she's an appealing figure to me. she was a plain frontier woman who spoked a pipe. it was a low match, but she had married early to a brute, and jackson who was a border in the home rescued her, took her out of the state, married her, and then found out that the marriage was not considered legal, and so that's where the rumor came she was an adultress. as soon as they could, they married again and lived very happily together, but she hated politics, hated the idea of going to washington and being subjected to the kind of life that was lived there, and so when she died, jackson was desolate. he spent the night at her

coffin, and never, i think, fully recovered. as a result, when his secretary of war married a very spirited woman named margaret eaton, the instinct in jackson that i for one admire of loyalty and a kind of almost unreasonable dedication to his friends kicked in, and when the society matrons decided that peggy easton who was a widow and daughter of a boarding houseman and probably a good deal more flirtatious than society permitted at the time, they decided that she was a lose woman and they refused to receive her even though she was the wife of his secretary of

war. .. the more he protested a worse the more her reputation became their game. my own sense is that she was a lively woman, but not the common tramp that was in circulation at that time. jackson said at one time to cheer her up, margaret, i would

rather have scorpions on my back than the tongues of these washington women. now, i justified a little detour into this whole kind of amusing story, because it does show when jackson's loyalties to control, he could become mulish. he could become unreasonable and that was what happened here. finally, van buren found a way out of it. he said i will resign as secretary of state, and that will force everybody else to offer their resignations. that happened and te 10's went off to an ambassadorship and it all died away and jackson could return to harassing the cherokees. while he was distracted, jackson

was distracted with proving in his words, that mrs. eaton was as chaste as of version was the way he put it, too much merriment. the state of georgia was coming up with its own solution to the cherokee problem and this is what happened. first they pass the cherokee quote of 1830 and that annexed most of the cherokee territory that was a budding five neighboring white counties, and that code declared the cherokee law within those areas was null and void. the code also prohibited cherokees from holding meetings or testifying against white men and the formerly cherokee territory. all previous contracts between indians and whites were nullified and less to white men agreed to vouch for their validity.

the result of that of course was ruinous for the cherokees and it was a massachusetts congressman who spelled it out for his colleagues and i will read from that. if white suffers guaranteed no white men were watching, then they could cross into cherokee territory, and this is quoting the congressman, they could burn the dwelling, waste the farm, plunder the property, a soap the person, murder the children of the cherokee and though hundreds be permitted to be looking on there is not one of them that could be permitted to bear witness against the criminal. then came george's legislation that banned all whites, including missionaries from living on indian land unless they were licensed by the governor and sworn oath and obedience to the state of georgia. several of the missionaries refuse because they said to sign that kind of oath would ruin their relationship with the

people they had to calm to to. but, two of them who refused to sign the oath were tried and convicted, and sentenced to four years at hard labor. so, that was the same time that the state legislature created something called the georgia guard, which was a new unit specifically designed to enforce the provisions of this code. when jackson's allies finally introduced the legislation to call for the removal, it was a new jersey congressman, senator, theodore freylinghuysen, who led the charge against jackson and against the legislation. he first spoke on april 6, 1830 and he spoke for the next three

days. and thanks to the wonders of the internet, we can now read the whole transcript of the debate, and it was probably as substantially debate as there had been in the house and senate up until that time. it went on and on, but with a great deal of literacy and legal arguments. what freylinghuysen suggested was, if this removal is going to happen, then it must be voluntary. everybody was convinced that jackson, whatever he said, was prepared to enforce it by military might it necessary. so, it is interesting to me the condor attack from john forsythe of georgia, who i think may be pretty effective argument.

he spoke about the hypocrisy of the northerners who had been allowed or decades to deal as they would with their own tribes and no federal interference. he reminded the senators that the north and midwest had vanished the tribes without provoking an outcry, mentioning the mohawks, the decoys, the iroquois's and when a main senator against the removal urged people to listen to the still small voice of their conscience, a senator named robert adams of mississippi return to the theme of northern hypocrisy. he called the indians barbarians had he challenged his northern colleagues to do justice to them before they lectured others.

