sort of contributions. yes? >> yes. but i would like to explain the non-governmental organization in america has largely done two things in the modern era. one goes all the way back to before we can a country. the first ngo in the united states is the volunteer fire department benjamin franklin organized before the constitution was ratified. and he was doing old-fashioned work, 18th-century style. that is there's always going to be a gap between what the private sector will produce and the government can provide. we didn't have enough government to provide the government and they wanted enough players to make it profitable to be a private business. ..

that's the first time i met him, 11 years ago but we were talking to his kids because one of his kids was proud of the fact that he was a volunteer fireman in the little town where they lived where i established the fire department as governor because be set up 700 fire departments. we had the higher -- highest fire insurance rate in the country.

the gap between what the private sector can produce in the public sector can provide. the new additional and improved role for the ngos is to basically hopefully work with public institutions and with private institutions where appropriate to figure out how to do things faster, cheaper and better because unlike big business you don't have to turn a profit every quarter and unlike the government you don't have to be embarrassed if you fail. you can take a bad story. you can say i tried to do this, didn't work. were going to do it some other way. so that is what you do with schools. you go in there and you tried to figure out how to take otherwise statistically disadvantaged kids and prove they are just as smart as everybody else and they can learn things just like everybody else and having the chess tournaments and they organized the way you organize them will increase their learning levels. so i think that what we did with

cti america was a version of the latter. we tried to bring people together to think about what we can all do to create jobs and i think there are a lot of things, there are other examples where private foundations are creating employment directly in partnerships with public and private groups like in san diego which is now the genomics center of activity in america, the largest number of prize-winning scientist of any town in the country. they have the university of california san diego. they have qualcomm and 700 other i.t. companies. they have all these other things and they have other foundations there investing and all of them worked together on a common plan. that actually works in the modern world. cooperation works in real life. conflict works in politics and news coverage.

it does. i am not being cutesy here. it does. i'm just as guilty as the next person. i buy three mysteries for everyone serious book i get. >> i don't know if that is feeding conflict exactly. >> but, anyway you get the idea. we need the ngos to fill the gaps. the robinhood foundation funds both kinds of ngos. the harlem children's son does both kinds of work. so there are differences, but you get the picture. there is a real important role for ngos here because they take a lot of heat off of businesses who have to turn a profit. they take a lot of heat off government who want to try certain things but may be scared of getting too much heat if it fails. >> the states or the laboratory democracy and the 18th century

ngos the laboratory. >> and cities are too now. the only difference between now and when the framers wrote the constitution as the cities are just as much laboratories. look at all the things, they don't like bloomberg and putting up $100 million to build a whole new university lab center to generate high-tech jobs. i don't know who is going to get the contract. i wish the consortium of new york would get it. >> as the stanford alumni have two somewhat -- >> stanford is in competition for the money but the point is it is a heck of an idea. it's the way the world should work. i think it's wonderful. los angeles just unmasked best new consortium to have major retrofitted buildings that include putting up more solar power and how they were going to finance it and it is going to be the biggest commercial retrofit raw check the country has yet undertaken. they figured out how to do it.

my foundations climate change initiative worked with them but all we did was provide technical help and support. they figured out how to finance it. so the cities can do a lot of these things but the congress that we should not make decisions which makes those things more difficult. they should be empowering them and reporting and incentivizing them. >> it's an election day today. not in new york city but certainly in many cities across the country or call mayors are being elected or reelected in san francisco, baltimore, philadelphia, houston, phoenix and yet i don't think questions like this happened very central to the coverage in advance of even those local elections so albeit what you said earlier is credible, having been a governor certainly that people expect governors and mayors to have

full business. that seems to not be central to the discourse around even local elections. how do we make that more fundamental? and i know you are racing around the country trying to do that since you are not a scalable resource, although it an almost inexhaustible one. how do we think about that dynamic? >> i got to say i was wrong and now i say i don't know but i have some ideas about it. when i was a governor, i really worked hard in the national governors association in all these are regional associations and the education association and there were a lot of things we did when i was governor where arkansas was the first-aid, the first-aid to require counselors for kids in elementary schools. i was proud of that but i was

