gospels. and this book, an early french book, is open to an illustration of st. mark. and mark, who would have been an early christian saint, is shown more as a medieval scribe. so it gives us a little bit of an idea of how, um, the artist of this type of book would have looked working at a tilted stand, he's writing his manuscript in this case on a scroll rather than on the pages. and st. mark is accompanied by his attribute, a lion. and just in the teeth of the lion he's holding what we believe is a penner which was a place where the medieval scribe would have kept his quill pen and other supplies. so the artist of this illustration gives us a little indication of how the illustrations were made. and then the final, um, book of

hours in our exhibition is one by a dutch artist, and it is open to illustrations of two of the saints to whom prayers would have been offered, in this case st. catherine of alexandria on the left and strt barbara on the right. and the unknown artest -- artist of this book of hours is referred to as one of the masters of the dark eyes because of the stylistic tendency to show, um, the faces with eyes heavily lined in dark colors to emphasize the eyes. and this is a style listic characteristic and shown in the individual portraits of the saints, each with her own attribute celebrating her martyrdom. we think this is a great way to learn about the middle ages and about the cultural life of the history, um, in the middle ages.

religion was a very important part of daily life. the books of hours were prayer books that laypeople, not the clergy, but the average person, would have and be would use to guide their devotional life. so in looking in the books of hours, you can get some of the sense of how medieval people approached, um, their daily life through their prayers and a sense of what they found beautiful in the use of rich materials, the gold applied, um, to the illustrations and, um, a general enjoyment of, um, all that nature has to offer. >> interviews from beaumont, texas, are being featured all weekend long on booktv. for more information visit c-span.org/localcontent. >> i am destler spoke to booktv about his -- i.m.

destler spoke to booktv about his latest book. this interview was recorded at the horn library, and it's about 40 minutes. >> the name of the book is "in the shadow of the oval office." simon & schuster published it, and, professor i.m. destler is the co-author along with ivo daalder. professor destler, when did the position of national security adviser come about? >> guest: formally, it was presented by president eisenhower in 1953 because he wanted a person or personal policy aide to manage a very elaborate policy planning process. but what we call the modern job of national security adviser was created semi-accidentally by john f. kennedy when he brought george bundy to the white house, and the message was i have this

job that's available called president's -- called assistant to the president for national security affairs. would you like it? and kennedy knew exactly what he didn't want. he didn't want an eisenhower-type planning process. it only evolved gradually when people learned what he did want. but what he did want was a person close at hand who would be sure that he got the range of options and choices on particular issues that fed him information, that connected him to officials at various levels of the permanent government, that to the degree possible did not undercut the secretaries of state and defense, but nevertheless, made the president very much at the center of policy. >> host: what was the eisenhower model that he created at least in theory? ing? well, eisenhower model was that you wanted to have a broad planning process that engaged all the agencies and decided what our basic policy approach should be to the major issues, the major parts of the world.

so it could have been what should our basic defense posture be, it could have been what should our policy toward thailand be. i mean, they got very detailed, very specific, and they would have interagency committees -- usually chaired by the state department -- get together and draft documents that were essentially nsc policy documents say what the policy should be toward this part of the world. and why and what the u.s. goals were. and then these would come up through the system, and they would go to the national security council. eisenhower would preside over this meeting. now, the nsc itself was created by the national security act of 1947. and it was established to give -- the people who pushed it wanted, essentially, to constrain the president by forcing him to meet with his primary advisers before he made decisions. because they recalled that franklin roosevelt made decisions the way he wanted to, and they didn't like that. and so, now, president truman

was -- created -- was pleased when the national security council was created by law as part of the national security act of 1947, but he didn't want it to constrain him. he said the president is president, there's no committee making policy, we're not a cabinet system. therefore, when the, when it came time to have a meet, he convened a meeting, invited all the senior people, basically a handful of people -- secretary of state, secretary of defense, etc. -- and then they had a number of subsequent meetings that he just decided not to go to, so he would demonstrate his independence. it was only when the korean war broke out that truman started to meet regularly with the nsc. eisenhower considered it rather differently. eisenhower, also, was very much president, and he very much saw himself as the decision maker, but he placed a much higher value on regular, weekly meetings of this high-level committee. and so he would -- just about

