i think the question should be maybe swee should have a check on voting procedures nationwide here simply because there is such an opportunity for mischief, and if not mischief, self-serving behavior by certain election officials or politicians. >> host: do you have another book you're working on? >> guest: you know, right now, i'm focused on money in politics and focused on a number of academic articles i see coming together possibly for a book, but right now, it's -- i was in the obama administration for about a year and a half. before that, i worked on policy for the campaign and also did the transition, and, you know, when you come back into the academy, i think you want to have some academic credit; right? you know, it's great to do books. i certainly enjoy book, but i also want to come back and send

a message to my colleagues and that i'm back and there's new ideas from my experience, new academic ideas, and while i'll certainly eventually put these into book form, sharp academic articles, that's the first thing out of the box. >> host: spencer overton, a professor at george washington university and author of this book "stealing democracy, the new politics of voter suppression." here's the hard cover, and here's the paperback. we thank you for joining us. thank you for joining us on booktv. >> guest: thank you so much, peter. >> host: book tv is here at george washington university in washington, d.c. talking with professors who are authors, and on the screen now 1 the cover of professor elizabeth saunders'

book, "leaders at war, how presidents shaped military interventions." why use the word "interjengses"? >> guest: this is a book dealing with a particular question about the use of military force in american foreign policy and how they used military intervention as a tool in american foreign policy. these are wars of choice, not situations where you are dealing with a direct attack on your borders. these are using -- this is use military force to intervene in the internal affairs of another state, usually quite a distance away from the united states. the book is really dealing with the question of why we see certain kinds of military interventions under some circumstances rather than others, so i argue in the book there's really two models of intervention. there are what i call transformative interventions seeing the united states getting deeply involved in the domestic affairs of another state so we

can think about the nation buildings intervention in the 1980s with haiti and the bull cans where the u.s. gets involved in the states, domestic affairs, building, rebuilding, changes domestic institutions. on the other end, there's non-transformative intervention where the united states goes in, fixes the problem, and gets out without really trying to leave a big footprint on the domestic. the central question is why do we see one of the models of the intervention at a given point of time rather than the other. >> host: what's a non-transformative intervention? >> guest: i argue the persian gulf war is an example where we kicked hussein out of cue wit, but -- kuwait, but didn't change the -- the 1965 intervention, the dominican republic, going in for

a surgical strike trying 20 -- trying 20 -- to deal with the problem. >> host: why focus on eisenhower, kennedy, and johnson? >> guest: people proposed a lot of different explanations for why there's two models of intervention. some people argue it's a lot to do with the international environment, so maybe the cold war we see a certain model of intervention and a different model dominating in se the post-9/11 petered, and people proposed the united states always chooses one model, so the united states people have said, scholars argued we'll almost always try to promote democracy. i have a different explanation that it has to do with who occupies the oval office at any point in time, and it's the president who matters profoundly for what model of intervention we see, and so i -- i show that there are not an infinite number of ways presidents intervene,

but there's a major fault line, and we can categorize presidents in one or two categories on how they perceive threats. an internally focused president believes the way other states are organized internally matters, and is the ultimate source of threats to the united states and threatens u.s. national security. those leaders are much more likely to choose the more transformative model of intervention, so kennedy, carter, reagan, all examples across party lines where you see presidents choosing that more transformative model. on the other hand, there's leaders focusing on what states do on foreign and security policies and don't focus a whole lot on their domestic institutions, and they are likely to choose a surgical strike. there's george hw bush, eisenhower, and i would argue johnson falls into that category, again, crossing party lines. i focused on eisenhower,

kennedy, and johnson because i wanted to show even within the cold war when you would think there was a pretty strong threat consensus -- we sort of all understood what the nature of the threat was in the cold war. you would actually see a wide variation, and you could see two different kinds of presidents and two different models within the cold war. that's why i look at those three presidents in particular. >> host: eisenhower, not transformative. what are examples. there's one in 1958, but what about ayn in 1953? >> guest: that's a very interesting case. the 1953 intervention, covert operation in iran and also relatively single intervention in guatemala, considered sort of a pair, and people often ask, well, aren't those what you call transformative interventions because in these cases the united states uses covert

operations 20 topple -- to topple regime. what i point out in the book is not every attempt to rid a leader is necessarily what i call transformative because just changing the top layer of leadership and leaving new r the other institutions of the state in place is not really institutional transformation. it's just decapitating the regime, and i argue these are more like palace cues than they are to the more transformative interventions that we've seen, for example, bill clinton in the 1990s. >> host: kennedy in the form of intervention? >> guest: i point to the vietnam war, another reason why it's useful to look at eisenhower, kennedy, and johnson. they made decisions about the vietnam war, and that shows presidents looking at the same conflict make very different decisions.