i think again, this is something we should remember. he said, about the indians, call them back from the deep wilderness to which they have been driven, adams said, restore to them the happy land from which they had been cruelly expelled. give them your fields, your houses, your cities, your temples of justice and your halls of legislation. do that and then call upon us to follow an example so worthy. adams said he did not expect to see that sort of northern repentance. instead, he was sure that rather than give up their own possessions quote the pretended philanthropists would content themselves with permitting things to remain as they are. you can see how that kind of argument resonated. you did these things through treaty and abuse.

you did these things to the indian tribes, and now you were picking on us. now we are just doing what you did and actually we have better cause because there were some agreements with the federal government going back 30 years. why are you doing this? they said at that point that congressman lumpkin and others saw it as the first salvo in a war against slavery. so, the vote came. it was closer than jackson's people have expected. on april 26, 1830, 28 senators voted for removal. 19 against. the houseboat was for jackson, 102 and the 97 against. jackson sign his bill on may 28,

1830. davy crockett had been one of the people to vote against jackson. he had been a jacksonian and fought at jackson's side but on this issue he broke with the president, and he lost his seat in congress. he had served two terms and he lost it. he said, i would sooner be honestly and politically then hypocritically immortalized. at least crockett said, his vote would not make me ashamed in the last day of judgment. so what the cherokees having lost in congress, they turned next to the supreme court and the two issues facing the justices were the imposing of a harsh sentences on the two missionaries for refusing to swear allegiance and the whole question of the georgia --

against the cherokees. so, when john marshall scored struck down the law's as unconstitutional, they also ruled that the missionaries be set free at once. in new york, horace greeley summarized jackson's response to this. jackson didn't say these words although they are often ascribed to him. it was really summing up what was known to be jackson's attitude. it was john marshall has made his decision. let him enforce it now if he can. so at this point the president of the united states was citing with the state of georgia over the decision of the supreme court, and he did it and the cherokees knew this, partially because he was being threatened in south carolina with the possibility of secession and he didn't want to go to war with

itchy -- with the georgians over this issue, so he gave in and thought that by doing it, he was staving off what became the civil war, but since many ways he may have been in some ways encouraging him. a cherokee chieftain named chat obelisk was living in north carolina at the time and during the war of 1812 he had fogged with jackson at horseshoe bend, alabama, against the british and their indian allies. his response when he heard about the ruling in jackson's flaunting of it, he said if i had known that jackson would drive us from our homes, it would have killed him that last day at four shoe. by the time the removal actually begin, jackson's term had ended and it was left to martin van buren to enforce it. now van buren had no interest.

this was an emotional personal issue for jackson, not even remotely for martin van van buren and impact in fact at one point when it was suggested maybe it could be deferred, the removal for two years, he went along with it until the georgians were so outraged that he had to back down and have it go through the schedule that jackson had first set. so, this is the reason that van buren would have been happy to differ it was the kind of economic chaos that i was talking about, the cotton market in new orleans had collapsed and there were bank failures all across the country and in fact, soldiers were patrolling the streets of new york city because of the fear of riots. so it was a terrible mess and that had priority for van buren. meantime, the removal went forward.

