at the campaign on the education or economy. is there a temptation more overwhelming forces that lead them to intervene worldwide? every president has intervened in some way worldwide. >> even the ones to have declared that they don't like to do the transforming kind of intervention like george w. bush have ended up doing that kind of intervention in the end. i do think that one question we have is, do we have enough of the stabilities in the united states? if we choose not to build them, should reveal careful about telling in if we don't have the capabilities at hand? we do see these presidents getting sucked into the interventions regardless of what they say, but i think the preparations then make has profound consequences for the way it plays out on the ground.

the ones who are better prepared tend to do better as things go on. george h. w. bush, pre successful war in the persian gulf and makes the decision not to go to baghdad and topple saddam in the early 1990's. that from a purely military perspective, of course terrible human rights perspectives come about that was a pretty good calibration of indians. prepared to do a certain kind of warfare, not prepared to do the more transformative kind and said i'm not going to go further than i am ready to. >> ronald reagan. >> the tricky one. you might think that republicans would tend to be more of the non transformative types, aim for the more non transformative, and in general you do see that. eisenhower is pretty general. his intervention was pretty

limited. of reagan was one who crossed py lines. he was much more like a democrat in the sense that he really focused on the way states are organized. the famous speech to the british parliament for he says the soviet union will collapse of its own accord, not a lot of intervention opportunities. there were pretty small in scope. relatively transformative, but pretty small. a little harder to trace just because of events on the ground, but in the larger sense of foreign-policy his push for democratization was much more on the transformer and of the spectrum. >> professor elizabeth saunders, what is your back out? >> i teach in the political science department. my undergraduate degree was something quite different to was physics and astrophysics.

please don't ask me any questions about that. i teach american foreign policy which is a wonderful course to teach. at the graduate level i teach ph.d. students. i study u.s. foreign policy and international security. >> your first book. >> it is. >> how did you go from astrophysics to a graduate degree? >> political science, i studied political science at yale university and had been fascinated by science and history. i certainly love to studying physics, but i also took a lot of courses in college on government and public policy. i started off thinking i might want to study nuclear weapons and then began to get fascinated combining to interests and i still do have a strong interest. but to become fascinated by the question of why in the post 9/11

world, a time when you would think we would have a pretty good idea of where threats came from and what the nature of the threat we confront was, there was a pretty wide debate in the early part of that last decade of the nature of the threat and what to do about it, and it has begun to fascinate me. the more i thought about it the more i thought about it in a research sense and thought it had a lot to do with who was in power. >> written for graduate students, women? >> and number of audiences. scholars, political scientists, story ends, a lot of engagement. i certainly hope that it will find that audience. written for undergraduate and graduate students, and i hope it will be of interest to anyone interested in the cold war more broadly and how the president's

inform our foreign policy. i try to put the foreign policy stuff in one chapter that you can skip if you don't want to dig down too far. you can read the beginning and skip right to the juicy bits about eisenhower, kennedy, and johnson which i think are pretty -- the meat of the book. >> george washington university professor elizabeth saunders. "leaders at war: how presidents shape military interventions" is her book. thank you. >> thank you so much. it has been a pleasure. >> is there and not fiction author robert you would like to see featured on book tv? send us an e-mail at book tv at c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> professor james miller. what happened on march 205th, 1931. >> march 25, 1931, there were a number of black and white youth of boeing on the train in

depression-era america heading toward the self. a fight broke out among whites and blacks on the train. blacks one, expelled most of the white hoboes. the white work out raised and reported they had been attacked. the report went out on telegraph wires. when the train is stopped outside of a small town in alabama, penn rock there was a policy waiting. they gathered up nine young black man, and as they searched the train is subsequently found to white women dressed in overalls, which was customary for women. shortly after the nine young black men were accused of rape. >> they became known as? >> they became known as the scottsboro boys. this became one of the most

celebrated racial spectacles of the 1930's, and i would add that no other crime and were supposed crime in the united states has been the subject of so many trials, retrials, convictions, reconditions, reversals, and two major supreme court decisions. >> we will walk through that. this picture here, where was this taken? >> that was taken shortly after the boys were arrested in alabama and has become a kind of iconic photograph of the case. it is one that was the most widely circulated in the united states and abroad. >> why is it iconic? >> it is iconic because i think it captures so many aspects of the case, even when it was not written about. the forlorn and bewildered

expression of the boys themselves, their poverty. the militarization of the trial has symbolized by the armed guards surrounding them. the total scene itself. >> if there were arrested, how did this become known as the scouts brought boys case? >> because scottsboro was the town in alabama where the first trials were held. the boys were arrested on march 31st, 1931. within two weeks all had been tried and eight had been convicted and eight had been sentenced to death. all in scottsboro. >> within two weeks. >> within two weeks. >> first jury. >> all white jury which ultimately became the basis of one of the first supreme court

decisions about the case. >> to defend them? >> a good question because in some respects no one in the town wanted to defend the boys. about zero lawyer was appointed. he was the lawyer of, let us say, suspect credentials. he was widely known to enjoy his liquor. he was not particularly well known for his judicial competence. he was distinguished during the case by his general reluctance to say much on behalf of the boys. >> to was the judge in the first case? >> good question. i have forgotten. >> okay. what is the town of scottsboro like? >> scottsboro then and now is a very, very small town in northern alabama.

scottsboro now is known because it is the site of the place where left luggage supplies are auctioned and sold. it is a pretty town, as the beach town. it is interesting because i have, in fact, talked to a young people from scottsboro he still talked about it in those terms, many of whom no one knew nothing about the case. >> how many trials happened? >> separated and tried in batches. someone like clarence who emerges as one of the major voices his the council used to talk about the case was tried at least three times. he would was tried at least and convicted at least three times. there was a variation because given the legal history of the case and the ways in which the

boys were separated, some were tried and convicted more than others. >> what happened after that first case which took two weeks? all the boys had been tried to get a. >> well, they were tried in batches. there were four different trials the first time around. >> okay. after that two weeks, how did it get to the supreme court? >> through a series of procedures. there were debates among various groups about who was best qualified to represent and defend the scottsboro boys. there was sharp contention between an organization called the international labor defense which was the legal wing of the communist party and the naacp, the idea of the one the right.

they won. they got their approval they also hired a very competent criminal lawyer, sam leibovitz from new york and played a critical world and laying the groundwork for the case as it wound its way to the supreme court. the first one in 1932. >> professor miller, how did it set to have a court case in alabama tried by a communist funded jewish white lawyer? >> not well in alabama. not well. all of these factors played a central role and the way the case was perceived and the way the case was tried in alabama. liebowitz himself had to have at one point an armed guard to escort him between when he was

off duty during trials. >> so we go through the second series of trials. what happens? >> the second series. this was the decatur trials in 1933. >> why did they move it from scottsboro? >> i think it was more a question of simply the most available and convenient venue. there were no legal reasons behind that. but the judge in that particular case was a very, very few reminded judge. that judge after hearing the testimony and the witnesses in effect declared a mistrial he ordered a retrial. that was in 1933. that provided the foundation for yet another set of appeals, which, again, went to the supreme court. the supreme court ruled on

behalf of the defendants. between 1933 and 1935 there was a time of waiting. >> and during that time were they held in jail. >> yes. >> what were there ages? >> ranging in age from 13 to early twenties, to two or 23. collectively all my and served over 100 years in prison. the first four were finally released after a series of legal maneuvers. behind the doors conversations and bargaining ten deals in 1937. others were held until the early 1940's and beyond. >> they all ended up with convictions. >> they all ended up with convictions. in my book i argued that the scottsboro case does not legally come