kennedy decides that he believes the nature of south vietnam's institutions is one major reason they go communist, and he intervenes in a transformative way in south vietnam trying 20 build local institutions to connect the population closely to the central government in saigon, and he's really honing honing in on rebuilding in the 1906s. it doesn't work well, but i'm not trying to explain whether it works, but the model the president chooses, which even if it doesn't work, has profound consequences of the qai the intervention plays out in the ground. >> host: why is it important to know which model? >> guest: well, even if the president changes his mind and changes the model midstream or it doesn't work, you may see years of struggle on the ground

or a failed war. it's important to understand why the president goes in with a particular model of intervention. it's also important because presidents don't choose them in vacuums and make decisions in office that have consequences for how prepared they are to undertake interventions. they make staffing decisions, appoint people in the department of defense and department of state and national security council and all over the bureaucracy. they make budgetary decisions, decisions about the institutions 20 create and the pure rockty. all of these things come together and affect how prepared you are to undertake certain kinds of interventions. for example, if you appoint somebody secretary of defense who is not a fan of nation building, it means you are not as likely to undertake nation billing later on when you have to decide about intervening, and if you switch to that kind of policy later on, you're much less prepared. you've invested fewer resources

234 it. what you do in the beginning can have a lot of consequences on the ground. >> host: now, professor, you often mostly think of vietnam, we think of president johnson. you say he was in the non-transformative category. why? >> guest: this is also a really -- this is kind of a surprising finding for me. when i set out to look at johnson, i sort of had an image that we all have of johnson trying to export the great society. he's focused so much on the great society at home and wanted to export it abroad, and that's what people often argue he was doing in vietnam, but actually when i looked at what he was doing in vietnam, he -- it's not that he didn't care about the people and it's not that he didn't want to improve the domestic institutions of vietnam and, you know, in the largest sense hope it became a democracy, but that was not his war fighting strategy. his war fighting strategy was

much more in line with traditional army doctrine of search and destroy, go out, find the enemy, engage him in battle, and defeat him. there was somewhat later in the war an emphasis again on nation building, but it was considered -- in fact, they called it in the white house the other war. it was considered something separate from the war fighting strategy. it was never fully integrated into the war fighting strategy. for johnson, this was not a war of transforming vietnam into making it a different kind of state. when he takes over from kennedy and in a white house meeting he says i don't want so much of the do-gooding social programs that kennedy had been doing. i just want to get along and win the war, and he really viewed these issues as separate. he wanted to do right by the people, but he didn't necessarily attribute it to the way he was going to go and win the war. >> host: are there clues to the presidents going in besides

their appointees? can we hear it in their campaigns 1234 >> guest: that's another really interesting finding that sort of surprised me. so scholars are skeptical of the idea that presidents make this much of a difference in foreign policy which sounds surprising because we have a sense who is in the white house matters for foreign policy decisions. they attribute them to the international circumstances or the particular vagaries of american politics. they are appeared as strained. to show it's the president who matters, i had to show clearly the president came to office already with these beliefs of where threats come from already in place. they may say things under the pressures of decisions that don't reflect what they really believe, 10 what i did is i went and i looked back at the documents that they produced when they were, before they came

to the oval office. i looked at johnson's paper trail when he was a senator at a congressman, and i looked at kennedy's papers from the pre-presidential period and eisenhowers extremely extensive career before elected president. i went to the johnson library and kennedy library and eisenhower library. i focused on the pre-presidential collections in the libraries, and it turns out you really can see it. you can see that the presidents are going to conform to one of the two categories in advance, and, in fact, just to give you an example, in 1951, kennedy goes on a seven week tour of the middle east and asia with his brother, robert, among others, to go and have a look at the third world for himself and get a sense of what's going on in the third world, and he kept a diary, and he spent an extensive period in vietnam and saigon and talks there about how it's really the domestic institutions

that matter, and the french are not doing enough to really build up local institutions, and this is going to be the key to wing the war, and when he gets into office, that's exactly what he does. that's ten years before he's inaugurated, so there's case after case that you see this where what the president does before he comes to office tells you a lot. >> host: professor, in ten years if you write a follow-up and put president clinton, george w. bush, and president obama on here, how will you find that same evidence? two governors, one a senator for a couple of years, and then a state legislature as well. glg it's trickier without the long paper trail. these three made it easy for me because they wrote lots of stuff down, a lot of letters. this was not the age of e-mail. first, i'd look at the e-mails, assuming we can get a hold of it. i do think you have to take seriously what they say even though they don't necessarily

have a lot of experience. we have, for example, bill clinton, really challenging george hw bush in the campaign for coddling dictators and so forth, and there's a lot of evidence of differences between the two of them. for example, policy in somalia, george hw bush is reluctant to do anything in 1993. when he goes in, it's limited. we feed the people and don't get involved in local politics. when bill clinton comes in, the effort is expanded to include nation building. i do think you can see some patterns there. george w. bush came in with a clear stance against nation building, which i think influenced the decisions he made in terms of appointments appointing donald rumsfeld and rice saying we don't need the 82 nd airborne taking kids to

school. the shock and awe, surgical strike getting rid of saddam, but no intention to remake domestic institutions in iraq in the beginning. the ideas that we're going to take off the head, but leave the body in place, and the institutions are going to hold. it's, of course, later on when paul brenner arrives, there's a much more transformative goal and the goal of rebuilding iraq from the ground up becomes u.s. policy, but the fact that's not the way the united states went in has profound consequences for the next couple of years as the u.s. struggles to catch up with the new policy and build the resources to do it. it's not until 2006 that we get a real strategy for clear hold and build and so forth in iraq. obama is a tricky case. you might think that someone who spent a lot of time doing community organizing would be an