always more proud when we were the second state to do something because it showed that we weren't too proud to learn, that they were out there on the edge of learning. and one of the real problems in education and in health care and i will just use it because they both bear on the economy, is that a lot of the challenges america faces for example in providing health care at lower cost and higher-quality so we can afford to be competitive in other areas, although challenges have been that i somebody somewhere but the ideas don't travel. almost every challenge in american education has been met by somebody somewhere. the ideas don't travel. part of that is the competition when you have in the public sector a monopoly on revenues and customers and in the private sector where the status quo has more power, more resources and more lobbyists than the future

does. but one of the big challenges that i tried to talk a little bit about in the book would admittedly not having an answer to, is just do that. hoddy make these ideas travel? i will give an example. ask yourself how many of you do this. what city in america has the highest energy efficiency standards for new buildings? answer, the oil capital of america, houston, texas. white? >> which is why it is so important we have a mayor they there. they are. >> the then mayor that did it, bill white was the deputy secretary of energy when i was president. he had been my friend a very long time and i knew he knew a ton about oil and gas but he also wanted to build a modern energy economy. he gets elected mayor of houston. the first thing he does was retrofit every home of the 20%

of houston in sewer homeowners of low income. and then he had the highest new building standards in terms of energy efficiency of any city in north america except her vancouver canada, highest in the united states. he was reelected with over 80% of the vote and yet the idea didn't really travel so well. although they do travel better than you would think among cities. we need to think about that and the united states because a lot of the stuff can bubble up from the bottom up. if you look at this book that i wrote it while back and in my book i mention the next american economy by william j. holstein and he talks about these prosperity centers. we need to figure out how to have more than how people learn from each other on the basis of that. >> one thing i want to ask you about is something not in your luck but that came out

yesterday. the census bureau announced a new draft methodology for how we populate and assess property in the united states and is early hypotheses out of that new paradigm or that we have 49 million americans living in poverty, our highest absolute number ever. more elderly americans living in poverty than previously assessed largely because of higher out-of-pocket health care. although the vast majority of older americans are covered under medicare, medicare only covers 80% of and hospital expenses. ostensibly although still somewhat challenging given the absolute numbers of children living in poverty is actually lower than had and previously determined largely because of

chip and supplemental nutritional in programs, chiefly free school lunches in preschool breakfast. as you think about that new emerging data, how does that impact both what you diagnose as challenges in the book, chiefly around social security, sustainability and medicare sustainability and also your recommended prescriptions? >> first, the childhood poverty numbers are still appalling but they are smaller. the children's health insurance program, that is what chip is, was started when i was president and then expanded beginning i think in 2007. we had 5 million kids i think and now 10 million kids can get health insurance under it. they will be maintained and that number will be expanded, assuming the health care reform bill is implemented.

bad plus nutritional supplements like the school lunch program does lower the percentage of people who are in poverty. in fact, what has happened to the seniors is that even though the social security checks go up more than the real cost of living exclusive of the health care goes up for seniors. the cost of health care has gone up so much that it's really affecting older people, who are on medicare but as chelsea pointed out, 20% of the hospitals for example are not covered. if you are really poor and old you get medicaid two. so what has happened is especially since the states are busted right now and are lobbying against raising the eligibility level for medicaid what is happening is this money

is going up, the amount of money you have to pay out-of-pocket is going up and the number of older people who qualify for both medicare and medicaid is not going up to make the difference up. >> the stains aren't commensurately changing their medicaid parameters? >> yes and because of their budget problems they have got. for example in 2007, 2009 gdp has gone down 7.5%. most people worry about going broke. health insurance went up 50%. and 5 million americans lost their health insurance. some of them went on medicaid so ironically the private sector drove 3.5 million people to the public sector all the time bashing the public sector. the states didn't have the money to pay their medicaid and the federal government debt will

increase. so what do i draw from that? i draw from that the conclusion that one of the best things about the so-called simpson-bowles commission, the bipartisan budget commission, is that it recommends not only savings and social security programs but 200 le in over a decade. that sounds like a lot of money to you and me in the to the government budget it's not. they recommended to appropriately design in a way that channels more income to lower income seniors so that if we don't fix the health care gap problem at least those people will have enough money to be lifted out of poverty again and again be done with state money. >> one of the things that you say you believe in the book but don't go into detail is that the united states could actually move from spending 17.8% of our gdp on health care to spending 11.8% of our gdp on health care

