphold especially when he shuts up kissinger who in the meeting has never won who was easily shut up so just a wonderful moment. very illuminating of all the characters and they think it's moments like that that we found that were both surprising and eliminating for me. >> and at the very and as he is getting ready to leave kramer tells them what a great move it was to make general haig vice chair, vice chairman of the army. he said it is greeted widely by everyone at the pentagon. this was a guy who was jumping over the other generals to get that started kramer wanted to be sure he praised hage before he got to that meeting. you can listen to the tapes and hear it for yourself. >> i would like to open it up to questions for anybody out there. yes, sir.

>> almost exactly halfway the communism false send in the event that virtually no one with nonviolence that virtually no one predicted, and the u.s. military has essentially left in search of an opponent and it has been said all you have is a hatter then everything looks like it nail, so do you deal with the sudden vacuum of opposition to american power and the need sometimes of hasty and ill-conceived to find a use for the american military now that communism is off the table? >> what he is asking is, communism fell so quickly and we were left essentially without an enemy. >> i think it is a very important point the mixer and there was a meeting down the street here in 1991 comic

dimension of 2045 different conservative organizations and "time" magazine and a couple of other journalists attended there and there was a general sense that the conservatives were at sea because communism had fallen and they didn't have an enemy to call around, and a lot of important people said yeah that is right in the don't quite know what we are going to do but we will do something and hinted that preach steps saddam hussein about six weeks later and one of the things that we say in this book saying it in a simplistic phrases communism has died but anticommunism remains. translated, transmogrified into sort of a general hatred of the things that supposedly saddam hussein represented which was extremism which was absolutely not what he represented that none of us that have become the focus. i think you basic problem in our

society is that we can't focus unless we have a particular enemy to focus on. this is a difficulty for us and all presidents and the communist era has faced this problem and then of them have solve that and not because they are antonette but because it may not be entirely solvable for so long, for 100 years prior to that time the united states always had a main enemy to focus on and the post-communist era, we don't. if you look at the qvr, the quadrennial defense review in 2002 after the 9/11 and the obvious need to fight people in afghanistan and possibly in iraq, who is the main enemy? it is china and that hasn't come and the 2006 qdr, it is still there.

2010, look and see what comes up. that we see fit main enemy. i think that is not a good deal for us to have the main enemy at this point in time. i have probably gone beyond your question, sorry. >> any more? yes, sir. >> can you wait for the microphone? >> the way in which the cold war morphed over decades to a war against regulation, unions. today we still have the use of those words communism and socialist in anchor to describe people who talk about regulation of banks or health care, so did the cold war take on that large dimension of a domestic beer and contest and become almost, almost became a part of what that was about? the i think you are on to

something. there certainly has been a polarization in the last 30 years of our domestic politics as well as our foreign policy and some of the very same slings and arrows are going back and forth. you hit on something really interesting because you are taking terms that were used against our enemy in the military sense and foreign-policy in transposing them to today. and this is a very dangerous time. for that to be happening. we are a nation in two wars and an economic problem that may be greater than we even know it today and yet we are pulling ourselves apart with this kind of terminology, this hard right, heart left terminology. and it is dangerous. it is dangerous and it is scary and you watch some of what goes on and on cable tv 24 hours a day and you shake your head. i'm not talking about one side,

both sides. there is very little constructive, very victual constructive discussion going on about her problems and how to solve those problems. it is a carryover? yeah, i think it is. i think to some extent the reagan revolution crashed in 2008 and the pillars of that hawkish defense was deregulation , and the anti-union position that the administration had is that broke up the air comptrollers so i think there is a merit to what you say, but i don't know that we can defend it if we say yes it is this but certainly the words and the tom, at least to me are scary. >> yes, sir. >> since the neocons have been partially discredited, discredited, the neocons have been discredited as a result of our international ventures in the middle east in the gulf

region, you said this is now the 41st year and onward. howard neocons then regrouping for the next big great policy battle? >> i think they are moving to that, because if you listen to cheney carefully he is talking in exactly those terms. if you ask them about their so-called misadventure, they will tell you it was because of the incompetency of the bush administration. it wasn't their fault because they had it right. a bunch of incompetents got it wrong. going to iraq was the right thing. they insist on that to this day. what they are doing is, they are trying to demonize president obama from that side. they are hitting him on weakness and it is extraordinary to have a former vice president of the united states so up front in less than a year, attacking the new president of the united states. a man that he left it bumble-- bundle of problems for.