so, as jackson left the presidency, people started to sum up his achievement and it weighed on him very heavily. at home in the hermitage, what was history going to say about him as president? the one thing you can save -- the two things. one is that he was the first military hero since george washington to be president, and second, he was the only other president without a college education. i don't know, i really don't know if that is even significant but it was the case. but what is insignificant is the difference in their temperament. washington had the temperament to deal in peacetime with political affairs of state, and jackson did not. he saw himself this way, talking about the cherokees. jackson had persuaded himself that john lawson has allies

represented the sort of arrogant aristocracy he had fogged in his 1920 -- 1828 campaign against john quincy adams and indeed thrown away. jackson could frame his removal crusade as one more populist issue like his attacks on the bank. by insisting on removal, jackson could see himself as taking the side of the beleaguered masses against their wealthy oppressors. privileged cherokees might paint him as an enemy of their people, a that jackson knew that he had always championed the ordinary man whether a white farmer in georgia or an indian prevented from moving west by a grasping tribal elite. jackson could be unbending on removal because he knew he was not the enemy of the indian that he was being painted. he was simply following what he termed the dictates of humanity. his conscience was clear. but i wonder, because as he

faded, and knew death was upon him, he returned regularly to this subject and wanting to know what history was going to say about him. and i think, i don't know, we have no way of knowing and of man as absolutely reluctant to express any kind of personal feelings as jackson, didn't leave any evidence for us to know but it seems to me he may have understood even if he felt his conscience was clear, that perhaps history would judge him less favorably. now, wilson lumpkin protested the way the northerners were using indian. he said they were indicting his fellow georgians as quote atheist, it deists, infidels and sabbath breakers wavering under

the curse of slavery. what i would suggest as a summation for the removal debate in the congress at least, is this. within the deck or his precincts of the u.s. capitol, -- fired in the nation's first civil war and the had won the opening round. but, i don't want tonight to explore the misery of the forced migration to oklahoma. i worry sometimes and i worried writing the book that we can become hard and to other people's pain if you dwell on it too thoroughly. for instance, in los angeles, when the police were accused of beating rodney king, a rather celebrated case at that time, the defense attorneys played the tape of the beating over and

over and over. they found every pretext for introducing it again because they counted on it, that the horror of it or they discussed would wear away and the jurors would be left with boredom and indifference. and i think when you write about misery, you have to be aware of that. so, i have dealt with a marvelous diary kept by a northern missionary named daniel detrich, who in his life chose to go with their converts on the trail of tears, and it is heartbreaking stuff. and i don't think it would make anyone in different, but i didn't really want to go into it much night. in the same thing really about the fate of three of the

cherokees who the reader of the book will come to know best, one named major ridge, his son john ridge and his nephew elias. these are three of the men who leaders, who saw the futility of resisting jackson, made their separate peace with him knowing when they did it that they would pay for their lives, with their life and impact that happens and it is to me a sad and shocking section of the book. but, what i would like to do instead is returned to what i raised earlier about guilt and responsibility. i think i try to remember that those voices that were raised in congress against the removal did not represent the views of most americans.

for most americans, they were caught up with their own concerns. the concept of manifest destiny was sweeping the country, that we were entitled to occupy these lands, and in fact, on the senate floor, missouri senator thomas hart then, his remarks were probably more in keeping, closer to a national consensus and i will read them because i think they do represent the way a lot of people were thinking. benson said he -- by divine command to subdue the earth. he put it this way. i cannot recline that this capital has replaced the wigwam, that this christian people replace the savages, the white matrons, the red squads. indeed i look upon the settlement at the columbia river at the fan of the caucasian race

as the most momentous human event in the history of man since his dispersion over the face of the earth. if the nation was indifferent, to the plight of the cherokees, harriet teacher stow -- harriet beecher still was holding all of america and not just the south to blame for slavery. i think i at least had not known her conclusion to uncle tom's cabin. one of those books that we all know but nobody probably actually reads. what she wrote at the end was this. the people of the free state have defended, encouraged and participated in the evil of slavery and they were the more to blame because they did not have the excuse of their upbringing or the culture around them. both north north and south have been guilty before god and the christian church has a heavy accounts to answer. i understood that indictment

better because i grew up during world war ii. i was 12 and at a saturday matinee at the neighborhood movie, when i first saw those newsreel pictures of gis unearthing the skeletons from the auschwitz death camp's, ever since then, i have felt a pang whenever people asked, and they were always asking in a friendly spirit, what nationality is that? and i was compelled to answer german. that memory made me appreciate a pattern that kept repeating 20 years later when i was covering civil rights demonstrations in the south for "the new york times". in greensboro and jackson. i came to expect the fact that