every week he was this town, there was a national security council meeting. and they would typically consider these policy papers which had been labored over by the various agencies as i said earlier. it might be anything from our overall defense policy to policy towards thailand or yugoslavia or somewhere. and the, and then there would be a, basically, it would be a decision at the meet, but there would be a paper issued by the national security council staff essentially saying this is our policy this further considered toward the world. so there would be a lot of -- eisenhower thought it was a good idea to have. he didn't think when there was a crisis everybody was just going to pick out the paper and read it and follow it assiduously. he knew the crisis would be different from anything planned, but he thought having groped with it, having faced the issue together was good. he's believed to say plans are worthless, but planning is everything. >> host: well, professor destler, what did the role of

the national security adviser, how was it viewed by the state department who had originally served in that capacity? >> guest: well, when the original idea of the national security council was created, the state department was very concerned because secretary of state marshall at the time saw this as something that potentially could challenge the heart of the state department's authority. now, early incarnations of the nsc, then the national security adviser were trying to be careful not to do that, to give the state department the primary role short of the president in the nsc and to make sure it didn't infringe on the state department's turf. um, but tension began seriously during the kennedy administration because while the president and mitch george bundy himself, national security adviser, i'm convinced they did not seek to undercut the state department, but they saw it -- they sought above all to present

actions to the president, to assess matters, to work with the people who were responsive to the president, sometimes to work around the people who weren't. and dean rusk, the secretary of state -- a very capable man -- did not really mess with the president. and he was very uncomfortable with this new version of the national security adviser. so when eisenhower was president, he had had this man for planning, and he had had almost secretly another man who later became famous, andrew goodpastor, fs who was his operational aide. he handled everything from the cia intelligence operations to getting people together when you had to make a decision about the suez canal and the british-french invasion. but andy, as he was universeally called, was very low profile and was, and was not -- his role was not publicized. eisenhower's administration the way to publicize -- went out of their way to publicize the process. so critics landed on them and

said these guys don't though what they're doing, and eisenhower in a sense asked for it because of the way he concealed or semi-concealed part of his process. but in any case, kennedy people come in and say we don't want the planning process, but this assistant to the president, that seems useful. let's see what happens. well, bundy comes in, he's very smart. he does a lot of stuff for the president, but everybody else does to. and then along comes something called the bay of pigs which is a famous fiasco, an effort to send cuban exiles to cuba to overthrow the government of fidel castro. it was a badly-planned operation. the people who planned it assumed that kennedy would necessarily send u.s. troops when it was about to fail. kennedy made it clear in that no way was he going to send u.s. troops. so it was a disaster. there was -- >> host: george bundy have a role in that? >> guest: well, george bundy had a role, but not a dominant role, and he didn't really control the process. what happened was the cia people, the advocates -- particularly a very bright guy

named richard bissell -- controlled the process. and bundy, in fact, wrote a letter which i discovered in the kennedy high prayer later to the president offering his resignation saying i wish i had served you better during the cuban crisis. but what happened was, i mean, this the immediate aftermath eisenhower -- i mean, kennedy said i've got to bring a military person in, because they have got to get control of the military and cia, so he brought in general maxwell taylor. everything should go through bundy. and bundy, who had been up until then sitting across the parking lot in the executive office of the president looked around and said, i've got to be in the white house. i've got to be in the white house building, not just the white house formally. i've got to be within one minute of the president. and so he looked around, and white house space wasn't as much used then. it turned out there was this area in the basement that was used for storing files of all things. so bundy sort of said i and my staff are her important than

files, so he managed to get, persuade, i guess, ken o donald who was the person to give him space. so they got crowded offices for himself, a couple of his aides, secretary in the white house. which meant that when the president buzzed, he could be there in one minute, just has to go up the stairs and around to the oval office. and that was very important because kennedy was the sort of person who liked to do -- when he had a question, he liked a quick answer. if bundy had a piece of information, he liked to go upstairs, tell it to the president if president was available, you know, do it in one or two minutes. the kennedy administration was a very bang-bang administration. kennedy hated people who lectured him, a little like obama. he thought he understood things, just tell me what's new, tell me what's interesting. >> host: and who was george bundy before he came to the white house? >> he was dean of harvard college, and some people felt he