institution builder abroad, but i actually, you know, from what evidence we've seen, i think the more useful pieces of information from his previous background is his opposition to the iraq war which is what he's perhaps most famous for on the foreign policy front before his election. he was close to the iraq war and actions taken as president have to some extent reflected that. not very quick to jump on the anti-mubarak band wagon in egypt uprising. the 2009 surge in afghanistan. throughout that debate based on accounts we have, he is very much coming down on the side of joe biden and the more counter terrorism approach as opposed to rebuilding afghanistan from the ground up, very much consistently rejecting that approach throughout the debate and ultimately the policy that he chose. the libya intervention also a little bit more hands off, bombing from afar, not putting

boots on the ground, and others argue he's constrained by iraq and afghanistan, but that's a more external focus. >> host: most presidents don't campaign on foreign policy. they campaign on i want to be the education president or it's about the economy, ect.. is there a temptation or are there overwhelming forces that lead them to intervene worldwide because every president has intervened some way worldwide; correct? >> guest: even ones that declared they don't like the transforming kind, like george w. bush, ended up doing that intervention in the end, so i think that one question we have is do we have enough of these capabilities in the united states, or if we choose not to build them, should we be more careful about going in if we don't have the capabilities at hand? because we see the presidents getting sucked into interventions regardless of what

they say, but i think the -- the preparations they make based on the way they perceive threats, again, has profound consequences for the way these interventions play out on the ground and ones better prepared tend to do better as things go on. now, that's also true on the non-transformative side of the ledger. george hw bush prosecutes a successful war in the persian gulf, makes a decision not to to go all the way to baghdad and topple saddam in the early 1990, and that from a purely military perspective, of course, terrible human rights consequences, but from the military view, that's a good collaboration of ends and means. he was prepared to do a certain warfare, not prepared for the transformative kind, and said i'm not going further than i'm really ready to. >> host: ronald reagan. >> guest: he's a tricky one. he was -- you might think republicans tend to be more of

the non-transformative types -- aim for the more transformative types, and in general you see that. eisenhower is a good example. his intervention in lebanon was limited. ronald reagan was really one who crossed party lines i would say, and on this question. he was much more like a democrat in the sense that he really focused on the way other states are organized. the famous speech to the british parliament saying the soviet union will eventually collapse on its own accord. not a lot of intervention opportunities. they were small in scope. the lebanon intervention, and the great intervention, i argue, was relatively transformative, but also small. it's harder to trace in his case because of events on the ground, but the larger sweep of foreign policy, his push for democracy was much more on the transformative end of the spectrum.

>> host: professor, liz -- professor elizabeth saunders, what's your background? >> guest: teaching and my undergraduate degree was in physics and astrophysics. don't ask me questions about that because i can't answer them anymore, and i teach american foreign policy here at gw, a wonderful course to teach, and at the graduate level i teach ph.d. students advanced theories of foreign policy makes, and i study u.s. foreign policy of course and u.s. security. >> host: your first book? >> guest: it is. >> host: how did you go from physics to a graduate degree in whatting? >> political science at yale university. i was fascinated by science and history, and i certainly loved studying physics and i took lots of courses in college on government and public policy and i started off thinking i want to study nuclear weapons and then

began to get fascinated which was something -- combined the two interests, and i have a strong interest in that, but began to become fascinated by the question of why in the post-9/11 world, again, 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 confronted was, there was a pretty wide debate in the early part of that last decade over the nature of the threat and what to do about it, and that question just began to fascinate me, and the more i thought about it and the more i began to think about it in a research sense, it was obvious to me it had a lot to do with who was in power. >> host: leaders at war. who is it written for? graduate students, laymen? >> guest: a number of audiences. scholars of international relations, political scientists, historians. there's a lot of engagement with the work of cold war historians

in the book, and i hope it finds that audience. it's written for undergraduates and graduate students, and i hope it's of interest to anyone who is interested in the cold war broadly and how presidents influence our foreign policy. i deliberately tried to put all the jargony scholarly stuff in one chapter that you can skip if you don't want to dig into the weeds, 10 you can read the beginning and skip to the juicy bits about eisenhower, kennedy, and johnson which i think is the meat of the book. >> host: george washington university professor, elizabeth saunders, leaders at war is the book, how presidents shape military interventions. thank you. >> guest: thank you so much, it's been a pleasure. >> is there a nonfiction author or book you want to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv

booktv@c-span.org. >> host: what happened on march 25th, 1931? >> guest: march 25th, 1931, there was a number of black and white youth hoboing on a train in great depression america heading towards the south, a fight broke out among whites and blacks on the train. blacks won the fight, expelled most of the white hobos. the white hobos were outraged, reported they had been attacked, the report went out on telegraph wires when the train stopped outside of a small town in alabama called paint rock. there was a posse witting. they gathered up nine young black men, and as they searched the train, they subsequently found two white women dressed in overalls, which was customary for women when they are hoboed