process but we cannot guarantee perfection. nixon comes off that he justified the wiretapping and of the watergate building just down the street committee justifies those as national security measures. that is where he lost it. congress overreacted placing heavy burdens. >> host: tell us how that has been working out for the congress. >> guest: the war powers act basically says the president did he uses force abroad he must get the permission of congress when a nation is attacked and if he does not do that within 60 days, then the troops have to come home. that did not stop residence. >> in a president that said that is constitutional?

each 12 refuse constitutionality pro i get, but the congress tries to put more controls of the executive branch and did the covert action area but the executive branch takes action anyway. congress, a lot of the story is how far did the but they will never cut off funding for the war. they will have oversight but they will not cut off the covert action with funding power. >> host: it is also the nature of the senate and i have worked in the senate and house it is the nature of legislation they cannot come on strong because there compromising. the independent counsel act. let's and on that one because that when, that is where congress will decide where you have to be to investigate it how did that

end up? >> guest: it is interesting. the independent counsel's negative chewed gourde everybody in the end. >> host: as long as the republicans were investigated. [laughter] >> guest: in the end of the reason it was a terrible idea because if you remember when we started, the president would be one person because we want to have responsibility and accountability for their decisions. the person is someone who decides the actions of the executive branch. the independent counsel create a separate unit that can do investigations, and prosecutions. >> host: not answerable to the attorney general and did not have to comply with any of the rules and they have no rules they have to follow. but then this died of its own causes.

>> guest: everybody thought they became political witch hunts against a target and not a crime and both parties agreed it is unconstitutional. a lot of people thought it but congress thought it was better to let it go. i don't think republicans suffered a great problems because it was not with us during the last decade. >> host: looking at this young administration, the first year, if you were writing about it 10 years from now, what do you think would be the high points are low plains? the things you want to point* out about executive power in the first year of this administration? >> guest: it is a hard question only in the first year. >> host: it is not fair only as a historian. >> guest: it seems they are expanding the power of the executive branch domestically on a number of

initiatives that the obama administration puts forward with health care, greenhouse emissions, it is striking. it reminds one of the great deal or the great society. >> host: mandates buy health insurance. >> guest: exactly. extraordinary powers and pushing them through the way he does. it seems with foreign affairs and national security, he is pulled back. one great example, the decision to transfer khalid sheik muhammed who planned a the 9/11 attacks will have the military trial in new york city are the recent decision to take the christmas day or underwear bomber and put him into the criminal-justice system almost immediately. that is really starting to pull back on the president's power the end of the combatants isn't that for the accords to make the final decision?

>> as i heard about it they heard 40 some cases and have released 75% of people they have heard we voice said the courts don't know about the military. it takes the executive branch to know about the military. >> guest: the executive, the courts i mean, wanted to be very conscious and not to intrude into the operations of the military during wartime and interfere with the decision of the president. of it is a new world. >> host: 40 secret hearings and 75% of the detainee's. >> guest: it is incredible what we have never seen before. >> host: giving to the courts would have been executive power. about this in 10 years. >> guest: me to. thank you. it was great fun.

>> i am the national security editor of "usa today" also a longtime friend of len colodny. i have worked with him since i met him almost 20 years ago when i worked in tampa florida which is where he lives now. i have bent involved with len and worked with him for a long time. in one of the lively interesting discussions there is so much in this

book and what you will find in new as well. hopefully you will engage them what is in the book and what you have learned and halfway through open for questions that you may have. but i like to start off talking about, tell us of the broad strokes you found in the book, the main points >> first, i would like to say that all titles are an absurdity. we never cover the subject matter totally and that is very true in this book. what we set out to do was to get some sense and why over the last 40 years. to who did what and why did they do it there are two

very large camps of people and in one camp he overturned the foreign policy of the previous quarter century in a way that went against the former principals in order to get something done that he thought needed to be done. there are a whole series of people who were pragmatic with their outlook but on the other hand, people who were much more ideological than that on the moral basis and they saw a lot of what nixon was doing initially in the thames that they talk with the soviet union, the attempt to what they called

red china and the third strand rich they decided upon before they came into office, an attempt to very quickly draw the vietnam war to a close. obviously he was not able to do that as quickly as he wanted come on the other two fronts he succeeded to open things up. by doing so he galvanized whole generations of people who were fundamentally anti-communist. these are people on the right, both on the democratic party or the republican party or any other party who spent the previous 25 years working their lives out against communism in the idea you could suddenly throw the dover and open discussions and make concessions to communist countries broke this was an amazing thing to them.

they did more than impact foreign policy if there is actually a very strong element on there helping to undermine the nixon presidency in a way to bring it down. the methodology is that the presidency ended because of conspiracy on the low left. we think that has to be amended and we show you exactly why in this book. there are many other strands and one of the most important for the people that oppose an exit because of foreign policy not because of who he was but because of his policies. this more that we call it continued on to the ford and carter administration where foreign policy was basically nixonian with the democratic

president with nixon's immediate successor, that calculus did not change until the early reagan years were the people who were buy now known as a new kind came into power. we have to say they did not come into the first rank of power by the second and third. they were held by more moderate people we're not used to thinking of reagan as a moderate, but in foreign policy terms he was quite a moderate. so much so they were very angry. what do you mean going out there setting new agenda is in trying to get rid of nuclear weapons? that is not what we hired you do do. and to hide their pragmatism

under george h. w. bush with a tremendous sense of what needed to be done in the world put together a coalition of the likes of which have never been seen before in the history of the world to take on a specific enemy or at a specific time and place. the new bonds were all for that except he did not go all the way to baghdad. he felt he could not go to baghdad and we show you why principally because it would have fallen apart. so the new konz went back into a habitual posture which is we're the greatest criticizes of foreign policy the world has ever seen. throughout the bill clinton years steadfast office that time if you want to find an alternative way to look at the world war what ought to

be done the new konz are there to provide it. george w. bush was able to come to the floor and utilize the power of those that were not necessarily neocons for those zero nights in the neocon camp of academics or newspaper editorial writers. and we tell you a lot about a very interesting people. think i'd better stop now and len can fill you win. >> there is one person while mini of your characters are familiar there is one person's name has been obscured four years as you discovered tell us to that person is.