was the de facto president of harvard college because he was very smart, he brought lots of impressive people to the harvard faculty. he was surprisingly popular among the faculty for a person of that position, and kennedy had gotten to know him because kennedy was on the harvard board of overseers. kennedy was a harvard grad, and he had, and he was, of course, senator from massachusetts. so kennedy saw george bundy operate with the overseers, and he was impressed with that. so that made him -- so that's where he came from. and he wasn't, he had -- he had previous hi written a -- previously co-written the them memoirs of henry stimson, a very important figure in world war ii and before that. he had not done major work inside government before, but people sometimes thought correctly that if he could manage a bunch of ordinary, independent harvard professors, he could probably manage in

government, too, which turned out to be the case. >> host: did president john soften have a national -- johnson have a national security adviser? >> guest: he had two. the first one he had was named george bundy. he inherited bundy, and bundy served him until ma of 19 -- march of 1966, so almost as long as he served kennedy. initially, johnson first of all was desperate to keep the kennedy people. he wanted it for legitimacy, he wanted it for continuity, and he needed them. he didn't have the background, he didn't have the staff people who had that sort of substantive expertise. at the same time, he resented them because he felt that they looked down on him whether true or not. and so sometimes things are self-fulfilling. if you think that and the relationship evolves, maybe eventually bundy did look down a little bit on johnson. anyway, early on he needed bundy very much. he even invited george bundy's mother to the white house when she was in town so as to help

persuade bundy to stay on. but he then, but they came apart. bundy pushed very hard for expanding our involvement in vietnam which most of us feel was probably his most agrege juice mistake -- egregious mistake as policy. he later regretted and a sort of mea culpa. but he wanted the president to speak out, be articulate and defend the policy. johnson wanted to conceal what he was doing as long as possible so he could get his domestic program through. and he felt if i speak out, they're going to take away my great society, they're going to take away my program as soon as they have this excuse that we're in a war, so i want to keep it secret, the fact that i made these big decisions i want to keep secret. bundy thought that was very bad. and they came to a head when bundy was invited to debate hans morgan thaw, a prominent realist

critic, and bundy accepted without johnson, asking johnson first. and then johnson managed to decide that bundy just had to go to the dominican republic at precisely that time to be an emergency envoy. so he sent him to the dominican republic. bundy had to cancel, but then he came back and felt an obligation, so he rescheduled. he then, he absolutely wiped morgan thaw out very ruthlessly, and in some respects and unfairly, he found some positions that looked very bad. he just generally, you know, generally was a much superior debater. and the public view was that johnson was pleased. johnson was actually furious. he told one of his aides, bill boyars, later famous as a television commentator, that he would be very happy to receive bundy's resignation. boyars didn't tell bundy that, but he thought that, you know,

johnson was sort of blowing off, and he didn't want to -- but anyway, the relationship wasn't the same. and when the foundation called bundy and asked him if he'd be interested in being president of the ford foundation, bundy said yes. and then johnson chose a convinced advocate of what we were doing in vietnam to fight the north seat that meese communists, and he was also reassuring to the president in terms of, you know, you're on the right track, you know? abraham lincoln was criticized, everybody was criticized too. you're just being tough, you're being good. you know, stay the course, stay to it. and so ross tow, who none of johnson's other advisers recommended for the job, was appointed to it. and, in fact, some people said -- johnson said i have my god damn intellectual now. [laughter]

but, and rostow was closer to johnson than bundy ever was, but he was not as trusted by the system. and is so he couldn't do the job as well. because as we point out in if administration after administration in the book, you have to be trusted by the system. the people, the people have to believe you're going to bring issues straight to the president, and if you're, even if your view doesn't agree with the national security adviser's view, that he should be able to present it fairly to the president. you should trust him to present it fairly. and people didn't quite trust rostow to do that. >> host: professor, henry kissinger, brent scowcroft, ronald -- condoleezza rice have all served as national security advisers. has the power of the nsa grown? >> guest: well, it's interesting. at least of the adviser, the power reached it height with henry kissinger. he was working for richard nixon. nixon did not trust the state