the whole afghanistan mess that they created is now an obama's hands and even that, the war on terror, he just can't control it, said they are rallying around cini and bolten and if you listen to those folks, they are taking their cues right now from that and they believe they can get back into power if they discredit obama. and it is really interesting come at their current law but there was sarah palin. it is sort of george bush in drag. [laughter] [applause] >> tom, would you like to weigh in on that? >> i don't think i can say anything that is going to top that. but there is a basic problem here, which is that in foreign policy terms, we cannot afford to throw anything out in terms of what may or may not work.

our problem with the neocon is that they were doctrinary in saying we must not talk to people who we know who are our enemies. we must always rely on military power. and the world in which frankly military power ranks far below economic power as a way to move nations and do things. so, i think it is very early in the obama administration to make any summing up kinds of things. i think the most important thing that any of pfizer can say to the president is no. in presidents get tahir that very seldom. but, in terms of obama's foreign policy what they really have to say is yes, we must try everything. we must look at all sorts of ways and also we must take from the neocons and from grammar in particular a very important thing, which is what is the

moral basis, the values basis of our foreign policy, how do we make decisions based on our values that are going to help us in the future? it may be that everybody says well, we don't really know what our values are. we try selling democracy but that is not necessarily a value. that happens to be one of the ways that our civilization in the united states is structured but it is not necessarily it core value of who we are. is it a core value that we talk about human rights, or we talk about civil fairness to people? is it a core value that we want to try and relieve poverty as the root cause of civil unrest? these are things that have to be decided upon, and i think going back to stuff that len and i were talking with you about earlier, these are decisions that cannot become to in secret. they have to be fully discussed

and they have to be discussed in public. once thee in place, having been discussed in public, then i think we can throw the full weight of the country behind them. >> yes, sir. >> i am glad you brought up the project of new american century, the signatories there too. liar read that document, it seemed more like the imposition of the monroe doctrine across not just this, but across the world. and to do so by selling democracy, selling the free-market, soft power if possible with military power if necessary, and the recognition halfway through this document was that this would cost trillions of dollars and people upon whom we are going to impose our values might not like it. there would be significant

resistance, and at that point there was a single sentence that said absent some catastrophic defense. so, as you say 9/11 played right into, or unable not only the invasion of afghanistan but also the sort of vilification of the entire middle east. i guess my question is, how can we tolerate the presence of this kind of political movement inside a democracy where they are willing to do just about anything to impose their will upon the world? >> i think we did. wiretaps, a whole lot of things, torture a whole lot of things but i want to go back to that document because it think understand where they were coming from. when i read that document, they saw a vacuum with the soviet

union gone for good they wanted the united states to be the sole superpower in the world, so this was no small idea. and they believed, their ideology was the way to get there that they could fill the vacuum and i believe that is what the project for the new american century was all about and i believe that is with this for six years of the bush administration was all about. they saw iraq is a strategic way to project power into the middle east into a secular state and saddam hussein was the guy that could do it for them. and so every move they had was strategic, and if you read that doctrine-- document and i read the vine you did, atsa the catastrophic event and i don't believe they had a thing to do with 9/11. i know their stuff floating around out there but i do believe that is it. it that they were moving that way with their cap under not. they were going to tighten the screws on hussein until they

could find the justify going in there anyway. i think 9/11 happened in it think it explains it that my explanation of the project for the new american century is pretty much generally accepted with most people that that is what they were about. they were going to fill the power of communism with americanism, sold their way and it necessary the battle of-- >> yes, sir. >> has henry kissinger senor bookend have you gotten any feedback from him? >> i would copious in the book. i know people who have read the book into like the book will have access to henry kissinger. i certainly would like to hear his version of this relationship with general heck. i would be totally intrigued by that. interestingly enough he has written an written and britain but very little about grammar and that intrigues me. i wanted explanation of his view of that relationship.