>> when i finish trading, i came away with this nagging question, and i have an answer and i could not explain it. then there was another question that now a little bit how did you go from detente to evil empire in less than a decade? that was the nagging question that got me to write the book. that is 40 years of four going less than a decade and while they were four containment for 25 years but as the daytime pass in the enemy's coal less there was a battle and it took many forms inside the administration after he left the ford reagan primary was

part of that war. and reagan pushing hard. carter comes in and they began again to attack. what is important to know is that there is a political revolution. democrats moving left forcing the scoop jackson democrats who would become the neocons and 1980. they began to try to take the party back. when that failed between 76 and 80 they moved and coalesced with the republican conservatives and formed what would become the rage and revolution in iran have america and four policy 14 or another. that was the key question in my mind and one other question. because i was intrigued by

the way nixon maneuvered out from the white house from inside the white house, i kept wondering he recommend he get haig. how did haig get to the white house? is searching around 2006, i called roger morris to call the national security council and the throaty name i had never heard before may be a fellow named cramer. he expend day she explained he was henry kissinger's mentor. and his name was fritz kramer perk we have modern technology so let's approval technology. rumsfeld comment cheney, wolfowitz something on the world security network. they are praising this guy like he is a geopolitical

jesus christ. you would think he was everything. i thought fritz kramer was a guy who coached michigan football i did not a understand there was another one out there. this guy is unique and different. not because of his theory of provocative weakness weakness, therefore it drawing attacks. that is the general theory. you never show weakness and noise negotiate at the barrel of a gun her rosie begin to understand a little bit about the fellow but what makes him unique is not the theory but who he mentored. he mentored kissinger when kissinger would become an accountant and went to harvard, he was like a father to kissinger. when he became the head of the nsc he recommended

general haig although he was colonel hague in those days. he became his deputy and haig was a true believer in kramer and as you will see in provocative weakness it cannot live with detente. it is impossible. players in the very beginning nixon and henry kissinger and also sending memos to the president and and $0.69 a memo about the need to win the vietnam war. this relationship is really important to understand how everything goes down in the next decade. and kramer, strangely enough, and this is a broad view, kissinger never surging government after he

left the four administration after carter. but kramer continued to be a force until he died in 2003. that is what was so remarkable to see the names like cheyne, wolfowitz, rumsfeld cheyne, wolfowitz, rumsfeld, the keeper of our flame and using the words provocative weakness when he was defense secretary. and we see it today with the back and forth between president obama and former vice president cheney. what cheney is really saying to obama, you don't use words like war on terror when you don't use the words terror, your therefore projecting weakness and in fighting the attack. it is what takes you through that journey and a cast of many who start and 69, 70 and reached it in 2009. that is a key element to

understand and creamers role is viewed that he opens a door to the nixon administration we have never seen before. and how things were done to undermine the policies and in the end if you think about it if general haig is as we say in the book, the ultimate kramerite come if you buy that, than kramerite is supposed to protect the president but he doesn't, he does everything he can to make sure nixon does not survive. we have looked in this book at white house tapes after the so-called smoking gun tape. we saw a time and time again haig would give nixon advised that would be detrimental to him. nobody has reported on these tapes before.

it is very clear nixon is guilty on the 40 year war, you agreed to richard nixon was directing the cover-up march 1973 to protect gordon stronger who we learned was just involved in the break-in. he was the eighth to bob holder and believes that would lead sowed trying to concoct a phony report which they would put public in order to cover up that involve meant for a lot of things going on in a think you'll find it interesting journey. >> one of the things you mentioned is nixon was maneuvered out of office but he did a lot of things to set up his own downfall. can you describe some of those things? >> personally nixon relied

even when we ought to that is one aspect. the problems with some exceptions goals that is an interesting and good gold because we have to achieve these by secrecy. there is a wonderful transcription of a briefing that dixon gave to the white house staff shortly after the announcement that we reproduce in the book in 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 everybody else would have come down upon me and we would never get to the

point* of going to china. you can believe that your diss believe that but he believed that. he also believe that in terms of what he wanted to do with the soviet union and how to deal with the piano more. one of the things that we point* out in this book some information had come out the floor but within four or six weeks of nixon taking office, he and kissinger and others in the administration conveyed to the ambassador and others from the soviet union that the united states wanted out of vietnam but would not mind if they lost on the battlefield or would not mind if they went on this. reaching 530,000 american troops in country via non. i can assure you that none of those 530,000 from behind

the scenes the commander in chief say it is okay if we lose the war. the reason why nixon thought it would be okay to lose the war which he thought was already lost come a was so that they could achieve more detente with the soviet union and thought that was the overriding goal. to exist peacefully with some other configuration but that has to happen. this was on par with the belief which he had expressed an article of foreign affairs 1967 that features to the movers and shakers. to have the chinese and in the future but blurt him to

say he was wrong about that i think he is effectively correct. but the problem was he also felt that the same time you could not have an open and full free discussion of these issues and expect to come out the other end ethics so i think that way nixon got his way quite a bit. >> also mentioning the disclosures come the meetings with the soviet ambassador which you found going through the records that the records written 15 years ago in his memoirs. one thing i found interesting about the book is how well sourced it is. lot of things people have not heard about that may sound far out but when you look through the nose and read the book you can see

the depth of the sourcing. describe that. describe the water gate tapes that were never heard before and what else did you draw upon? >> a vast array of books and material fifth with 600 footnotes in this book. we try to have nothing review can check this out. the website is all different kinds of things that you can go hear some of the tapes. there is nixon tapes and.org with a texas university system you can hear what we have reported here. we tried very hard sometimes there is no way to get to sources. sometimes only one person may know something. we do spend a good deal of time which we can check.

i'd like to pick up on tom and the vietnam issue. what bothered the kramerite the most with vietnam, not winning and by giving up arms control power, projected power the opening to china. and also to deliver this message and that is the toughest part of the book to write because in a sense in order to accomplish the foreign policy goals and affect he was leading us out of via non. he could not get the quick end that he wanted and as a result he turned to what was called vietnamization. that was a slow withdrawal

of american troops and continued battles. >> withdrawing 10,000 troops by my definition is not slow. it was a very rapid withdrawal. >> to understand how the opposition and galvanized and why kramer would be so welcome at the pentagon because kramer says he will have to win the war. you cannot come out of there looking week. there is a conversation in the book that we report between president nixon and cramer in 1972. you can hear career make the case for why you cannot come out of vietnam looking weak as nixon decreed that we would. when he goes to the pentagon and gives advice and spreads his believes, never again. we will never do vietnam ever again.