department. nixon very much wanted to dominate foreign policy himself. he found kissinger a congenial partner, and so they -- nixon said at the beginning that he was going to resurrect national security council meetings like eisenhower and have this open process where everybody could argue. but that it would be structured so that he could clearly make decisions. he -- and he did some innovations this terms of how they did policy studies is so that unlike under eisenhower where they tried to reach con seven is us on policy, under nixon they were supposed to reach consensus on what the options were so the president could choose one of them and not be buried under a bureaucratic consensus. and they did that for a while. but nixon after he came to office found he really didn't like high-level meetings with people shouting at each other and people challenging the view the president wanted. he found himself -- he had a peculiar problem that he could not sort of face down somebody, even as president, and say i am -- i've heard you, and i'm

not doing that, and i expect you to support what i'm doing, which is this. he donald cothat -- he couldn't do that. therefore, he retreated from the problem, had his, the most brilliant courtier who's been in government, henry kissinger. he reinforced his ego to a shameless degree. at the same time, he was a brilliant policy person, and he worked very hard at -- and kissinger, therefore, became dominant. nixon, therefore, when he decides he's going to open to china, the chinese respond, he has to send somebody to china. it turns out nixon was a little worried about sending kissinger to china. why? because the press had already been sort of pursuing this storyline that this kissinger guy is great, the president who's terrible. and, therefore, fortunately, we have kissinger to save us from nixon. well, that was basically nonsense because kissinger and nixon were on the same track,

and nixon was, actually, in china in particular the real driver of the policy, he was convinced we should do something well before kissinger was convinced. nevertheless, that was the press image. so, and nixon feared correctly that if he sent kissinger to china, kissinger would be the hero, and people would -- and that would then sort of color nixon's reputation. but he didn't really have any choice. because he'd run such a narrow process, there was nobody else who really knew what was going on who had enough seniority, so he sends kissinger on this famous secret trip to beijing, and kissinger, it's a successful trip. kissinger negotiates a grand visit for nixon to make to china the following year. enormous turn around in u.s./chinese relations. and so it's, so in that sense the relationship was a great success, the national security adviser was in the center of it, instrumental in changing one of the most important policies we have. in terms of the personalities,

this was something that exacerbated rather than improved relations between the president and his national security adviser. and later on nixon did appoint kissinger secretary of state this his second term. but he clearly would shot have done so if he'd felt he had any choice. by that time he was buried in accusations of the watergate scandals involving the burglarizing of the democratic national committee headquarters and reports which turned out to be true that the president himself was involved in this. and he, therefore, needed a person who had a strong reputation. and so he appointed kissinger as secretary of state, and kissinger interestingly for somebody who had gotten his power because he was so close to the president, kissinger now distances himself from the president, brings all of his good people over to the state department, and he -- and operates very effectively from there. >> host: so henry kissinger as

nsa increased the power -- >> guest: increased the power. >> host: did it stay that way, and did it ever supplant state? >> guest: well, it never reached the -- well, the difference between, say, the kissinger and the bundy regime, under bundy the people who were on the wavelength of the president in the state department loved the system because they could get to bundy, they could get heard and so forth. in the nixon administration, the strong people in the state department didn't like the system. they that hated the system becae they felt shut out. a lot of the senior nsc people were shut out because kissinger and nixon didn't tell them what was happening either. so you had a -- so they no monopolized power. that meant they could only handle a narrow range of issues, but they dominated those. and nobody has done that since. the next prominent national security adviser was brzezinski who worked for jimmy carter. and brzezinski, like kissinger, had been a professor.

kissinger at harvard, brzezinski at columbia. and both had been a prominent foreign policy writer and intellectual. and brzezinski had tutored jimmy carter who didn't have much foreign policy experience and was carter's personal choice. brzezinski had very strong views about what policy should be. he tended to be more anti-soviet and more suspicious of the soviet union than anybody else in the administration, including the president. therefore, he was essentially the most hawkish member of -- and he argued a lot with the secretary of state cyrus vance who was a strong but cautious sort of middle-of-the-road person on policy and howard brown, secretary of defensement and the, but brzezinski would speak out publicly for positions

that the president had not yet endorsed. and that meant that the administration looked like it was speaking with more than one voice, and the press got ahold of this, and the reputation of the system became very, very negative. people said that, you know, brzezinski, you know, and since once or twice the president would give a speech that looked like half of it was written by brzezinski and half of it was written by vance. finally a senator introduced a bill saying the national security adviser should be confirmed by the senate. he said it's clear that we have two secretaries of state, o we should, therefore, confirm the other one as well. and so the whole thing, so the office became a major issue. >> host: is the nsa a senate office now? >> guest: no. it has never become a senate-confirmed office. most experts, myself included, argue against doing this. um, the office, there are,