i sort of got the kramer view in the rosen interview that kramer was the man of principle and ideology and kramer-- and kissinger was not so yeah i would really like to hear that. i think this book is kind of fascinating because at the end of the day it is they did it has all the power and henry had to know that. when he became chief of staff kissinger had to know, especially nixon was so weak at the time. he was drinking. he was taking dilantin. he was out of the white house most the time which we document to the white house logs. they literally, we called that section of the book the hagan administration. hey was virtually president of the united states and henry is running around shuttling the middle east and so forth it is really fascinating. and when we go to defcon three in 1973 and the israeli war,

nixon doesn't the-- isn't even there. he does not issue the order. it is issued, he was the only person talking to him with general haig, so if you look at it from the 40 years of do you i would love to hear henry kissinger pause the a. >> i would like that added little bit. directly to dr. kissinger's web site where he has listed eulogies that he is given and the one for kramer is quite wonderful. and the operative line is that kramer was a major influence on my life altering the 30 years that he would not speak to me, which is quite a wonderful some of and after that hoping dr. kissinger who did not agree to an interview for this book, will be spurred by this to write for the first time about kramer at some length because he was a very important man in his life.

the eulogy makes very clear that kramer was an absolute dissed ended many ways. he also did not have any of the responsibility of carrying out policy. kissinger is the man to carry out policy, could not be the absolute is because that was his responsibility. and this is a general thing. i have heard this from elected officials and private conversations all my life. i've talked to them about the locks that are out there that ralph nader and other people are making all the wonderful announcements and they say, it is great to have them out there because that keeps us on line and in a certain way but it is also an understanding that the public officials have that they have the responsibility that they have to carry out policy. it is not possible very often to do the most radical thing in one direction or the other.

i think that is what kissinger was trying to say about grammar, and he felt that was at the heart of their dispute and it was an air reconcilable dispute because of that philosophic problem. >> did very passionate argument by the way and annette quote to james rosen, heggs says i love the man. i love the man. that is how passionate he was about grammar and i suspect henry is just as passionate. >> i was wondering i think there were others probably that did not believe in that strategy and maybe there were lots were china

was the main thing, and some people think the zionists goofed within the neocon push and udc a lot of jewish people of around that cause, so i am just wondering if this is something that you looked at, because they think it is important to see all of this, the spectrum. >> i think we did look at that. i think we interested what was floating around out there. we reported what we could report. based on documents and facts. the neocons are not necessarily, genius and the fact that they are all fine but they, when the right academically or when they talk or lease their leadership is very clear on what they believe and i think it is hard to describe someone as a neocon without talking about the fact that they are true believers. i don't see them as evil.

itis happen to disagree with some of what they did. i said earlier i think iraq was strategic. they certainly mention that the time they thought it would help to mitigate the is really a problem in the middle east. it didn't. it only made it worse so if that was their idea of a cure, it did not work and they just made things worse. i think we have to refocus our cells. i hope that is what the president is doing. i hope as the years go by of his presidency that he popefrey focus because he has been bogged down by a lot of things they did. you don't disentangle yourselves from the tortures, the wiretaps or the policies. you can just go in and day trips out, so i think we should all hope that there is a refocused going on. and the neocons will continue the drumbeat of their beliefs and that is what we do and a free society a we don't shut them up and in a democracy we do

just the opposite but what we tried to do when "the forty years war" is elucidate what they are saying and what they are saying it. it is really important to understand that. not to shatok them but argue and civil weighs about why they were wrong. >> yes, maam. >> do you see is becoming more isolationist? in other words we have got into this afghan war, and if it does not prove successful, is there a chance that we might become more isolationist? >> tom? btu think that there is a risk that we will become more isolationist as a nation because of this experience? the i don't think it is possible for the united states to be isolationist any more with anybody wants to or not. our economy is so intertwined

with those of overseas countries that isolationism in the pre-world war two sense is no longer a possibility. height tariff terriers ali seema appropriate when there are recessions and things like that but seldom is the long-term answer. i don't think that we can do that. i also think we need to think the idea of what is internationalism. it out to be the fact of life, rather than a posture that the american government in engages in court chooses not to engage in. that is certainly the lesson of the 40 years war, is that we have to include possibilities. we have to look at all sorts of ways of dealing with things and of doing things. the pressures that are possible for the united states to apply today to other countries and other regimes to get them to do more of what we would like first of all is we have to decide what