if you're going to go win, ago win and win it with everything you have got. in many quarters after vietnam, that rang with many people. the kramer provocative weakness, which i described described, when it comes to fruition in the reagan administration is likely changes from the campaign campaign, it does not say provocative weakness that was the mantra and that was the kramer doctrine. easy to say until we wrote the book i did not know that it now we do know the mid to late -- material and papers that we dug up it is clear this man was a force. and we will galvanize the force is what i described and what we described in the book. >> we are in two wars now

and in the beginning part of the four years or how the conduct of the vietnam war affected just about every policy decision that nixon made and later, gerald ford. what parallels to use the between that and what we see now with the iraq and afghanistan wars? >> the most important parallel is the power of the military and the argument for the military to the fact the decisions of a president. if we look through the last 7500 years of american history, you see presidents are not successfully lobbied from the left. it just doesn't happen. it happens a little here and there with domestic affairs but very seldom and foreign affairs. but they are successfully and lobbied from the far right. it is very difficult for the iraqi president who was not

a military man to say to the budgetary, you cannot have more soldiers coming you cannot have more equipment equipment, you should make a graceful withdrawal, it is a very difficult thing to say because of the military and the whole military complex the power to affect public opinion. it is very, very difficult to say this. also you can say you are wrong because very often they are not wrong the point* is it is hard to do and that is affecting our capacity for decision-making we have all they come out of a rock in the sense -- iraq without a single american casualty in the most recent month because we have withdrawn troops and we have

gone behind barriers and because a president said i am taking their troops out. over the objections of everybody else. i don't see that is possible to happen in afghanistan. but over the next six months of might be possible from one year from now that is why president obama has been willing to go along with the 30,000 troops surge even though the campaign was not to do things like that. as the most important pragmatist since nixon because the outlook is similar to that he is perfectly willing to do things that the new konz of the bush administration were not willing to do which is talk with iran and north korea and concerted efforts to achieve through diplomacy something that we don't have to have further military

involvement but not enough to say there should be no more troops in afghanistan. the basic problem is where is the decision-making made and how does it get made? but the idea that kramer had of provocative weakness is very difficult. osama bin laden rich value that. when the americans withdrew from lebanon after we bombed the barracks, that showed me that they were week. we could attack the americans and not be attacked in return. he said this in interviews. and that is what kramer was yelling about for 50 years. so it is not a dismissal of doctrine. it is not wrong either there is verification but the problem is whether this is the answer.

i think it is not but it is a very seductive dr. and and one that is easy to hook onto and you can see where it works out and that is part of the reason that it is so provocative in is just fascinating to me to see the speeches of donald rumsfeld when he was president ford's chief of staff he would say one thing then gets to the pentagon 1975 come with rear four weeks later he comes out with a doctrine of provocative weakness and other things that kramer has been saying for years. when he left office 1977, the farewell speech was that when he left office 2006 he said i am sorry i have to go back to the same themes of 1977 leash cannot display weakness because that will invite and amaze to attack us.

it is a very seductive and important doctrine. that may be simplistic but that does not mean it does not have a certain kind of power. and it fits in with a view of the world that was quite realistic for kramer and general walker and others of that ilk who were friends of kramer's to spend their lives working as an anti-communist as opposed to the anti-fascist and they were great patriots that devoted their whole lives. they believe more so than the civilians that this was an absolute essentials strand for american foreign policy and it had to be based on military superiority and on the willingness to use the military whenever it needed

that to withhold the use of the military was settled 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 again but yet there are many things in the 40 years' war better new new, new documents, tell us whether the things that you found and how you were able to get them? when they were hidden away for so long? >> they were not hidden away but we did not understand the context. until we understood the battle i don't think we could interpret properly. we looked at a number of things that to me either didn't have full information the white house tapes were not released so there was nothing to studied now we could go back and steady we

learned a lot more about how the military moved against president nixon. they formed an espionage ring headed by the chairman of the joint chiefs thomas and more. and they traded the secret diplomacy and above two jack anderson to undermine that and we could find out the tapes existed we could hear president nixon saying when he is told in this ad role more and others and if you listen closely are watched closely to the investigation he would have learned that general haig was facilitating the ever by the military. so it was very important. the president says on that tape come it is a federal offense of the highest order.

it is so important we put eight chapter title to it. he was in effect saying the military was committing espionage and treason against the commander in chief. and john says to him we cannot do anything about that we have to paper this over. he immediately in pure richard nixon paranoia up orders the cover-up and it is a media. field men who was being used to do the stealing of documents was shipped off and it was treated very strangely as if it were just normal bureaucratic spying against the president, just so they could gain knowledge. not true. they wanted to undermine the policies they believed in the policies and so they were doing exactly what the president said. we did not know that.

we have now been able to put that into the context of what it we describe in the 40 years' war. you can understand who the players were and why they would do what they did and how they would come to full fruition. it was also very important before we could write the book there had to be a george w. bush administration because we never saw a pure kramer administration were they followed the doctrine to the t. there was not a john bolton and the other administration that he did the u.n. ambassador. they were very clear through the academic neocons and those in power and those who follow the kramer doctrine who were not neocons, they believed in it in the use of words over and over but because there is a whole new setting we opened a whole new panoramic to view the last 40 years of foreign policy, that the mind of

that nixon administration and a costs should new we're in the 41st year of the war. it is going on. cheney is articulating those positions and it is important to understand cheney has the ideology if you listen to people on television, some cable people attacked him as a republican and lack job. know he has the ideology he believes in and firmly believes obama is weakening the country by doing what he is doing that violate the kit kramer doctor in. it is the new window we opened up old stories and old fact surrounded by old tax and stories by a new context and allows us to pay a day's debate more fully than we have never debated that i know of in a full political sense the debate between the ideologues and a pragmatist and what it was really all about.