unlike the office of management and budget who is a white house official, runs a large staff for a particular purpose who is confirmable, the national security adviser is not confirmable. to jump toward the present now, i mean, we can -- there are a lot of interesting stories in between, of course, but the person who ends up embodying the best way to play the role is brent scowcroft who was assistant under -- he had this job twice. he had it under gerald ford, and he had it under george h.w. bush, the senior, the first president bush. and scowcroft was a low key person who was underestimated by many, but a very strong intellect, very purposeful, very hard working. and he, basically, he said about the job, if you have to spend

the job, you have to spend the first year establishing trust. and it's not just trust with the president, it's trust with your peers, it's trust with the people who are below you so that they will also work for the purposes of the administration. he said it takes about a year to do that. and once you do that, then you can become more assertive in terms of your own policy views. but do it as quietly as possible. don't go on the talk shows except if you can't avoid it, and do this internally. perfect example of this was in the middle of the second year of the george h.w. bush administration everybodies has sort of figured out that saddam hussein is not going to invade kuwait, and then he does. [laughter] and then he conquers kuwait. and so the administration says, what do we do, what do we do? they have one senior advisory national security council meeting, and everything is kind of fudged up. it, apparently, was not a good meeting. and baker, secretary of state, says, you know, the oil is the

main problem we have here. and various things people said were sort of scowcroft thought that's really off base, you know? there's been this rule which we need to enforce after the cold war that countries shouldn't conquer countries. this should be the rule we learned from world war ii and not stopping hitler. and this is a perfect case of where this should not stand, it should be reversed. so, so he goes to bush, and he says we need to have another meeting. and here is what i think needs -- the argument i would like to make. and george h.w. bush says, that sounds good, why don't i make the argument. and scowcroft says, no. if you make the argument, everybody's just going to follow you whether they believe it or not because you're the president. let me make the argument. they'll argue with me if they want, but i will make it clearly, and then if you agree, you can then move policy in that direction. so they remeet, scowcroft makes this very articulate argument in favor of moving, of confronting

the iraqis. excuse me. taking a clear stand. and they do so. first, they send a bunch of troops to saudi arabia, and later they double the troop commitment and finally, as we know, ordered a -- but in the meantime, they also negotiated a worldwide alliance against saddam which was very, very effective. and james baker, secretary of state, was instrumental in doing that. >> host: we are here at the university of maryland, and we are talking with i.m. destler, professor here. he is the co-author of this book, "in the shadow of the oval office: profiles of the national security advisers and the presidents they served from jfk to george w. bush." professor destler, what do you do here at the university of maryland? >> guest: i teach in the maryland school of public policy which is a graduate school which prepares people for government is the service. >> host: and you're also the director of the international security and economic policy program? >> guest: that's right. >> host: what is that? >> guest: excuse me.

the international security and economic policy program which we call isep is a part of our curriculumful we have probably 130, 140 new students come in each year, and maybe a quarter of them do what we call international security and economic policy. and that, basically, the premise is particularly with the end of the cold war we need people to have some understanding of both the security side and the economic side of foreign policy, and typically the united states hasn't had that. in fact, a course i teach on foreign policy making i argue the united states and the executive branch has two governments. it has one group of people with the nsc that handle the national security issues, another set of people around the national economic council created by bill clinton which handle the economic issues. they meet at the level of the president. l the secretary of state is somewhat is involved in the economic, but by and large they're two different groups of people and agencies. so we try to be sure our students have at least a lit as

i in both of -- literacy in both of the international security issues and the international economic issues, and it seems to me that today with the european crisis likely to do more than drive our relations with europe and the with the economic growth of china posing fundamental challenges in this that area, if it wasn't obvious before, it's obvious now that people need to understand this linkage between economics and security issues. >> host: just looking back at some of the national security adviser, henry kissinger, condoleezza rice, colin powell all went from nsa to secretary of state. is that significant? >> guest: that is significant in the sense that they, um, they -- the secretary of stateship even though it's not always the most influential position is often thought of as the most prestigious and the most prominent, certainly the most senior cabinet position in the united states. they all, i mean, their paths