which is what grants in switzerland spent on health care. that would save us about $187 billion a year. how would we do that? >> i would say the federal budget. it would save you $850 billion. that is, if we -- every year the pew charitable trust those in analysis of health outcomes in wealthy countries and they generally conclude that america ranks about 30th in the overall quality of health care. that's not fair. it's too low. but what is true is that germany and france are normally at the very top and it is true they get that her health incomes and spending less money. and it's also true that even if you had -- if you give us more

credit for being, for example having the longest breast cancer survival rates in the world than eating great of heart surgery, otherwise somebody else would be giving this talk tonight. >> by thank you. speak you still have to face the fact that we are not getting what we pay for and it's being driven primarily by the way we finance health care and d. for services. chelsea used to work for mckinsey about three years ago. >> i didn't get the stanford credit. >> mckenzie issued three, 3-volume study trying to analyze the differences between what we spend for health care in america and put other rich countries spend, and they essentially concluded that the biggest deal

was fee-for-service medicine instead of paying overall enrollment, which dartmouth and other people say has led to about 40% of the american people getting health care that is likely to be more expensive than they should get in not getting the optimum care. the second was the way we finance it with a lot of insurance companies which adds a massive amount to the administrative cost was not just the insurance company but also the insured and if you have insurance on the job, then it's more paperwork for the medical providers, or the employers and for the insurance companies themselves. it's about a 250 billion-dollar item that we wouldn't pay if we had the administrative costs in any other country. the third thing is we pay more for medicine than anybody else but if we bargain more we can do that. that is about 75, 80% of the

biz -- difference. the biggest chunk left is about $150 billion because we have higher rates of diabetes than any other country in the world with its intended consequences which is why childhood obesity is the number one public health problem in the country in my opinion. and their other things that make up about 5%. >> given that we are almost out of time, if you wanted to ensure a clarion call to action or one fact that would help lead to more facts face to face as we move tomorrow from this election day moving toward the next election day, next november, what would it need?

>> if i could only say one thing i would say everyone should at least be involved where they live in trying to support state and local initiatives that do bring government in and the private sector and ngos together to do what we did at the cgi of america meeting, start with where you are. this is still the biggest economy on earth. as much as i worry about the retirement of the baby boomers and i know one of them, i worry about them. you should feel good about this. 10 years ago when i was about to leave the presidency might then hometown of arkansas had a terrible tornado that ripped up the oldest part of the city. and all african community next-door was virtually leveled where i had worked 20 years. i went down and i had dinner with 20 people, a barbecue. i hate rb queue with 20 people i

went to high school with. besides me only two others had finished college. besides me only two ever made more than $50,000 a year. their number one goal was that their retirement this going to impair their children's ability to raise their grandchildren. whenever you give up on america, you just remember that. people make rational decisions based on what they know. now, in spite of all that, our average workforce ages still younger than europe and japan, the other long-standing wealthy places. canada aba a little bit younger than us but not much. it's easier to start a small business here than almost any other place. we still have these laboratory

supports for r&d that most countries don't have. we have a lot of indigenous stakes here. we have a better venture capital network and other things, so, and we know what we need to do and there's plenty of money to bring the economy back if we figure out how to unleash the money and corporate treasuries and in banks. i am not pessimistic but they are doing this kabuki dance in washington now over the same old thing we have been debating since we were told in 1981 that government is the problem. it is in. it may be but it's not the only problem and it has to be part of the solution. so my view is if i can tell you to do one thing it would need you know, starting come up with doing, find something to support in your community and in the state here and use that as evidence to try to change, break the logjam in washington. because there is not a single --

one of the most important points in this book is i go through all these other countries that are now ahead of us in certain industries, frost or -- faster broadband download speeds, higher percentage of young people in college, less income inequality, faster job growth, lower unemployment. there is not a single example on planet earth of a successful country that got their on an antigovernment strategy who said the most important thing you can ever do is never attack somebody and they local income group. not one of the 33 oecd countries we are 31st in the percentage of national income going to taxes. mexico and chile are lower than we are. we are like 25th in the

