won't even see him on this trip, but in the summer we get to catch up, so we come out here with the family quite a bit. >> the book, "a game of character" the author, coach, craig robinson, coach of the oregon state beavers. basketball season begins in november. there's a month and a half of training to go. >> that's right. was in

excess? hah >> he didn't care what anyone else thought of him. he was who he was. he was late coming to religion but he found it. he decided to become a christian. god was right there in the saddle with him. general once told me that he

wouldn't give a glass of warm spit to an officer afraid of getting shot. stone wall use that same kind of analogy or feeling with every man under his command. you are all expendable because we are out there for its purpose. we are out there to do with the. run out of ballots, go to the bayonet. run up debts, go to rocks. run of iraq's use your fists. because that is what i will do. and he did not tolerate wavering in his beliefs and. he was very self righteous. in addition to be a good hypochondriac he was a religious not. there is no other way to put it. so therefore he was always right. and his men responded to that but for some strange reason he stood there like a stone wall.

one of the greatest points of pride after the war was commanders to save stonewall. a lot of men followed stonewalled a lot of men got killed. he expanded life in pursuit of his goal but as the general says he drove the north crazy up and down the valley because he recognized what was going to happen and he was willing to spread that force because he felt it was the proper thing to do and the sound thing to do. >> sometimes he drove property me crazy. he was pretty persnickety. when he wanted something and felt something was his due he demanded. >> stonewall has driven a lot of people crazy including me. so back to moral courage on grant. how could he not be sensitive to

the slaughter that resulted once he started the wilderness campaign without really clear tactic and tough grain and he knew what those losses were? >> one of the things we tend to forget is lincoln thought he was going to lose the presidential election. grant and lincoln were both convinced that if lincoln lost the election, democratic party platform basically had been quick, that would be the end of the war. grant felt he had no choice but to hang on to robbery lee and keep the war going and he did. he also did not have resources he should have had to make the

moves he had originally planned but he did have a strategy. the interesting thing to expand this about the moral courage is the fascinating film about this period in warfare from 1619 to 1865 is it is the only period we have wind generals who were commanding in the field in charge of large armies, not just divisions or small groups but armies on the scale of the civil war still have to exhibit personal courage because they have to stand up and be shot at. if they are to do their jobs. there is an abrupt change that happens in warfare in which senior commanders -- someone in grant or robert healey's position is relying heavily on a

staff and those are people who not only are getting shot but to a great extent they cover for his inadequacies or problems. one of the fascinating things about these generals that we see is that we really see how they react under pressure and respond because there wasn't anybody covering for them. in every case when you talk about lead you sometimes -- some time stewart didn't show up as he was supposed to. grant had some appallingly bad generals that he couldn't get rid of for political reasons. to a certain extent they all had those problems. it is the rare combination that draws us to these men, that they risk personal danger and have more courage to stick to their

beliefs. they really believed and that the same time they tried not to take unnecessary risks. they were all aware as professionals that the first principle is getting your objective from the men and the casualties. sometimes you just have to go on and whipped them. the art of genius that they'll possessed was knowing when that moment is and you're convinced that you can't let grant at charlot when he said we will with them tomorrow and he was absolutely right. >> that is a good point to turn to the audience because i know you have been wanting to jump in on some of these questions. some of you have personal

favorites in the general and specific battles you want to talk about. i want to open it to the audience. let's take some questions about generalship and the civil war. >> there is a microphone on either side. >> i will start with this man. we have mikes on both sides. you are. >> i have a question for mr. trudeau about robert e. lee. when he was in the appomattox campaign, looking at ultimately facing defeat, why did he reject the option of guerrilla warfare? can you explain that in military terms and moral terms? >> i have to explain it in class terms. robert e. lee was part of the leadership class of the south. wind you if think about the cauldron that was southern society with the slave

population and the poor whites, biggest nightmare was social chaos. they saw the breakdown of an organized army where at least there were rules mostly followed. to turn into a guerrilla situation where there were no rules as being a worse option for a southern leader. when you look at various commanders, joe johnson, specifically, a presidential davis order to disband for that purpose, richard taylor fought any effort to bring his area of controlling to those bands. these were men for whom walt surrender was a terrible thing, social chaos was worse and it was made on that basis rather than a military basis.

thank you. >> another question appear. >> at the risk of being thrown out, did you ever run across admirals in your studies? lincoln has this wonderful fellow who was an admiral and his secret weapon. did you ever run across any research on him or know anything about the admirals during the civil war? >> a data couple articles on the red river campaign so i got to know admiral porter pretty well. what i liked about him is he had a way of evaluating the army commanders and he had absolutely no interest in political generals of which there were a large number. if a general was straight with him and delivered on his promise he was his friend for life. that was sherman and grant. . he wrote constant nose to the secretary of the navy and things

are going terrible here. if only sherman was here we could get a all right. >> next question? >> you alluded to something earlier this kind of interesting about what you have been talking about which is the familiarity these folks had from west point and serving together in the military before the war. it has been well known that it was from a distance on wondering how that familiarity played out in your mind and how these general use their intuition, knowledge of who was on the other side and how that might have changed the course? >> pecan incident where knowledge of the opponent and a specific battle guided the results. >> grant -- he knew him. i would say basically the answer

to me is we and grant new their opponents very well. it backfired in the sense that by the late 1860's reverse 64 the mere mention of robbery in the's name made them nervous. at one point grant said you act like he is going to jump out at you. on the one hand it makes things easier for those people who had studied the psychology of the other side. robert really was older. we need to think about the age differential here. they had met during the mexican

war. robert a. lewis is olympian in the sense of age. they were looking down because they were older guys. it did not work quite the same way as it did with someone like grant who was much younger and it was really seeing it from a distance. >> to put a footnote on that. one thing among these guys not knowing each other, they'll study about the same thing. they studied napoleon. this was about war of maneuver. there wasn't a good work for them to study between the time robert e. lee graduated and the time grant and custard graduated. it all went back to military period. and the people who were formulating it. a common mindset was that. this lady has a question. >> two comments and two

questions. i want to thank you for supporting hillary in 2008. >> one of the things we were talking about is politics and generals and a want to keep this off of the generals. >> the other comment i wanted to make is find out if you do any of this stuff at public schools? i have a fifth grader and a seventh grader and they are not studying the civil war which we find very upsetting in california. i want to know if you have been going to public schools and what kind of response you are getting if you are going, if you met any of the defendants of these brave men? >> are you presenting at schools? dealing with a high-school audience at all?