were quite different. powell was only national security adviser for a year, basically, at the end of the reagan administration. he was promoted from deputy. he then became chairman of the joint chiefs of staff as a military officer and then later on he was very prominent. he could have run for president in 1996 and maybe won, but he then was, um, he was of, he didn't for reasons outside the scope, perhaps, of this conversation. but he then, when -- he was the sort of obvious appointee for secretary of state for the next republican president even though george w. bush and he never got along, and powell didn't -- he was not an effective secretary of state because people knew that the president didn't rely on him. but condoleezza rice by contrast had just been national security adviser. bush relied on her very much. and when she replaced powell as secretary of state, even by most measures she was less qualified by experience, she turned out to

be a stronger and more effective secretary of state because she is had the presidential relationship -- because she had the presidential relationship which, of course, she had built through the position of national security adviser. >> host: how did james jones do for president obama, and how's tom donlan doing? >> guest: well, the jones appointment is a puzzle. i'm sure if we could get inside the president' mind, he would explain why he appointed james jones. there are a couple of good reasons. jones was a highly respected senior retired marine general who had shown his integrity by refusing to be considered for chairman of the joint chiefs under donald rumsfeld because he thought correctly that donald rumsfeld who was george w. bush's o secretary of defense was, basically, pounding people down and not, not letting them show any strength in terms of their own, their positions. one of these people who gained power by sort of squashing

everybody else. whereas others say like george bundy tend to get power by enhancing other people, so they would work together. anyway, um, the -- you had, i'm sorry, i'm a little bit -- >> host: oh, how did general jones -- >> guest: okay. so he was -- obama felt as person who wasn't deeply involved in, he probably felt he wanted a senior person, needed somebody to deal with the military since he hadn't served, he wasn't particularly strong, hadn't had experience dealing with the military. so he appoints jones. problem is, jones -- if you believe bob woodward's story and i do, i'm sure jones told him this -- jones apparently told obama i'm not a good staff man. if you want to appoint me to something, appoint me to a cabinet position because i've never been a good staff man. he budget. he was always waiting for issues to come to him rather than being sure he was the one that brought the issues to the president. and he would, and so he wasn't, his style was totally different.

he wanted to try the structure a formal process that no president since eisenhower has really been interested in structuring. obama was very, was similar to kennedy in the sense that he was cerebral, he liked to have people around the room, he was interested more in people for what they could contribute to the discussion than for what their office was. and he wanted to make the decisions himself. and jones just couldn't, didn't serve that need. and be jones was very formal in style, and obama was very informal. meanwhile, different people in the obama entourage who had better relations with the president began playing various pieces of this role, most importantly tom donlan who is the deputy national security adviser, ran something called the deputy's committee which became particularly from the george h.w. bush administration onward a very important vehicle for policy, headed by the national security adviser's deputy.

and including the deputy secretary of state, deputy secretary of defense, cia, etc., altogether trying to hand p l issues -- handle issues that are very important operational issues but may or may not reach the presidential level. anyway, donlan turns out to be a master at handling this process, and so i sometimes say that there's, apparently, a college out in oregon that was created relatively recently. and when they built all the buildings, they didn't put in these sidewalks. why not? they wanted to see where the students would walk. and so they looked and saw where the grass was worn down, and then they put the sidewalks in where the grass had been worn. i say in this case it wasn't as if obama wanted to see who was, in fact, being national security adviser, but the effect was the same because more than anybody else donlan was, in fact, playing this role. so the sensible thing when it was time for jones to go, the sensible person to give the job to was tom donlan. so i think he has done a lot better. i think he's, he is able to

manage the process. he understands the substance. there are, however, can i go on a little bit? >> host: sure. >> guest: if you look at people who write about this subject, there are kind of two different views of what the national security adviser should be. one is sort of the broker/manager, very senior, the manager of the process. the other is the policy guru, the grand -- the thinker who puts together a grand design. now, to people outside the process kissinger and brzezinski looked like the second model. they looked like people who design policy, who develop grand conceptions and help the president put them into effect, and this is some truth to this -- and there's some truth to this judgment. the others like myself and ivo daalder, my co-author, believe that although that sounds like a wonderful idea, part of it is it