percentage of national income going to spending because of all the money we had to come up with to avoid the calamitous consequences of the financial collapse. so, i want you to change national policy, but we have to somehow find a way to break this psychology and i find i i am happier if i have something to look forward two in the morning so i don't just gripe all the time. if you ask me one thing you can do, make something good happen. go hire somebody. i have a friend of the company which is the largest mass mailing company in the country. if you get "sports illustrated" every month, you got it from them. and most other magazines. on november 1, they challenged every company in the united states with 50 or more employees to hire one more person. they said if everybody, even

walmart, just hired one more person everybody with 50 or more people could afford to do it, there would be another million people working within a month and it would change the psychology of america. just do something. and then you will be able to tell the members of congress what you did and asked them to follow suit. >> thank you all very much. i hope you will do that and why the book. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. [applause] for more information on president clinton's book, back to work go to knopf doubleday.com. >> on your screen is the center

of the university of texas at austin campus. booktv has been on location here at the university of texas conducting interviews with some of their professors who are also authors. every sunday during the month of november we will be bringing you those interviews at 1:00 p.m. eastern time as part of our university series. speakers a short author interview from c-span's campaign 2012 bus as it travels the country. >> mr. waterman set the stage for this book. what is it based on and take us through what readers can expect. >> the book is based on my time in the navy in the 1920s -- 1964 to 1977. the reason i wrote the book was i was speaking to my cousin one day about how i hadn't done

anything. he looked at me with this funny look and he said, haven't done anything? you have done stuff people just get to read about. i went, maybe that is the idea. so i went home and i talked to my wife. she said yeah, you have done a lot of stuff. i said like what? she said just start writing. just ride it out. just write a chapter. just write each event like a chapter in figure out the timeframe when it could and then clean it up. so i did. as i wrote it, i mentioned to some people that i was writing a book about my experiences and they said oh yeah i remember doing things like that. what turned out once it was published, i got feedback over the internet from guys saying like, this reminded me a lot of the stuff i did and got away with and lived through, so it had an appeal for most any young

kid who joined the military. i was 18 when i went in and i was 31 or something like that when i got out of active duty. i still meet people who have read it and save boy that was great. i loved it. a reminded me of some of the things that went on then i was in the service. so i said well maybe i got one. >> you write in detail about the circumstances which led you into the branch of the armed forces. can you explain how you ended up serving in the navy and the capacity that you served? >> i was interested in scuba diving but i've sort i put a sort of put it aside and i had gotten into photography and running the dark room was someone was on vacation. i learned a lot of things from that, but i decided my only

option in my into puny a situation was to join the military if i want to get out of rocklin maine and do something interesting. so one day i was down at the post office where the recruiters were that i was going to go see the router -- recruiters. the only one that was there was a navy recruiter and i spoke to him for a while, a real nice guy. i told him what i had in mind and i said i'm going to quit high school and get out of town. he said don't quit high school. stay in and i will guarantee you will get in school. i stayed the extra two or three months or whatever it was and graduated and went into the navy and the rest is history. i do choose did choose to be a photographer, which is kind of the closest thing that i could think of that i was doing on the outside and ended up later becoming a diver.

>> you talked about what people thought about military service in the 1960s. can you explain how you feel it was the event and how you talk about it in your book? >> it was actually worse than what i talked about in the book. after i got back from vietnam, 69 i got that but i went back to the east coast and a friend of mine and i used to go to washington and take pitchers of these demonstrations. we didn't have an opinion about it but i couldn't believe the stuff that was being said about the vietnam veterans. they were portrayed as druggies and cases and people who couldn't make it on the outside and things of that nature. later on, i found, this was basically -- they had a better chance of getting a job and less of a site in less drug addiction than the general population and

so on. so i didn't think too much of the way we were treated and i never had anybody spit on me as can be proven by the fact that i was not in prison. we sort of didn't pay a lot of attention to that. we hung around with people who were of our same way of thinking and we didn't pay any attention to it to the most part. >> there are a lot of books written about individual experiences during vietnam. what makes yours different or sets it apart? >> well, based on like i say, information, feedback from the book, guys are saying this is not just another one of those me, me, me vietnam books. i'd give people credit where credit is due and any ideas that came out, love to help other people succeed if possible.