>> montgomery county asked me out and i went out and talk to advanced honors class. i made a mental -- i talked to a group your first step is the size of the group. is this a group that battles tactics worse stories? soaked i said a lot of good stories. and they surprised me with a few questions about tactics and things. it was a good experience but clearly a 1 off kind of thing. not part of any program. any of us who have given talks in the civil war roundtable at some point in one of those someone will come up whose great granddad was in this regiment or this battle and sometimes they have a personal peace of

memorabilia which is always touching. letters they can talk about. that to me is a wonderful connection that just reminds you part of why this is still part of the american psyche because so many people among us who can trace back to the events. >> is elementary school too young for elementary historians? in the industry of the civil war? >> going back to my education courses, the perception -- >> i think it could be taught. >> something we talk about -- i promise it is taught to. >> we need you in california. >> robert e. lee was such a

complex character. it was an interesting moment, at fredericksburg when union troops were on the bottom and he was on the top with his troops lined up and said something like if war wasn't so terrible what a magnificent moment this would be. imagine all the troops lined up. i don't know if you recall that moment but what does that reveal about him and his character and the idea of work can be terrible and magnificent and his pitching to get to battle and really do some serious damage? >> the quote is a little

different. it is good that war is terrible or we would get too fond of it but it points out that the civil war probably because of the weaponry transition which required deployment of troops on mass was the last war with the pageantry of worse still an element of the experience. gettysburg, the moment when the southern forces of virginia and north carolina emerged from the war on july 3rd and began to form up at cemetery hill, read the union accounts about the momentary off, the sharply formed a line, the flags are marking off the various regiments and brigades and divisions, it was still a part

of workmaking at that phase. but there were times that it was an element and something to behold with off. >> pageantry aside there's something about going to work that excites the imagination and the psyche. the challenge, the comradeship, the intensification of the motion and if you read the accounts of those coming back from a recent experience they tell you they miss the comradeship they were with. a lot of the reenlist to go back again. i am sure it is not ready's character. he is expressing something more universal. there was a new york times reporter who wrote a book called the 5 have the title right work is the act that gives meaning to

our lives, talking about how the sense of worse weeks through societies and he was in central america in the balkans and talked about this intensification of emotion associated with conflict. suspension of normal life. it gives this extraordinary lucidity. it goes back to normal shades of gray. it was about pageantry and everybody who has corrected this. it goes back to reunions and holds people in the grip of a very emotional experiences in war as the most formative times in their lives. >> i would like to ask a

question. i am pleading with you, not just asking can you mentioned two things grant did if you combine everything together not only did he capture and destroy three different armies, but as general and president he cared more for the black man than the other generals. he befriended one of the aerie's greatest writers, samuel clemens and henry james. huckleberry finn had come out the year before. grand made it clear even in his memoir that freeing the black man and making him a full participant in american society was the main reason the war was fought or should have been fought. you haven't really touched on those two matters especially the second one. he knocked himself out for the black man. the one present until warren harding passed the anti lynching

bill. >> is that a question? [talking over each other] >> it is an opportunity to talk about moral character. >> the very brief -- grant was the only general so far ahead been president. my argument is he was a greatly underappreciated president whose reputation had been mangled by a lot of presidential historians and moral courage, doing what he thought was right was very much the part of that, but i would not go so far as to say that to single him out, had the situation been reversed by robert e. lee, i would go back to the fact that these men all

new each other, i think their behavior, if you look at this, whatever problems were with this group of people, they were gentlemen in the real sense of the world. they all had their faults. that didn't get into grant's drinking either mainly because in my view sobriety is a greatly overrated virtue. it just didn't come up. they all had their problems. grant at one point was shafted so badly that he felt he had to resign and if washburn had 19 terrine and made him aware was

political suicide in his quest to be the general on the union's side, he tried to do everything he could. >> these were men of the enormous character. we are out of time and i know we have a lot of other issues to cover. thank you for the great job you did writing these books. [applause] >> let's continue the discussion. who was the greatest general? thank you very much. [applause]

>> wesley clark was nato's supreme allied commander from 1997 until 2000. noaa trudeau is a civil war author and wrote gettysburg:a testing of courage and southern storm:sherman's march to the sea. steven woodward is a professor at texas university. john mosier writes on military history. donald davis is author of lightning strike:the secret mission to kill admiral yamamoto and avenge pearl harbor. visit archives.gov. up next, booktv attended a reception for arianna huffington, for her recently published book third world america:how our politicians are abandoning the middle class and destroying the american dream. the party is posted at a private residence in washington d.c. and runs just over 30 minutes.

>> how are you? [talking over each other] >> she was doing all this stuff. [inaudible conversations]

>> i have been around the country and the huffington opposed -- people have been sending hundreds of stories of struggle and overcoming obstacles and most of that we share the long story. >> on want to talk to you for a second about we are less than a month away and a lot of talk the gop will take over the house. what are your thoughts about that happening? >> anything can change. that is the amazing thing. whatever we do now as two years