inflates the role of the national security adviser beyond what it's likely to be, and it's likely to neglect effectiveness in policy management. brzezinski, whatever his strengths, did not turn out to be an effective policy manager. kissinger was an effective policy manager in the sense of getting issues structured and available for the and getting good work out of his staff, but he wasn't good in the sense of strengthening and engaging, bringing the agencies along, bringing them together. and so i think the scowcroft model is better of the person who works with the senior cabinet people, who is a notch below them in terms of rank but may well be as important because he's so close to the president. in many our book, in our conclusion we say there are three rules for effectiveness of a national security adviser. the first is establish trust. the second is build trust down into the system, not just at your level, cabinet level, but at the deputies' level and so

forth so that you have multilevel government that's working for the presidential policies. and the third is get close to the president and stay close. [laughter] now, there are a lot of details about this. trust means trust in preparing options for the president, presenting information in detail and in a form that the president wants. some presidents like to read, some presidents like to read essays, most like to read memos, shorter, terse things. some like to be talked to, some don't like tock talked to. some like to be lectured, some like to be given bullet points, and you have to be able to respond to that. that was one of the problems with jones, i think donlan's much more in sync with the way obama thinks. >> host: professor destler, did any of the former national security advisers talk the to you for your book? >> guest: yes. we talked to the great majority of, i mean, i've talked to bundy several times, we talked -- we interviewed rostow. we had an oral history round

table in which we had five former national security advisers including tony lake, rostow, we had brent scowcroft, others. we interviewed colin powell, we interviewed john poindexter, the greatest failure as national security adviser who presided for the egregious iran-contra affair in the reagan administration. but we talked to lots of other people too. and we organized a series of round tables in which we talked about how the process had worked in particular administrations or for particular issues. and these are on our, the web site of our center for international and security studies at maryland, cissm.com. and if you look for national security council round tables, you will find discussion with former officials in the nixon administration, one for the clinton administration, one for the george h.w. bush

administration, etc. and these are aimed at giving people a real sense of how the process worked. and they're totally open. they're on the record, they're available to scholars. and in the, and we had one with former national security advisers. and to that we taped the text of our interviews. we also had an interview with brzezinski, but i think we weren't able to get him l to agree to publish the interview. >> host: and we have been talking with i.m. destler, "in the shadow of the oval office." dr. destler, thank you for your time. >> guest: it's been a pleasure, peter. thank you for having me. >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and be books on c-span2's booktv.

booktv explored the literary culture of beaumont, texas, with the help of our partner, time-warner cable. watch an interview from our time there next on booktv. >> i'm amelia wiggins, educator of public programs at the stark museum of art, and i'll take you through the making of medieval manuscripts in conjunction with our exhibition, medieval manuscripts here at the museum. so in the middle ages, books of hours were made from different art supplies than books would be used -- made from today. instead of paper, medieval bookmakers used parchment or animal skin like the calfskin on view here in the case. a calfskin in particular is called vellum, but parchment or animal skin was also made from sheep or goats. the skin would have been, um, pulled from the animal, soaked in water and lime to dehair it and to take out some of the fat

or grease, stretched on a frame and then scraped until it was thin, um, similar in thickness to our paper today. once the parchment was prepared, it would be cut into rectangles to be used as pages, and those would go to the scribe whose job it was to write the text of the book by hand a. and instead of using a pen like we have today, he would use a quill made from a feather from a goose or a swan. the feather would be heated in hot sand and cut into a nib that could hold ink. scribes also had to make their own ink by hand. they would use a growth on an oak tree called a gall to make a dark, tannic ink that was very permanent. and then the scribe would write each letter of each word by hand. he wasn't the author, though. a scribe would usually be writing from a previous text, copying the letters. and in the early middle ages,

scribes were mostly monks working in a monastery, but in the late middle ages, um, when books like the ones on view here were written, those scribes were usually secular professionals working in a group of crafts people to produce the books. a scribe might carry his pens in a tool called a penner, that's that leather case here in this display. and the penner is what we saw st. mark's lion holding in his mouth in one of the illuminations in the books here on view. once the scribe had written all of the text of his page and ruled the page, it would next go to the illuminator whose job it was to illuminate or light up the pages of the books with illustrations. and the illuminator also had to make his own paints, usually from organic materials such as minerals, plants and from, um, insects occasionally. he would grind up the mineral or other material and then mix it