there are some interesting stories and a fair bit of humor in there. i tried not to get too technical and in cases where he did use technical stuff i put a footnote for the most part so it is fairly easy to understand. i don't put a lot of acronyms and things and like most military books do. the photos are i hate to say it, very good and i think they are 80 or something like that in this book. the first edition that was printed by random house was poor quality. it was a paperback but this thing is on acid free paper and its dig print for us old guys to read. that's about a. >> the very specific event that you raise in your book that stands out in your mind? by i guess the first time i was shot at. ice kind of remember that and i

found out you don't have to be shot at very many times to spend 30 seconds out on the fairway. it didn't mess me up, but in one case it did have an effect on me was one of the vietnamese guys we were working with mutilated the corpse of a dead -- i didn't hate the viacom because i've never been captured by them or anything like that. i was never shot or wounded myself but i worked with people who hated the vietnamese for some reason. i just felt that they were in a bad situation we were trying to help them and we they were not very successful. but that's another story. >> the c-span campaign 2012 bus visits communities across the country. to follow the buses travel skip

visit www.c-span.org/bus. >> next george mason university's colin dueck talk to booktv about his most recent book, "hard line." it's about 20 minutes. >> host: colin dueck is at george mason university and also the author of this book, "hard line" the republican party and u.s. foreign policy since world war ii. professor dudek, what is hardline mean? 's phos the title because they think it sums up one of the main arguments in the book which is that the republican party since the 1950s and had a foreign-policy approach that tends to be hardline by which i mean hawkish on foreign-policy, taken seriously with the idea that there are threats out there to the united states and trying to be kind of uncompromising in the face of those threats.

that it's been pretty consistent that there is also a friday in the sense of what the particular republican approach has been under a group particular republican president. >> host: that was my next question. 67 years at the end of world war ii, about 66 or 67 years and 34 those of us here is that had republican president. has there have been a consistency amongst those republican presidents? >> guest: the main consistency is than the one i just, we just described the idea that the u.s. has been engaged under republican presidents with an isolationist republican president since the 20s. that has been the consistency. variety though has been that somebody like let's save roche 41 senior and bush 43, bush jr. followed very different foreign policies in some ways and the two of them differed from richard nixon and ronald reagan as well. >> host: how are the two bushes different from ronald

reagan? >> guest: the first bush for example, his emphasis was on stability, prudence, precaution. he was trying to preside over dramatic changes and maintain u.s. national interests and was pretty successful in doing that. bush 43 after 9/11 was convinced of an approach that was much more idealistic, that the u.s. would try to undercut support for terrorists lie invading iraq, democratizing, very different from what his father's approach had been. >> host: now in your book, "hard line" you have chapters as well on barry goldwater and robert taft. why? >> guest: i chose those two because they were senators who are particularly good indicators of republican opinion, at crucial moments. goldwater of course was the republican nominee for president in 64. tapper and repeatedly never quite one. taft represents an era in the 30s and 40s where most republicans especially

midwestern republicans were more anti-interventionist. one of the main stories in the book is how republicans eventually abandoned that tradition and you have the success of eisenhower and more international publicans by the 50s but it took a long time and in some ways it is never completely faded if you think about somebody like ron paul today. he's kind of in that taft tradition. i chose goldwater because he was such an important figure as the republican party moved to become more conservative, more southern, more western and actually more hawkish on foreign-policy and that is what goldwater was. he was a very important transition figure even though he lost the presidential election. he pointed the way towards other republican nominees like reagan and bush 43. >> host: robert taft ran for president once, twice? >> guest: he ran in 48 and 52, yes. >> host: was he not elected

because of the isolationist policy? >> guest: that was one of the reasons. i think especially for more moderate republicans, for northeastern republicans, sort of established in the northeast but that was an unacceptable position. by that time the time taft interested me was criticizing for not hang tough enough on -- by 52 he actually, it's his staunch anti-communist and that wins him over to a posture of cold for assertiveness and foreign-policy and what he and eisenhower had was tactical differences in some ways. they disagreed on how much of the land commitment the u.s. should have been here for example that by the early 50s taft was pretty hard line on anti-communist foreign-policy. >> host: you begin your book at the end of world war ii. is this a reaction, a republican reaction to the fdr presidency? >> guest: i think republicans were definitely inclined to oppose fdr in many cases including his foreign-policy because they just oppose him so