librarians and schoolteachers and shop keepers would sidle up to me after some new outrage from bull connors, the sheriff in alabama, and they would murmur to me, you should know we are not all like that. and i realized that there were many georgians who were against the cherokee removal. it wasn't all northern voices. there were people, but they know more spoke out or could speak out then these people in the 1960s, so they could champion the cause of civil rights. it was the social pressures were just too great. during the vietnam war, antiwar activists, they launched a campaign to get protesters to

sign a vow that they would not pay their income tax until the war was ended. and i remembered very clearly an incident in los angeles, where a southern california man had actually not only signed the bow, but followed it. he was arrested. his property was seized, and he was put in jail. that was a one-day story. what happened to him after that never made the newspapers, never made the television. and i realize that very few of us and i'm certainly not in that number, are willing to pay the total price for a commitment to a cause. some people are, and i always admire it, but it turned out that campaign against the war fizzled too and the people coming up in the people who organized it paid their taxes.

so, i think what happens is, then as now. we go on deploring and protesting, but privately and ineffectually the actions that are being committed in our name by our government. during the research for this book though, i was sourly amused to find that hypocrisy has a long and distinguished history. i hadn't known that henry thoreau had not been paying his local taxes for five years before the beginning of the mexican-american war. but, when the shooting started, then thoreau seized upon the war as his excuse for withholding from his local township money that had nothing to do with the war itself. i also came to think that even though northerners spoke out

against, on behalf of the cherokees, are often patronizing and ignorant of the tribes that they were defending. ralph waldo emerson wrote a celebrated letter, open letter, to van buren, when -- about the issue. but even in the letter he described the cherokees as a racist, savage men and in fact, his concerns seemed more about the stain that the removal was placing on the united states honor than it did upon the misery of -- that the cherokees were being subjected to. the letter though has great literary force. he says, if van buren went ahead and implemented the jackson policies, you, sir, will bring down the renowned share in which you sit into infamy.

if your you are sealless sets to this instrument of profanity and the name of this nation hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty will stink to the world. before the georgian garden estate politicians, i could hardly be surprised that they would refer to the cherokees as barbarians, because they had taken them as their enemy and when we do that, we have to deny those people in a common humanity. peace marchers in that same vietnam protest were shocked by the crude and racist names that our soldiers and marines had for the viet cong. but, if you are asking some young men to go to war and kill other young men, you can't do it under a banner of universal

brotherhood. you have to dehumanize. you have to demonize. and so, however, we try in wartime to turn the guilt of an individual, with the individual may feel, into a general absolution for our troops and yet we are reading these days regularly about the soldiers coming back from iraq and afghanistan, and they are deeply troubled, tortured by what they have seen and done. there is a price. during world war ii the germans in my hometown, minneapolis, were not rounded up and put in concentration camps. even though the german-american german-american -- before the war had been disseminating very poisonous antiwar propaganda, but we were not seized after

december 7. at the same time we were being spared, american society was being bombarded on all sides by the constant vilification of the japanese. again, i was a child, but i remember the movies, the editorial cartoons, the comic looks, all of them portraying the japanese as subhuman, subhuman creatures with but teeth and thick glasses. they were no better than rodents. they were torturing american prisoners. they were 99 yankee flesh. the impact of that indoctrination does not and with a peace treaty. i was reminded again of that in 1996. why was in hanoi when robert mcnamara, former secretary of defense, held a meeting with a conference -- with north