there's a lot of new information in the 40 year war. >> one of the things we did is go back to the document one that we looked at is i don't know how many people read it in the first place the republican party platform of the year 2000 that runs about 95 pages and plays out in great detail exactly what the administration was going to do when it got into power. one of the most interesting times in the history of the united states was the nine months the bush administration was in power prior to 9/11 when they began to put into practice many of the things they promise to do in that platform in the year 2000. there are also many other documents. we believe there are still

plenty of documents there for people who look and it is not really a good idea to try to write the history based pioneer ideology or liberal leanings or anything like that. you might want to take a look at what has actually happened then try to get a sense. we have been very pleased that many of the reviews of the book which basically said the republicans don't get off easy in the democrats don't get off easy because that was not our objective but the objective is to look at the material and tried to evaluate and understand the big war that was going on with a grand umbrella for what it is. then to get into the details and weeds. most people don't know any more that six or eight weeks after president reagan came

out and called the soviet union the evil empire he stuffed that phrase back into his pocket because he found out in his negotiations with the soviets come it was getting in the way. he could not call them again. it is not eight phrase he repeated it in public. others did but he did not. it is a problem for me. i cannot talk to the soviet leader's. the negotiations are bogged down so we will take that back. years later he finally said to gorbachev no. you're not really an evil empire but six weeks later it was out of his vocabulary. you only find out things like that if you're in the roots of the document and that is what we tried to do. >> if any of us were doing the project for the new american century in the

1990's we would have known exactly what they had thought or what they wanted to do. they took a vantage of the impeachment and pushed on that iraqi liberation act and also pushing their freedom fighters though the stage was set to if they took the presidency, there was no doubt they were going to iraq. they kept telling us and every which way they knew, 9/11 did not matter to them, it was the a good reason to go. they left afghanistan much faster than they should have and did not achieve their goal and have created a mess for us of the magnitude we will not know for maybe decades. we will pay for the blunder. but it was the ideological blunder. the 95 pages should not surprise anybody because we went over all of those. including the document cheney put out the last year he was secretary of defense

and projected the future and literally talked and kramer terms of a defense policy. . .

so that you can feel what it is and make your own judgment. it's very important that you use it as a history. our opinions we tried to keep to the minimum but we also try to tell the story the way it was. we talked earlier about the spy ring run by the general joint chiefs of staff, admiral moore. i'm not sure how many in the room or later watch and on tv are familiar. this sounds far out to wait till a little about that and when these white house tapes became available desperate out even more about it. >> in a very strange way when i was writing my first book i focused on something written about in the kissinger book which is the military moved against the president and it was called the moore-radford affair,

radford being the chairman of detroit jeeves. while i was doing this project i was interviewing john ehrlichman in great detail and he had a letter that president nixon gave him that allowed him to go into the archives and get things out of his files to use to write a book and so he said to me len, i'm going to the archives, i'm going all my files. i have admiral's confession. he was the admiral under moore in the white house directing the entire operation. he said i want to try to get it for review. and sure enough he came out with a transcription of that confession in which welinder leads off the case with a stroll, the burn bags they went into, briefcases they broke open, and he also says al 18 cut

dustin on the plan and he goes in to talk about hague in detail. the document is still classified. you still can't get that document out. we have the document and have put it on line. i had in my first book and was very important in this context to understand that the military while the republicans and democrats come and go the military stays. and i don't want to talk about the military as though they are one because there are not, there are people in the military to don't agree with the view of things but these folks did and they saw this as a very dangerous period and to the point that they were willing to steal documents. ascent this win kissinger went to set up the meeting in china and he broke into kissinger's briefcase and stole all kinds of things come important documents that nixon did not want the military to know. i asked john why did you have to run your foreign policy in

secret and he said we would have never gotten through otherwise. i happen to disagree with john mitchell. i think when nixon planned to do these things he should have had a discussion with the public. he handed them the things we had no idea of the dimensions of the radical turn he was going to take so quickly and without consent from the congress or others. so there's a lot to that. but do not think in terms of spy ring, think in terms of espionage, in terms of that this was serious. it wasn't one bureaucrat spying on another. these people were not only stealing, they were leaking and of leaking for a purpose. >> i think i have to end their that the joint chiefs began d'aspin operation because they were being cut out of the loop because nixon was so obsessed with secrecy he wouldn't even tell his joint chiefs he was going to go to china. the first the new was that she

came back after he had been on a trip with kissinger and he briefed admiral welinder and moore about before they went into the meeting with some clemente where he was going to tell them kissinger spent some time in china. this was the first the military knew about its to leave kuwait which isn't just a breach of protocol. how can you undertake something that is going to be so tremendously affecting of the war and foreign policy and not for your leadership in on it. reasons that going back a year and a half they have begun this espionage operation. i just want to make one comment that nixon when he came into office most presidents get a chance to pick the portraits they want to have fumbles and

one of the portraits nixon picked was woodrow wilson because he considered himself an international as wilson had been but he absolutely did not believe in willson's basic open covenant arrived. he thought this was the book. >> there's another point here. if you're fighting the war back in vietnam who do you think the enemy was it was in the chinese? in many ways, and i think it was bill buckley who discarded this week to read it was as if roosevelt had gone to berlin and toasted 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 him. we might have a different view of that but it's understandable that you could understand somebody who put their life on the line how they might interpret that and i think

buckley struck a nerve when he said that. >> there's a lot of things in the book that show how certain items such as the party platform are all there but ignored. would you advise journalists now who were working at foreign policy and the military to do with your experience? >> i think they have to say we don't know we all. we don't know it all and finished a book that covered 40 years and we don't know what all but it's time to sort of step back and not be so reflexive as we are in foreign policy. it's almost knee-jerk what he's saying or not saying and doing or not doing so my advice to them is open your mind. and it's not just a journalist is to everybody that deals with it because all i need live through these things. many of you live through these things and had no idea what was going on behind the scenes power fight going on with context and

the defense that he would see and why they took place. so that is the message of the book. if we could find kramer, this force no one can see, then how much else is out there that we can't see? and kramer opens a new window to look at, not just for myself because i know there's others out there, i know there's historians elbaradei now that are sending in freedom of information act that cramer's papers and until there's substantial and based on what we know we've got reports in the book between kissinger and kramer. you can see the relationship and feel the relationship in the book as you read the book. these two men and how they finally split and don't talk to each other for 30 years. and hague was in an interview for the buck the strong man and he describes to james rosen, who

doesn't know who kramer is that he asks a question, james rose and asks the question about salt and how the military viewed salt and he begins to go on, and i'm paraphrasing, describing how kramer was the father of henry kissinger and brought him through the -- made him what he is and he turned his back and says you know, kramer detests kissinger today. he used the word detest kissinger because of china and because of arms control, because of vietnam. he spells it out and that's now available also on the nixon tapes that is available to you. so this is a very strong help feeling so you can imagine we've never read the reality of the kramer kissinger split because we didn't understand kramer and i will say this to you, if you look only at the kissinger and nixon relationship you will never find kramer except as a mentor to henry kissinger.