bitterly on the domestic side. that was part of it. you see those parties back and forth and they associated fdr's new deal with this liberal internationalism that have one 11 actor in a force of some of the more conservative republicans were skeptical about the idea that the u.s. should play a leading role through multilateral organizations like united the united nations after world war ii. >> host: when you hear the phrase, partisan politics stops at the waters said, what do you think? >> guest: well i mean it doesn't but a couple of reasons is for one thing democrats and republicans have differences and liberals and conservatives have differences on how america should be involved in the world. so in that sense these are principled disagreements and they show up in partisan politics. also of course both parties use foreign-policy sometimes as a political instrument to critique the other side.

it's just one more element of partisan politics. sometimes regardless of what the president is saying or doing. you see that as well. >> host: ronald reagan won the cold war. >> guest: i think ronald reagan played a auto part in the cold war. the way that he did it was to ramp up treasure across the board when he took over in 1981 military and economically, diplomatically, ideologically. i think that was one of the factors that forced the soviet union to really rethink its approach on gorbachev. >> host: did the end of the cold war changed republican foreign politics? >> guest: it did. as well america had to decide, where do we go next? what should america's role in the world by? for the republicans especially communism was such a unifying force during the cold war. left republican sort of confused and divided.

there was that pat buchanan win, the isolationist wing in the 1990s and the more realist kissinger type school of thought. there were american nationalists who believe in mary -- military strength and i think george w. bush ended those disagreements for a while for through the conflict of the war on terror that they have resurfaced today with barack obama's president we see that. >> host: professor dueck when clinton was president jimmy carter was president, was there a vast change in american foreign policy? >> guest: i think carter actually tried to bring change. he was probably the only cold war president that believes you could get beyond the cold war unilaterally. i think he thought 77 when he came in he could decide issues like human rights and north-south issues and try to move beyond what he called subordinate fear of communism.

it turned out that the union actually thought the cold war was still continuing so it was difficult to declare an end of it and by the end of his presidency he was back to the more cold warrior position. lyndon johnson you mentioned and he is best known for his foreign-policy. actually most republicans at the time were very firm on the idea that johnson should fight in vietnam. they criticize johnson for not standing up aggressively enough to communism in vietnam. that was the republican position in the johnson years if anything to be more aggressive against north vietnam. >> host: who makes foreign-policy? who creates foreign policies? is at the intellectuals? is that the scholastic types or is the president's? >> guest: its president. the influence of intellectualism is overrated.

probably the best example in recent years is neoconservatism. a lot of people are sold on the subject of neoconservatism and if you look at the bush years talking about george w. bush it was president bush that made the key decisions whether to invade iraq and how to invade iraq, how to follow-up with actions later on. sometimes he did it in ways -- so if soot into the day you had a group of intellectuals who were influential but they were not making policy and they were about as influential as he gets when it comes to foreign-policy intellectuals. foreign-policy is not make the intellectuals. it's made by residents. >> host: what is neoconservatism? >> guest: the word is usually a version of the foreign public policy approach which is particularly hawkish. i believe the u.s. should promote democracy in the world even by force if necessary. and you know, this is something where their roots in the broader

american tradition. it's not exactly unheard of in american history so i think the word is sometimes overused. that concept of neoconservativism taps into a lot of broader republican tradition but most republicans are pretty hawkish on american foreign policy when it gets right down to it. to say that it was just neoconservatives have somehow pushed george bush into iraq is really not accurate. >> host: colin dueck u.s. foreign policy since world war ii, your chapter and richard nixon is entitled richard nixon and henry kissinger. why? >> guest: because henry kissinger was just an exceptionally important figure. i only include a handful of people that were not presidents and nixon and kissinger really were a team. at the end of the day nixon made up his -- decision. kissinger is probably the best

living representative today of a certain string of republican foreign-policy thought which i would call realism, and that emphasizes balance of power, the international behavior of other countries, not their internal behavior. it needs to carefully coordinate diplomacy. the kissinger approaches very different from the bush approach. and very different from the reagan approach. and so i think kissinger is deserving of special mention for that reason. >> host: richard nixon went to china in 1972. what that that due to republican foreign-policy expectations? >> guest: well at the time it was a popular move. with the general voting public it was popular. in congress, there was a group of conservative kind of consistently conservative public who were very skeptical because