vietnamese generals and members of the communist politburo. they received him with exquisite courtesy. they could afford to, they had won the war. but, there was one breath moment only once in the three days did their tempers flare, and that was when mcnamara repeated a cliché that i have heard time and again even from general william westmoreland. he explained to the north vietnamese that we americans have been at a disadvantage in the fighting because our culture put a higher premium than theirs on human life. around the table in north vietnamese grew townsend silent and then finally one communist leader said, and he barely describes his theory, he said let me assure you mr. mcnamara that our mothers grieved for their sons every much -- every

as much as yours did. but this fact is as a young officer in world war ii map mare had participated in planning the firebombing of tokyo. it seemed to me he was still emotionally unable to see asians as fully human. so it is understandable for me that andrew jackson and the georgians of the arrow could not acknowledge the impressive credentials, the impressive achievements of the georgia cherokee nation. there were still men who were regarded as -- after world war ii remember the nuremberg tribal trials in bavaria for our attempt to mitigate germany's collective guilt. the trials were intended to establish which individual nazis had been responsible for those unspeakable crimes.

but, post-war literature out of germany and much of it written by writers far to young to have been complicit suggest that a collective standard of guilt can be hard to shake off. and i have come to wonder whether we might not even feel guilty or about injustices that occurred in our lifetime. again from 1945, this example. reading the newspaper on august 6 of that year, i knew something fundamental had changed in the world when america dropped the first atomic tom. i was a kid, i knew it. all the justification since then about the american servicemen who were spared by an earlier into the war, they have not changed my uneasy feeling. and yet, i have seen my students at the annenberg school at the

university of southern california, their parents had not even been born at the time of her rush them and they regard america's use of the bomb as a historical footnote, nothing more. is certainly has nothing to do with them, nothing more than the salem witch trials have to do with them. they didn't live through that moment. and i'm not suggesting that we go through life with constant guilt, but i do think that there are feelings that are below the surface that we sometimes don't even acknowledge. i think of another category, the guilt of proximity. you know that, when a man goes on a murder spree, his neighbors are inclined to wonder what they could have done to stop them. and on a political example, now that i have lived half a century in california, i can attest that

the rounding up of the japanese at the start of world war ii resonates more deeply in my state than right here in atlanta. after all why californians stood by and often profited while the japanese in and even the native-born japanese americans were rounded up, shipped off to concentration camps. the argument goes that they were sent to camps in wyoming, two ovens, but wartime censorship however no one could have known their fate for certain. we didn't know what happened. if we want to indulge in blaming all the people of germany for the holocaust, we must be very clear about just what their crime was. they send back when they could permitted there were neighbors to be rounded up and shipped away and their offense is little different from the actions of the californians and by extension all americans. yet our treatment of the japanese -- than the treatment

of the jewish but that is a blessing not an excuse. as you may recall the congress got around to apologizing to the japanese in 1988 and that offered a minimal monetary restitution for their losses. but then congress refused for several years to make a similar apology to the cherokees and the other indian tribes that it then victimized, swindled and mistreated by our government. republican senator sam brownback of kansas, he first introduced an apology as legislation in 2004 but it kept being table. then, that bill was finally passed five years later as an amendment to the defense appropriations act. president obama signed it a year ago this month. the language specifically for bids regarding the apology at the a basis for any sort of monetary compensation.

to sum up, here is what i have taken away from the cherokee experience. sometimes because of panic or greek, human beings and we americans are certainly human, may act against iran high principles but eventually remorse will assert itself in the form of what lincoln memorably called our better angels. those voices will insist that we live up to our ideals. to steal our conscience then, we may tender an apology. it will always be too late and it will always be inadequate. bearing that in mind these days, i believe we must resist every effort to demonize the mexicans without papers or the muslims living peacefully in our midst. if we insist on labeling them all as drug lords or terrorists, we are simply guaranteeing that one day our grandchildren will have to apologize for our blindness and their bigotry.