you need to look at the relationship through kramer because hague is the key to what is going on in his relationship to kramer. nixon never understands the relationship. he's putting stars on hague as rastus he could. fastest in history to reach for stars and he doesn't understand. he thinks the relationship is a friend of kissinger who is a right wing who sends memos. he doesn't know that kramer is actively working with hague to try to implement his ideology or to slow nixon down. then there is the kramer part of the bush had been stationed in the defense department. kramer's son plays an active role with the nsc during this and you will be able to follow his role. i believe and i'm not 100% sure i think he was one of the, maybe the source of the words evelyn player in that speech. he went many times to vietnam

with general hague and had exactly the same views as general hague said there is a lot new, a lot new for you to read and for you to learn about and more discovery down the road. all we did in four years war was open the window. >> i've got one more question for tom and then open up for questions from the audience. even 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 we uncovered a stronger our thesis became that we seldom if ever came across a piece of evidence that seemed to say you are full of bologna what you've been thinking about in the concept that you're talking about. i found it very surprising the degree to which kramer kramer's

influence was felt during the nixon year and after that. we have set its conversations in the oval office that are not usually looked at because they don't have anything to do with watergate where kissinger says i have a paper from this friend of mine. he sends it in and nixon says yeah i recognize the writing even though he took his name off. that is the guy whose paper you sent me last year on another subject. nixon was very smart. he and -- this wonderful all the combinations of things that happen. nixon had a small group of journalists he really liked and there were people who had been with him in the years between the house by presidency and presidency, people who had not abandoned him and continued to talk to him and one of these was a guy by the name of mick and he

had in the pentagon correspondent who eventually became a columnist. and he was close to kramer and for the wonderful article about kramer in the fall of 1972 which placed him as kissinger's mentor. and nixon most newspapers happened to read the article and said to hague do you know this guy? get him in here. let's talk to him. i've been getting his memo for years and he's a of the country. maybe we can talk to him when henry isn't here. henry came back and said to hague no, i'm going in with kramer. door not going in. then he says to kramer please do not lecture the president and he says to the president now mr. president, fritz is going to disagree with a lot of your policy, so they get in there and start out duking it out to all.

the tremendous respect for one another. it shined through the line, and indeed kramer does start lecturing the president and it's kind of wonderful to behold especially when he shuts up kissinger who at a meeting is never one who is usually shut up, so it's just a wonderful moment, 50 eliminating all the character and i think it's moments like that that we found were both surprising and eliminating for me. >> and in the ferry and as he's getting ready to leave, kramer tells him what a great move it was to make a general hague vice chairman of the army. he said it's greeted quietly by everyone the pentagon. this is a guy jumped over 240 other generals to get that starr and kramer wanted to be sure he praised hague before he left the meeting. it's fascinating and you can listen to the tapes and hear it for yourself. >> i'd like to open a two questions for anybody out there.

yes, sir? >> [inaudible] -- and get halfway almost exactly halfway the communist and walls and even that virtually no one with nonviolence that virtually no one predicted and the u.s. military left in search of an opponent and it's been said all you have as hell everything looks like it now. do you deal with a sudden vacuum of opposition to the american power needs of sometimes pasty and ill-conceived to find a use for the american military now that communism is off the table? >> what he is asking is when communism fell so quickly we were a left without an enemy. >> think it is an important point that you make, sir and there was a meeting on the

street in 199145 different conservative organizations and "time" magazine and a couple of other journalists attended and communism have fallen and they didn't have an enemy to coalesce around and a lot of important people said that's right and we don't quite know what we are going to do but we will do something and into the breach stepped saddam hussein about six weeks later and one of the things we say in this book without saying it in a simplistic phrases communism died but anticommunism remains. it gets translated, transmogrified into sort of a generalized hatred of the things that supposedly saddam hussein represented which is muslim extremism which is absolutely not what he represented but

nonetheless that has become the focus. i think the basic problem in our society is we can't focus on less we have a particular enemy to focus on. this is a difficulty for us and all presidents in the post-communist era have faced this problem and none of them have solved it and not because of their inept but because it may not be entirely salles goebel -- solvable. prior to that time the united states of the seven main enemy to focus on in the post-communist era we don't. if you look at the quadrennial defense review in 2002 after the 9/11 debacle and the obvious need to fight people in afghanistan and possibly in iraq who is the main enemy? china and that hasn't really -- in 2006 que br it is still

there. in 2010 let's see what comes up, but we seem to need and a nanny and i don't think that is a good idea for us to have a main enemy at this point in time but nonetheless that exists. that's gone beyond the question. sorry. >> can you wait for the microphone first? >> [inaudible] -- regulation today we still have the views of those words communist and socialist and anger to describe talking about regulation of banks or health care so did the cold war take on that large convention of a domestic contest and become almost what became

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

talking about one side. both sides. and there's very little construction, very little constructive discussion going on right now about other problems and how to solve those problems. is it a carry over? i think it is. i think to some extent the reagan revolution crashed in 2008 and the pillars of that word hawkish defense that was also the regular edition of the anti-union position that the administration had as they broke up the air controllers. so i think there is a merit to what you say but i don't know that we can defend if we say yes it's a this but certainly the words and the tone at least to me are scared. >> the neocons have been largely discredited -- the neocons have been discredited as a result of

our international ventures in the middle east and gulf region use it this is now the 41st year and onward. hell are neocons regrouping the next great policy bedle? >> i think they eluted to that because if you listen to cheney carefully he is talking in exactly those terms. if you ask about the so-called misadventure, they will tell you it was because of the incompetence of the bush administration. it wasn't their fault. 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 trying to demonize president obama from that side. they are painting him on weakness and it is extraordinary to have a former vice president of the united states so out front in less than a year attacking the new president of the united states.