it is that we would like somebody else to do and what their relationship to that is an second of all, what kinds of pressure are we going to apply, economic pressure, sanctions? weekend deposited the economic pressures. if united states is going to buy a lot from your country we are going to have something to say about how you do things. theory difficult for us to deal with what arnell called rode risch teams if we are not in constant communication with them. so the digital age made communication so much more possible to do, is just wonderful and the possibilities that i think we have. so i think that the future is international. i don't think there's any hope for it. i think china couldn't be isolationist dfid try danika could united states.

>> yes sir, right back there. >> i am fascinated by your discussion. i am terese where his influence actually stopped over the limit was, because even those involved in the project for the new american century for split following 9/11 on with their afghanistan or iraq was the first decision. when wolfowitz was one of the lit, there is ones will try to calm him down and things like that so i'm curious to hear you say prince kramer's influence did not have a big effect in the bush administration due to the infighting following 9/11. >> i think it is an interesting question and i think this book raises the question but this one answer the question cut racec great they? about his influence. how far did it go and where did it go? i don't think we claim to know that. we don't have enough information to understand the depth of what that was. i for one believe he would have opposed preemptive war. i just don't think he would have

thought that. i don't think he saw that is in democracy's best interests coming from elites that he would want to cover. dennis's my opinion having steadied kramer. in the limited way we did. consider 40 years war the discovery of kramer, not the final word of kramer and that is why we are not the historians. the historians, we have given them the gift of clayman valve they need to go find out everything they can find out to enter your question. i could not answer directly and honestly because i don't know. >> i would like to add a little bit there. grammar's last public appearance at a swearing-in out ceremony of the pentagon for a friend, the why not to rumsfeld hill was, had some influence over and said to him no provocative weakness please mr. secretary when you are going into iraq because

everybody knew that we would go in there shortly. that much was captured by a camera but the conversation that when on afterwards was of related to me by somebody who was in the room at the time. and, it was to this, what are your plans after you conquered the iraqi army? what are you going to do then? because you must not go into a country and have no plan to occupy it afterwards, or else there is no conquest. and i think that is an indication of what kramer's edited mida been. kramer's pauls, general kernan bolter and general brownie were still around. used to go out on the lecture circuit especially walters after he retired, national review on the cruisers and things. and they would say this time and

this was maybe an the latter years of the clintons administration, one of the founding tenants of the united states is that we cannot go to war unless we are attacked. so these are about the hard court guys on the right who are saying that is an important tenet of who we are is a country. how we relate to the world. we don't attack unless attacked, and the war in iraq was an unprovoked attack. there were lots of things that were looked for as cause as to why we should do this, the possibility of weapons of mass destruction and the buying of uranium and this, that india could thing. in my mind i am thoroughly convinced that saddam hussein would have had atomic weapons, whether that what it meant anything in terms of the safety

and security of the united states and those ten years is hard to say. but that actually, it was something we look for. there was the reason, and ideological reason for why to go into iraq to topple the dominoes in a positive way. we heard a lot about toppling donna mose in the vietnam era, how we had to prevent that from happening, but in the modern era they want to topple the domino of saddam and hoped that could undermine all of the other authoritarian regimes in the area, and this is one of the results of the iraq war that absoly did not happen. >> i think we have time for a couple more questions. yes, sir. >> i have a question concerning the relationship between the

neocons in corporate america especially the oil industry. how important was that? how much of an influence was that on their theories and how they went about designing the policy, etc. at etc. and also if you can distill this for you world-- war into a take-home message, what would that be to you think? would that open up your eyes as he said earlier or is there something else you would like to say? >> i think when you ask this about the power and the relationship of oil, i don't think that is an ideology. i think there is a relationship between our foreign policy in the united states's foreign policy and the need for oil. and what they are not held that played out in the neocon and that is the way we framed it, neocon, i am sure it is a factor but i don't think it is the driving factor. i think power was much more the