i hope we don't pass on to them that burden. end of my sermon, thank you for listening and now it is my turn to hear what you have to say. [applause] they asked if you have questions, and i hope you do, that you will come to the microphones. when i first started teaching, the person i was replacing told me about having a guest speaker. it turned out to be i found out later robert shearer who is a columnist and was at that time i think with ramparts magazine. at any rate, it was a class of 25 and a call for questions. nobody spoke up, and he said,

well, we are just going to sit here until somebody has a question. [laughter] and of course, you know, a challenge like that is irresistible. so they sat absolutely silently for 45 minutes. the bell rang and they went home. i'm not going to make that mistake. >> you spoke about the cherokees and the whites that were quarter blood, half blood and mix. when it came to the trail of tears, did those individuals have a choice as to whether they had to go on the trail or not if they had white blood in them? >> oh yeah. mixed bloods is a phrase that comes a little hard to people, our generation, but they were called mixed bloods. many of them identified themselves as white, had nothing to do with the cherokees. didn't live within the territory, and that was considered their choice.

the people who did work for one reason or another -- for instance one of them was a very small fraction of cherokee heritage was addressed by his mother in cherokee days as a little white english gentleman, and he was so embarrassed and humiliated that he tore off the clothes and insisted on being seen as a cherokee. but you know it is a little like what we know about, we will never know the full extent of that, but the light-skinned black person passing as white and i think we are pretty well aware now that jefferson, when he was leaving paris, sally hemmings could have stayed on in

paris as a white woman. she was very light-skinned, and he had to make certain -- all this is speculation but it looks as though he had to make certain promises to her about freeing her children if she were going to come back and live at monticello. so, yeah, there was a lot of flexibility and there still this. the census form, don't reread that the census form has to be completely berrigan eyes now because people don't find it easy to specify within maybe six categories. so, yeah. thank you. yes, sir. >> was there any pretense of compensating the cherokees? i mean we took all their land away from them when they got to oklahoma.

were they given property out there? >> well, yes. that is one of the arguments jackson made. they got land, they got money for their removal. and i had assumed, this is ignorance on my part, i did know much about oklahoma and i just thought well, the poor cherokees i had seen in this area of georgia, and i thought this is a very bad bargain, because this is a lovely part of the world, and i assumed that they got flat, sandy expanses. but actually that area is very handsome. in fact, those cherokees sogegian and came early had hoped that when the great mass arrived, they would see that this was not the wasteland that they have been told, that it was really fertile, attractive but of course that misses the point that it wasn't their tribal land. that it was and where their were

buried. >> good evening, thanks for being here. i just wanted to ask you, president jackson was often at odds with senators clay, calhoun and webster are going was wondering what their stance was on removal? >> well, the cherokees hoped that clay would be elected president and they felt that he was there one champion, and in fact by the standards at the time, he was also when he was the secretary of state for adams and the issue came up, he had said in the private cabinet meetings, you know, the indians can never be assimilated. they are going to die out and baby given their low culture, it is no great loss. and adams, who recorded all of this in his journal which he

kept assiduously, was shocked by this. and the next day when one of his other cabinet officers came and said, you know maybe we shouldn't be fighting with the georgians if what secretary clay says is true. we are just alienating our friends and a lost cause. and adams, who was rigorously principled, said in effect that is not a consideration. that was clay's opinion and we are going to act on the law, not on that opinion. so that was quite. what he did, he resisted the removal and i really came to like henry clay a lot. very smart. had a lot of good ideas. he proposed that perhaps countries could get together and create a can now in panama that would facilitate traffic.