a man that he left a bundle of problems for to read the whole afghanistan hammes they create a discount and obama's hands and even that the war and terror. he just can't control it and so they are rallying around cheney and bolten and if you listen to those folks they are taking their cue right now from that and they believe they can get back into power if they discredit obama and it's really kind of interesting, their current love affair with sarah palin. it's sort of george bush and drag. [laughter] [applause] >> tom, you like to weigh in on that? >> i don't think i can top that. [laughter] but there is a basic problem here which is as far as policy terms we cannot afford to throw in a thing out in terms of what

may or may not work. our problem with the neocons is they were doctrinaire and saying we must not talk to people we know our enemies. we must only rely on military power in a world in which frankly military power now 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 sum up things. the most important thing in the adviser can say to a president is no and the president get to hear that. but in terms of obama and foreign policy, what they really have to see is yes, we must try everything. we must look at all sorts of ways and also we must take from the neocons and kramer 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 value that are going to help 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's not necessarily the value and that happens to be one of the ways that our civilization in the united states is structured but it's not necessarily a core value of who we are. is a core value that we talk about human rights or we talk about civil fairness of people, is a core value that we want to try and relieve poverty as a root cause of civil unrest? these are things that have to be decided upon and i think that going back to the stuff that len and i were talking with you about earlier these are decisions that cannot come to in

secret. they have to be fully discussed and discussed in public and once they are in place, having been discussed in public i think we can throw the full week of the country behind. >> mr. -- yes, sir? >> [inaudible] as i read the document, it seemed more like the imposition of the monroe doctrine across not just this hemisphere but across the world and to do so by selling democracy, selling the free-market soft power possible military power if necessary, and the recognition about halfway through this document was this would cost trillions of dollars and people upon whom we are

going to impose our values might not like that and there would be significant resistance and at that point there was a single sentence that said absent some catastrophic event s. res. use said two wars played right into -- as you said 9/11 pleaded to the location of the views. how can we tolerate this political movement inside a democracy where they are willing to do just about anything to impose the will on the world? >> i think we did. wiretaps, a whole lot of things, torture, but i want to go back to the document because i think i understand where they were coming from when i read that

document they saw a vacuum with the soviet union gone 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 the project for the new american sentry was all about and i believe that is what the first six years of the bush administration was all about. they saw iraq as a strategic way to project their power to the middle east and to a secular state and saddam hussein was the guy that could do it. every move they had was strategic and if you read the document, and i read the line you did and absent the catastrophic event. i don't believe they had a thing to do with 9/11. i know this stuff floating around out there but i don't believe that's it. but in fact they were moving that way whether it happened or

not. they were going to tighten the screws on saddam hussein and to the could justify going there anyway. i.t. 9/11 happened and it explains it, but i think my explanation of the project for the new american century is pretty much generally accepted amongst people that that is what they were about. they were going to fill the power of communism and americanism and if necessary at the peril of the gun. yes? >> has henry kissinger senior book and have you gotten feedback from him? >> i would hope he's seen the book. i know people who have read the book and like the book who have access to henry kissinger. i would certainly like to hear his version of the relationship with general hague. i would be totally intrigued by that. interestingly enough he has written and written very little about kramer.

that intrigues me. i want an explanation of his relationship. i got the kramer interview that kramer was the man of principle and ideology and kissinger was not so yes i would like to hear that. i think this book is fascinating because of the end of the day this hague who has all the power and henry had to know that when he became chief of staff kissinger had to know that especially nixon was so weak at that time he was drinking and taking the land in and was out of the white house most of the time which we document for the white house logs. hague literally be called that section of the book of the hague administration. those 15 months hague is virtually president of the united states and henry is running around out here struggling in the middle east and so forth. so, it is really fascinating. even when we go to defcon three

in 1973, the israeli war nixon is it even he doesn't issue the order. it is issued in his. who was the person talking to him as general hague? if you look at it from the 40 years few would love to hear henry kissinger's view. ..

be a are your responsibility of carrying out policy. kissinger is a man who counteracted policy could not be the absolute because that was is responsibility. and this is a general thing. i furthest from the officials, private conversations all my life. i talked to him about the lies that are out there that the ralph nader is another people are making all the wonderful announcements. it's great to have them out there because i keep stuff online in a certain way. it's also an understanding with these public officials thought they have the responsibility, they have to carry out policy. and it's not possible to very often to do the most radical

thing in one direction or another. and i think that that's what kissinger was trying to say about kramer. he thought that was at the heart of their dispute and irreconcilable dispute because of that philosophical problem at the heart. >> is a very passionate argument, by the way. and in the quote that james is racing, he says i love the man. that's how passionate he was about kramer. and i suspect henry is just as passionate. >> ratepayer. i'm wondering if you could elaborate on whether you think that they are a homogeneous group because i'm thinking comic you know, you know, juster mollified that even though your on the list, there were others probably that did not agree with

our strategy and maybe there were ones who survived. some people think that the group that pushed it and you do see a lot of jewish people, you know, around that time. you know, i'm just wondering if they are, you know, this is something that you looked at because i think it's important to see all of it. >> i think we did look at that. i think we understood what was floating around out there. we reported what we could report, based on documents and facts. the times are not necessarily homogeneous when there are one but they sure when they write academically, when they talk or at least their leadership is very, very clear on what they believed. and i think it's hard to describe someone as a neocon without talking about the fact

that they're true believers. i don't see them as evil. i just happen to disagree with some of what they did hear it as i said earlier, i think the move to iraq was strategic. i certainly mentioned at the time to thought it would help mitigate the israeli problem in the middle east. it didn't. it exacerbated and only made it worse. so that was their idea of a cure, it didn't work and it just made things worse. i think we have to refocus ourselves. i hope that's what the president is doing. i hope as the years go by in his presidency that he will refocus cacique being blocked by downed by a lot of things that they did here you don't disentangle yourself in the kinds of issues, the tortures, the wiretaps, the policies. you just can't go in and yanked it out here and whatever. and so i think we should all hope there's a refocusing going on. and the neocons will continue the drumbeat of their beliefs. and that's what we do in a free