mousey tongue is a horrible dictator and you know a long-term foe what the united states presiding over the system so they didn't like it but actually the mainstream response by the states as this makes perfect sense. it is created, it's practical, it's constructive, it's helpful so why not do it? that was the mainstream view at the time. actually that particular move as is that of long-standing legacy by any president since. >> host: dwight david eisenhower first republican president after world war ii, did he set the tone for republican foreign-policy? >> guest: i think it was very important because it was not obvious until eisenhower came in that the average country would engage foreign-policy in the world. a lot of republicans were more skeptical comment eisenhower made it very clear when he became president that he was

going to leave the republican party in a more international direction. and it stayed there. they never was a republican president during the cold war that ever really repeated that. >> host: what would you consider to be ike's successes and failures in foreign-policy? >> guest: i think on the whole he was a very successful foreign-policy president. i think he avoided unnecessary wars. there were implications over taiwan and indochina, berlin where he managed to maintain a firm line tip will medically and militarily without actually entangling the u.s. in anwr. so that was very useful. he also managed to strike a balance between the fiscal responsibility and the u.s. diplomatic role and insisted on a cab to military spending with percentage of gross to

mr. robert in spite of a lot of drescher. he kept it there and by the way was much higher than today. it was almost 10% throughout eisenhower's ears so that was the context of the time. >> host: what about the coups that he was, that he got the u.s. involved in, iran, guatemala? >> guest: there's no question he was a very assertive cold warrior. it's ironic because one of the criticisms john f. kennedy made of the eisenhower gears when kennedy ran in 1960 is that eisenhower had not done enough to preserve cold war policies. actually eisenhower did a great deal and as you just mentioned he would perceive covert action because he thought of it as a low-cost way to contain communism or even in some cases roll it back. it turns out in the case of iran, the iranian leader at the time was really a iranian nationalist or you know, so that is his eyes been a controversy

right up to the present. but the idea that eisenhower was suggested as sitting on his hands, very far from the truth. >> host: gerald ford? >> guest: he is underrated. he is often thought of as a caretaker. in a lot of ways he was impressive, intelligent. he was kind of a mainstream conservative, internationalist. i think he did his best under the circumstances. it was a very difficult time are u.s. foreign policy because republican congress was completely fed up with the memory of vietnam and the possibility of anything that might resemble vietnam, were talking 74, 75, 76. vietnam with its allies, cuba for example were quite assertive and promoting socialist revolutions in part of africa and other parts of the world and if you read kissinger's memoirs to see it was a very difficult time to preside over

foreign-policy. ford was attacked from both the left and the right. attacked from the left for supposedly propping up dictatorships and attacks from the right for not being tough enough on the soviet union. that is where reagan came from. reagan actually ran against ford in the primaries in 1976 thing they did taunt had failed and the answer was to be even tougher. ford got it from both directions. >> host: what you teach your george mason? >> guest: i teach foreign-policy come international security, u.s. defense policy and ever a friday of courses both graduate and undergraduate. i worked at offered and then prints them. >> host: our economic interest important in foreign-policy? >> guest: i think sometimes they are overestimated actually for the importance. i didn't really find major decisions for war and peace for example are shaped by frilly

narrow economic interest. it is not as though presidents get on the phone and ask the leaders of major oil companies, should we invade iraq or something like that. i think the broad context is pretty much every president wants to maintain a system which is open to peaceful exchange and this is kind of part of the american division of the liberal economic order. that is an important factor but the idea that special interest drives big decisions i find to be true. on trade policy there you find interest group activity. when you have a shift for example like today, why is it that it's so hard to get through congress with columbia? is because they are strong in congress and the president is very aware of that. >> host: what do you think has been the biggest failure of republican foreign-policy in the

last six years? >> guest: i think the failure of the bush administration was to adequately prepare for the post-war phase of iraq, to really seriously think through what would be required once the war was over and then you have to re-create some kind of order. i don't think the president bush prepared adequately for that. now to his credit, eventually he got it right. took a few years but i think that the surge some credit is due because he could have just walked away. a lot of people were calling on him to just walk away. if you remember in 2060 is very unpopular to be in iraq. he stakes his staked his presidency on the surge as it was called the network. if it hadn't been for the surge iraq would have been much worse shape today and would have continued to spiral in absolute violent civil con -- combat.