he was an early proponent of the good neighbor policy. he had many virtues. he thought that slavery would wither away on its own, that as more settlers arrived and more and more labor was available, that slavery would become untenable economically. so, he had a lot of line spots. for calhoun it wasn't the indian issue -- wasn't as far as i can remember particularly interesting to them. he was very concerned with the tariffs particularly. and webster was a northerner. he had northern sympathies, but wasn't a principled leader. you know, it is important for me to remember at least that i can get very caught up with the rhetoric of the anti-movement but remember that this is -- was

a relatively small number of people who really cared passionately on the issues. yes, sir. >> yes, from reading a your review of your book, one of the things that the reviewer pointed out was the nexus that you made between the civil war and the removal of the indians. yes, now coming to atlanta i expected you to talk about that. but you have not talked about it you have alluded to it that you have offered very little evidence for examples of it, and i would like for you to discuss it briefly, please. >> well, first about we start start with the premise that i have a lifetime -- i have given a lifetime pass to jon meacham because he did a very, very good review of my last book on the war of 1812. [laughter] so he can do almost no harm --

crime. now the thing is that he, and you he know he wrote a book on andrew jackson, and he has a vested interest in andrew andrew jackson. and so, to me, we have a difference of opinion. i think jackson was fantastic in so many ways, are actually almost literally a fantasy figure almost. but, i don't agree with the point. now i mean, meacham is certainly entitled to his opinion but the fact is that men like wilson lumpkin and john ross and the cherokees side, they saw very clearly that this was an early attempt of the north to impose its values on the south and in the case of lumpkin, it was to be resisted.

ross at first thought it was a good thing, until a correspondent wrote from philadelphia that it was very bad to get the anti-slavery movement mixed up with the anti-removal movement has so many, even in the north, were not abolitionists. but what you watch -- i mean you have to start with the premise that in 1828, the campaign didn't even mention slavery. and yet, by the time jackson left it was at the forefront of the national debate. now something was happening during that period in something was the mobilization of the quakers, the northern missionaries, the congregationalists against the removal but also against

slavery. and i think, it is not a straight line, but i think that when you defy the supreme court, i think that was a very important element in the thinking of the south and you know you can disagree, but something happened that went from it not being a nonissue in 1828 to south carolina in 1860. >> thank you, jack. [applause] >> thank you. >> the this was hosted by the atlanta history center. for more information visit atlanta history center.com. >> author and former cia analyst and head of the cia's bin laden

unit michael scheuer has a book coming out february and 2011. is that biography on osama bin laden and michael scheuer joins us to preview his book. mr. scheuer one of the things you write in your book is something i would like you to expand on. bin laden is not the caricature that we made of him. indeed, if i only had 10 qualities to enumerate in drafting a thumbnail biographical sketch of him, they would be pious, brave, generous, intelligent, charismatic, patient, visionary, stubborn, egalitarian and most of all, realistic. >> yes sir, i think it's very much an enemy who we need to respect because of his capabilities. much like the allies felt during world war ii. they know they needed to kill him but they needed to be respectful of his ability to fight them.

and i'm afraid what we have gotten from some authors and most politicians is a caricature of bin laden as either a criminal or a thug or somehow annihilist or a madman, and i don't think that is true, and i think it retards their ability to understand the enemy we face. >> what is the danger of that character in your view? >> well, the danger is we underestimate capabilities of the man. bin laden runs an organization that is absolutely unique in the muslim world for example because it is multiethnic, multi-linguistic, and there was no other organization like it. it is more like a multinational organization that it is a, certainly a terrorist group. also, the danger, another danger we face is simply that we underestimate the patients, the

piety and most especially the motivation of bin laden. he is truly within the parameters of islam. he is not somehow a renegade or someone who is outside of islam or hijacking the religion. he is a pious, what is called a solipsist sunni muslim and has appealed comes from the fact that he is believably defending the faith against what is deemed by many muslims as an attack from the west. >> well, knowing that or presuming that he is within the muslim faith and tradition, what should the u.s. strategy be? >> well, i don't know exactly what our strategy should be but i think before you can have a strategy, you need to have the american people on board in terms of understanding with what the enemy is about. we have spent now 15 years as of

this coming august when bin laden declared war on us 15 years ago in august of 2011. and, we have spent all of those years telling the american people that we are being attacked because we have liberty and freedom and women in the workplace and because we have elections or one or more of us may have after work. and that really has nothing to do with the enemy's motivation. if we were fighting an enemy who simply hated us for how we lived live our lifestyle and how we thought, the threat would not even rise to a lethal nuisance. because there wouldn't be enough manpower to make it more than that. we are really fighting an enemy who is opposed to what we do, with the u.s. government does, and until we really understand that, i don't think it is possible to form a strategy. >> you episode chapter in your book called luring america.