society. we don't shut them out in a democracy we do just the opposite. but though we try to do in the 40 years for his hallucinate what they're saying and why they are saying what they're saying. it's really important to understand that, not to shout at them, but to argue in a civil way as to why they were wrong. >> yes, ma'am? >> gcs becoming more isolationist? in other words, we've gotten into this afghan war and if it doesn't prove successful, is there a chance that we might become more isolationist? >> tom? >> do you think that there's a risk we will become more isolationist designation because of this experience? >> big as possible for the united states to be

isolationist. our economy is so intertwined with those of overseas countries that isolation in the pre-world war ii is no longer a possibility. hightower of barriers always seem appropriate when there were recessions and things like that. but there's seldom a long-term answer. i don't think we can do that. i also think that we seem to need to rethink the idea of what it's internationalism. it not to be the fact of life, rather than a posture that the american government engages or does not engage in. but certainly the lesson of "the forty years war" is we have to include possibilities and look at all sorts of ways that doing things to look at things. the pressures that are possible with the united states to apply today and other countries, other

regimes to get them to do more of what we would like. first of all, we have to decide what it is that we would like somebody else to do and what our relationship to that is. and second of all, what kind of pressures we can apply, economic rusher, sanctions, we can do positive economic pressures if the united states is going to buy a lot from your country, we're going to have something to say about how you do things. it's very, very difficult for us to deal with what are now called rogue regimes if we're not in constant communication with them. for the digital age has made communication so much more possible that it's just wonderful in the possibilities that we have. so i think of the future is relentlessly international. i don't think there's any hope for us. i think that china can be isolationist at the tried and neither could the united states.

>> okay. yes, sir, right back there. >> i'm fascinated by your discussion of fritz kramer. i'm curious where the influence actually fat or where the limit twice because even those involved in the project for the new american century were split following 9/11 on whether afghanistan or iraq was the first decision when both were flying off the bridge at camp david they are trying to calm it down and then click add. so i'm curious to see or hear you say what fritz kramer's influence didn't have an effect in the bush administration due to the whole end fighting in 9/11 with iraq. >> i think that's an interesting question. i think the book raises the question but doesn't answer. it raises a question mark about the influence how far i went 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've opposed preemptive force. i just don't think you would've thought that. i don't think he saw that as an democracy's best interest coming from the elites that he would want to govern. that's just my opinion and view having studied kramer. in a limited way we did. consider 40 years war the discovery of kramer, not the final word of kramer. and that's why we're not the historians. the historians, we've given them the gift of kramer and now they need to go find out everything they can find about to enter your question. i could not answer directly and honestly because i don't know. >> are they to add a little bit better. kramer's last public appearance was that at a swearing ceremony at the pentagon for a friend and he went up to rumsfeld who is the man who had some influence over. and said to them, no provocative

weakness please mr. secretary when you're going into iraq because everybody knew that we would go in there shortly. that much was captured by a camera, but there's a conversation that went on after word was only related to me by somebody who was in the room at the time. it was to this but i hear plans for after you conquer the iraqi army? what are you going to do then because you must not going into a country and not no plan to occupy it afterwards or else there's no conquest. and i think that's an indication of what kramer's attitude might've been. kramers pols or general vernon walters and general at brownie who is still around. used to go out on electric circuit, especially walters after he retired, and national

review on the cruisers and things. and they would say at this time and this is maybe in the latter years of the clinton administration, one of the founding tenets of the united states is that we do not go to war unless we are attacked. so these are about the hard-core guys on the right who are saying that's an important tenant of who we are as a country, how we relate to the world weird we don't attack unless attacked. in the war in iraq was an unprovoked attack. there were lots of things we looked for as causes to why we should do this, the possibility of weapons of mass destruction, buying of your rain man, this come about, and the other thing. i was thoroughly convinced that given ten years saddam hussein

would've had weapons if that meant anything terms of safety and security of the united states or in this ten years of hard to say. that actually wasn't there. it is something we look for is an excuse. it was an ideological reasons for wanting to go into iraq to topple the dominoes in a positive way. we heard a lot of talk plain dominoes in vietnam era how we had to prevent that from happening. in the modern era, they wanted to topple the domino of saddam and hope that would undermine all the authoritarian regimes in the area. this is one of the results of the iraq war that absolutely did not have been. >> i think we have time for a couple more questions. yes, sir?

>> i have a question concerning the relationship between the neocons and corporate america, especially the oil industry. how important was that like how much of an influence was on their theories and now that went about in designing the policies, et cetera, it better have? and also, if you can distill the 40 year war into a take-home message, what would that be do you think? would that be open up your eyes as he set earlier or is there something else? >> i think when you access about the power in the relationship of that i don't think it's an ideology. i think there is a relationship between our foreign policy in the united states' foreign policy. and the need for oil. and whether or not that played out in the neocons and that's the way you framed it, neocon, i'm sure it's a factor. but i don't think of a driving

there. i think power was much more a fact there in their thinking. certainly the vice presidents relationship to howard burton, something that we have a test on tonight which is something we should at least mention. there are more contractors in iraq and afghanistan than we have troops. more, more. slowly but surely we're privatizing wars. and that's a part of what we're asking you to look at. we wouldn't have thought of doing that. the idea of ending the draft never envisioned what's going on today, that we would supplement the draft with the howard burton and the kb are some of those people we have over there fighting. people killing people and being killed were not part of our service, not part of the military. so we've got a whole new group that has come out of the last

decade. >> how would you say the take away message is from "the forty years war"? >> to take away message is what we always say about history is you can't always understand that have a sense of what will happen in the future without understanding the past. this is very true in this particular period. you through the evolution of everything that's coming on at the present. we got beyond the second world war and the anti-communist fervor that animated it 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 of this book, it's that we need to understand the ways in which foreign policy is put together in the ideology at war in doing so in order to be able to positively affect a citizen. >> i think that's about all the

time we have. i appreciate everybody coming out here to listen to tom shachtman and len colodny talk about there but "the forty years war." we'll be around for a while if you have anymore questions afterward done. thank you very much. hot [applause] >> thank you very much >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals over the next few months.

>> please let us know about paris and festivals in your area and will add them to our list. e-mail us at the tv at c-span.org.