bush had this quality of very tenacious almost debra ness and sometimes he got it right and sometimes you got it wrong but it was sort of a package deal. it ended up to be useful for the surge. >> host: why is it that it in public opinion polls democratic presidents are more popular than republican presidents? >> guest: when you say abroad, you may really be talking about western europe. be fined for example bush actually was not unpopular you know in africa, israel, the philippines, poland. where he really was unpopular within western europe and the contrast the strikes is western europe. the people talk about world opinion that is where. you can also ask yourself what is it amount to? what specific concessions has government made in france and

germany because of a more or less popular american president? it doesn't really amount to much in concrete policy. government. >> host: professor dueck to presidents get credit for less than major or different foreign-policy such as president bush in africa where he increased aid to africa and in christ they aids budget etc.. do they get credit for those more or less sideline issues? is that fair to call them sideline issues? >> sometimes they don't get as much credit as they should. i think you their member 2008, a lot of potential is put on that initiative is i think the bush administration was rightly proud of it and want to highlight it and they knew was something also that was not especially controversial. so, but you know at the end of the day you have to say the defining decision and wash was the invasion of iraq and he is going to be judged on that one way or the other. we have yet to see how it turned

out. right now it is 2011. i mean you know we will see over period of years iraq stabilizes and whether it has democracy and bush will continue to be judged and be judged based on how iraq turns out. >> host: how did you get interested in this topic? >> guest: i can't remember when i wasn't. i have always finished in this topic. >> you are watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2's booktv. >> if you would walk down the streets of philadelphia, walk down the streets of new york in the 1850s and asked somebody what is the most pressing problem facing america at this time they would have told you this but terry and complex, the fact that the catholics are trying to take over. they're trying to take over america. and there was rumored that the pope was going to come and establish headquarters in cincinnati. [laughter] why cincinnati i don't know but i would think the pope would

have better sense in that. nevertheless, this was the rumor. he was going to establish its headquarters of the jewish hospital in cincinnati. now you get this connection. it's a conspiracy and you know americans love conspiracies and this was part of the conspiracy. so far nothing about slavery. these guys are bent on destroying the roman catholic church and as one minister said exterminating roman catholics. so, the german protestant immigrant came over and he was one of the great political cartoonist of the day in the 1850s and 1960s. he gave a santa claus and the new democratic donkey and the republican elephant and here he has a cartoon, question many

people couldn't read in those days but they couldn't back understand cartoons. here he is a cartoon which shows, you may think these are crocodiles coming ashore but actually they are the roman catholic church and they're coming to take her children. in the background is not the white house that it is the st. peter's cathedral. although you can't see it, up here it says tammany hall and tammany hall of course is a democratic party organization of new york. thomas nast was a republican. the republican party was the first major evangelical party and america founded in 1854 and it brought together the anti-catholic wing of the party with the anti-slavery wing. and here is the anti-catholic wing of the party. the american patriot.

it was a party newspaper for the american party which eventually folded into the republican party. they are opposed to aggression and roman catholicism. their post to foreigners holding office, pose to none reason to the gesso wittes. opposed to secret foreign orders and so on. they wanted to restrict immigration but particularly restrict the rights of roman catholics to vote and to hold office. now, the republican party was the offspring of these two strains. the anti-slavery strain and the anti-catholic strain. when i say anti-slavery keep in mind that the republican party, most of the people in the republican party did not care about slavery where it already existed. they wanted to keep the territories light. they wanted to keep the slaves out of the territories, so white

men could have opportunity there because they believe that anyplace where slaves go whites cannot compete obviously because slaves don't take wages. so the republican party billed itself as the white man's party. here you have abraham lincoln and he is debating stephen douglas in that famous 1858 senatorial campaign. the republican party slogan that year was vanquished the twin despotisms, catholicism and slavery. going hand-in-hand. now i should tell you in full disclosure that abraham lincoln was not a religious figure. in fact he hated to religious bigotry but he swallowed the republican party line, because it was very effective among the republican party base. hue effort in politics, get out the base, get out the