can you talk about how osama bin laden wanted to lure the u.s. to fighting in afghanistan? >> yes sir, he worked very hard from 1996 when he declared war on us until 2001 comment i think we frustrated him on several occasions. he wanted us on the ground in afghanistan, so they could apply the mujahideen al qaeda people, the taliban people, they could apply the same military force against us that they applied against the red army in the 1980s. believing that they were much weaker opponent than the soviets and a fairly limited number of deaths would persuade us to leave eventually. and so the attacks on us in saudi arabia in 1996 and 1995 in east africa in 1998, on the uss cole in 1999, were all designed

but failed to get us into afghanistan but 9/11 did the trick. >> in your upcoming book, osama bin laden mr. sawyer you also talk about some of the other books that have come out on osama bin laden and his family. what do you think of those? steve coll's at florence wright? >> i think many of those books are very worthwhile and what i tried to do was to take a different tack than those books so i wouldn't be repeating what had been written already. steve coll's book is an excellent book i think. there a number of very good hoax on bin laden. jason burke wrote one, british journalist, and the problem i had with those books where they were primarily books that were based on what other people had said about osama bin laden, not what he had said or done himself

and i have found over the past decade that whenever bin laden speaks, he is very often described as ranting or raving for issuing yet another diatribe and so, thought that i would take the primary sources based on interviews, statements and speeches he made, and write a book based on what he said and see how it turned out. and i think very frankly that when you take the primary sources, which number in my archive and i'm certainly don't have everyone that is available, but i have over 800 pages. when you take that information, the man that emerges is not light the bin laden that emerges in lawrence wright's steve coll's book is sort of someone who is mentally disturbed or hateful of our lifestyle. but rather a man who is very

clear about what he believes, what he intends to do and most especially, match his words with deeds, with which is very unusual for any politician in this day and age. >> because every background with the cia does this need to be clear to the cia? >> yes sir, everything that i write, whether the book or an article or even if i was a poetry writer which i am not, for the rest of my life it has to be cleared by the cia and this book was in fact reviewed twice, once before a senate to the publisher and then once after it was reviewed and we had made changes that the publisher wanted. or the editor wanted her go so the agency -- i'm very careful to try to respect my obligation to have that reviewed before it is published. >> was anything taken out? >> no, nothing was taken out. in fact, i have worked with the agency now for six years since i retired probably have published

two books in and probably 200 articles and i really only had four or five things taken out by the agency over that amount of time. and, have to say that at least on four of the five vacations they were correct and i was wrong. they are simply looking to protect classified information and sources and methods and they have been very good to work with. i found them very, very accommodating and very helpful. >> three different presidents have chased osama bin laden. are you surprised we haven't found an? >> well, you think we have found him. certainly between 1998 and 2001, mr. clinton had 13 opportunities to capture him or kill him. and certainly mr. bush, his generals had a chance to capture or kill him at tora bora in december of 2001. i think now, especially in the

last five years, it is not surprising that we haven't gotten him. first, like any other thing in life, if you have an opportunity to do something and you don't do it, sometimes the opportunity doesn't come around again. but second, we have so massively undermanned our operations in afghanistan that there is simply not enough american soldiers and intelligence officers to go around. they have so many tasks and so few people to do them that i don't think it is a surprise that we haven't got him at this point. >> well, that said, what would you like to see the u.s. do in afghanistan? >> for up or pull out or what? >> i think sir that we have been there too long. i don't think we have enough soldiers in the u.s. military if we committed every ground troop available to rectify the