>> we are in section 27 at arlington national cemetery. this is one of the oldest sections of the military cemetery at arlington. and that's where the story of arlington national cemetery really begin. arlington house so much history tied up in the civil war. this section of the cemetery was begun in may 1864, really before there was a cemetery. how did that happen? it happened that 1864, the civil war have been going on for several years. in washington was really a hospital city at that time. ailoe were as many as 50,000 in the hospitals of washington, temporary hospital set up all over town. and of course, those people

started dying. and they had to be buried. the earlier in the war, the national cemeteries were established at it alexandria, virginia and the old soldiers home, northwest washington. they were planned to accommodate all those who died in the washington area hospitals. what happened was the war went on much longer and was much bloodier than anybody expected so that we pretty soon filled up the graveyard, the national cemeteries in alexandria. and at the old soldiers home in washington and needed new burial space. so the quartermaster's office of the union army looked across the river and found this place, arlington and that it would be a good ways to begin burying people. arlington happened to be the home of robert e. lee, the

confederate general. so not only was it a convenient place to begin military burials from the civil war, it was also thought to be a matter of justice, maybe even vindication if you want to call it that. the first military burials at arlington came of may 1864, well into the civil war. and the very first of those burials was private from 67 pennsylvania infantry named william chrisman. he was a farmer, he was from a poor family in a kenyan to serve in the union army. he ended up in the hospital in washington. he got a case of german measles, which killed many, many service members on both sides of the war. he developed peritonitis from

his measles infection and he died in a washington hospital. was brought across the potomac rivers here to to arlington as the first military burial. things were so desperate at that time in the civil war, there were so many people dying, and that there wasn't much time for ceremony or ritual at arlington. they would bring people over for burial day after day after day and they went into the ground as william christman dead with no flags flying, no music playing, quite often not a chaplain to give them a signal. so basically we're just trying to keep up with the carnage from the civil war when arlington began. during the war, things are so desperate that there was no time for tombstones. they have had words that were made out of time or walnuts,

painted white with black lettering. those, of course, to be maintained or they fell apart. so that in this years of the civil war we begin to clean up and make sense of things. someone came up with a design in the 1870's, late 1870's, early 181900. it's a uniform design, anyone who qualified for burial qualified for one of these tombstones. the earliest stones were like these you see here, which i've been name of the comny the state and the date of burial and an incised shield. later the design was simplified, just to include the name of the of birth and the date of burial.

that's the modern tombstone you see in other sections of the cemetery today. the first military burial here, william christman, was typical in that like many soldiers who died in the civil war on both sides, he wasn't killed by a bullet or a cannonball. he was killed by a disease. most of the people who died -- more of the people who died in the civil war died from infections, dysentery yellow fever, measles, mumps, then died from battle wounds. and most of the people you see in this section of the cemetery are in that category. william christman was buried in may 1864. arlington cemetery was an established until a month later, june of 1864. it was officially designated a national cemetery and it began to fill up very, very quickly.

this part of the cemetery where income of section 27, was called the lower cemetery. as you can see, is that the heads of arlington heard there's a road just outside of the cemetery here. you can see the lee mansion from this location and that's the way the opposites are worth living and working in the lee mansion during the war want today. they didn't want to see the burials coming in. they didn't want to live a graveyard, working a graveyard. he wanted these grades out of sight and out of mind. the quartermaster general, brigadier general montgomery knives didn't like that idea. as a matter of fact, he didn't have much use or robert e. lee. they served together in the union army. next consider lee a traitor. and thought he should be hanged for his desertion of the union army and his leadership of the

army of northern virginia. so meigs came to arlington on the day he was officially begun at the cemetery, june 14, 1864, came to this part of the cemetery, looked arounnd was upset that there were no graves around the lee mansion. his next act was to go up the hill where we will go shortly into begin to put burials right up next to the mansion. he didn't want police to be able to come back after the war was over. so you will strategic approach to the creation of arlington cemetery up the hill and mrs. lee's garden. >> so we are now up on the hill overlooking washington d.c. at the lee mansion. i'm aiming the camera at mrs. lee's garden. >> yes, this is missing please

guarded on the hill, the highest part in arlington national cemetery. this was the home of robert e. lee, mary custis lee before the civil war. and at the height of the civil war, 1864, the first military burials were made in the cemetery, the lower cemetery, out of sight of the mansion. quartermaster general didn't think that the graves were close enough to the mansion, so that he found officers who had died in surveys and he had been buried here around mrs. lee's garden to make it more difficult for the lees to return to arlington after the war appears inexorably walk along here we see these tombstones actually encircle the garden? >> yeah, they don't all play around way around but they formed a border around part of the garden. i think there's something at the end of the war there were something like 40 graves of officers.

we don't know exactly what meigs thinking was, but i suppose he expected to bury officers here rather than private, you know, and enlisted men because it would make it more difficult to remove them after the war was over. they were also more prominent, better known. it was a strategic move on meigs part and it proved pretty effective it has by the end of the war, there were not only these greats here, but there were thousands of other graves in arlington in the native very difficult for the lee family to fily attempt to return? >> they never really attempted to return, but they wanted to get to arlington and they worked for years. robert e. lee, after the war, quietly met with his lawyers in alexandria and discussed with them a way to get arlington back. mrs. lee, who was more vociferous about it, went to

congress after general lee died and petitioned congress to give arlington back and basically her position was hooted out of congress. they thought it was a ridiculous idea. at that time, radical republicans were in charge of congress that they didn't give her a very good hearing. she died in 1873. her csonka mother eldest son, custis lee, what to congress, got voted down, then went to court and by 1882, he won a famous case in the supreme court. the supreme court ruled that arlington had been seized without just compensation during the civil war and give arlington back to the lee family. it took a wild but by 1883 the lees had arlington back. of course the bad news for the lees is there were 16,000 tunes

here at the time. so as a practical matter they can come back to live here. so they settled with the government for a fair market value, $150,000, 1100 acres of time real estate and 16,000 tunes on the banks of the potomac forever. the great irony is that when custis lee find the estate over the title over to the federal government, custis lee on one side signing the title. on the other side with the secretary of war, robert todd lincoln, son of abraham lincoln, so that you had fun of lee and some of lincoln agreeing on something. and i would say that was the beginning of some hope that we could reunite north and south again. it took a wild but that was the beginning of the reunion we had >> so we're going to walk back here to the first term of