factor in their thinking. certainly, the fis president's relationship to haliburton is something that we have not touched on tonight which is something we should at least mention. there are bork contractors in iraq and afghanistan than we have troops. mark, mark, slowly but surely we are privatizing the wars. and that is a part of what we are asking you to look at. we would not have thought of doing that. the idea of ending the draft never envisioned what is going on today, that we would build and to draft with the haliburton's the kbr's the people over there, killing people and being killed or not part of our service, not part of the military so we have a whole brand new group that has come out of the last decade. >> tom, what would you say the take-away messages from four

years war? >> the take-away messages what we all say about history is that the cannot have a sense of mike diwan in the future without understanding the past and this is certainly very true in this particular period. you see the evolution of everything that is coming out of the present. we have got to be on the second world war and the anti-communist fervor that animated it. into an entirely new era and that era began with the fall of the berlin wall and of communism, and if there is a message in this but it is that we need to understand the ways in which one policy or put together in the ideology of war in doing so in order to be able to positively affect our citizens. >> i think that is about all the time we have. i appreciate everybody coming out here to listen to tom

schachtman and len colodny talkedut their boat, "the forty years war." we will have-- be around for awhile but you have any questions after we are done. thank you very much. removal of theis the co-auth president, published in 1991. for more information visit tom schachtman.com. >> we are frostburg state university speaking with robert moore the third about this book, they always said that would merit a white girl coming to grips with race in america. to start off with white did, who actually said that you would always marry a white girl and

why did they say that? >> i think that was more of an internal feeling on my part. i grew up in i think it's very fascinating time period in the suburbs of philadelphia to 1960's. we were one of the few african-american families, perhaps the only african-american family to ride the wave of millions of whites who left urban america at that time to go to the suburbs for couth the same time many african-americans were coming out of rural america and going to the cities, so i felt very unique. i felt caught in between. i think two groups, like two sides and it was a time period that was pre-multiculturalism, so i felt internally that perhaps i was destined to marry someone who was white. brad then african-american. >> one of the first parts of your book is, you have different

sections, the first one called straddling the fence. how did you come to grips with your identity as an african-american male growing up in a predominantly white area of suburban philadelphia? >> it was tough. i don't think i did. i think i still wrestle with the impact of that time period. i grew up with people who were very good friends of mine. i had great friends from that time period who held numerous stereotypes about african-americans and i internalize the stereotypes. i was fortunate that both of my parents for which was unusual for that time and came from a dual income families of tenth grade all of rounds, i opted out of the public school system and went to a private school. i had my first contact with african-americans actually, my first girlfriend was in tenth grade in african-american. so i had to leave that situation and go someplace else to work on

my dina the. >> what do you think it means to be, what is an african-american identity? >> today? >> either today or what you felt growing up, what it means to be a black person? >> that is an interesting question in the big question. i think we have stereotypes of each other and i subscribe to something called group position theory and i kind of look at groups of people in our society and look at their overall place in society, and i think we hold stereotypes about groups, and we internalized those stereotypes. i was socialized as a middle-class person growing up in the city in the suburbs of philadelphia. i'm not sure there is anyone i didn't see that african-americans have for that whites have come up but i think we do feel a sense of cultural

difference. whether this real cultural difference or not is up for debate but it think we feel sense of in group versus out crippen one day i hope we will get over that in this country. have a sense of oneness. >> why did you decide to write the book in the first place? >> i felt i had a lot to get off my chest, and i really think-- i have three kids at the moment and started having kids late in life. i did marry a white female, and we now have for the first time in this history and mixed race movement, a bi-racial movement, and a lot of my thoughts today stem from identity. i am fascinated by people who called themselves mixed race, whereas up until the past 30 years, the past 25 years if you

had any african-american ancestry with the background you were considered african-american. so racial identity questions are still with this. i think they are absolutely fascinating, so i've really want to just dive into and write a book about how race is changed over the past 35 for 40 years. >> how has it changed? what is the biggest thing you've seen today's verse is growing up in the '60s? >> it is questionable because they think many people think race relations have moved forward in a positive way and i question the tremendously. we still have a massive society, 80%% of whites living with less than 1% african-american residents, so i think we think things have changed massively, but the mixed race movement for example, my kids, how will my kids identify with themselves