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as. >> i am from the midwest and would not and have dreams about volcanoes. all dreams are about tornadoes. i thought when i was growing up by had recurring nightmares about tornadoes and started to ask my friends and discovered all my friends were from the midwest you dreamed about tornadoes. my own childhood is in the '60s at a time where this is before video footage of tornadoes. you can go on nine now there is a whole genre of tornado footage where you can see an hour after hour of tornado footage none of that existed you never heard about i mean

you never saw them you did not see it clear photo of one. but as part of the texture of our lives we did get tornado training is in school. we were told to sayings one was high in the southwest corner of the basement and again, the other is open all the windows. those are the worst advice on possible. they told us that i think because they were trying to give us a feeling that there was something that you could do. but they knew nothing. there is a tendency certainly among american governments, schools,

instit utions, to try to give people a feeling of empowerment. this was part of why people remember this advice. this is interesting historically it goes back to the 19th century they were not modern scientific views but actual ids that became the ground in the 1880s and some people still listen to them today. there were always nonsense but never any scientific research. there was a scientific mission. the advice of opening the windows, people believed in the 19th century that they were so destructive because the core was a vacuum and if it passed over the house the air pressure would press out

words and a boat up the house so you open the windows to equalize the air pressure. that is total nonsense. tornadoes are not destructive because of that but because of the wind that travels at close at 300 miles per hour but there again, it sounded good and nobody knew anything better so it just kept going around and around and getting repeated. when you hear things like that today, people have the idea if you drive the open country if you see a tornado the best way to hide is under the freeway overpass. you can see people doing that but it is the worst place on earth too high because the wind under the

overpass it acts like a wind tunnel in speenine -- speed is the wind up. with then you could be sucked into the funnel but the southwest corner of the basement came from an observation that most tornadoes moved southwest to northeast. you fear in that quarter it would strike full on and then you could be more survivable than in the northeast corner. i have friends who are younger than i am when they went to school they were told told to hide in the northeast corner they think that was safest not the southwest corner. but it doesn't make any difference.

almost everybody killed by tornadoes is killed by flying debris. now i am making fun of scientists now but once they had found when researching the book when people first came to the midwest and did not know much about tornadoes, the native americans who lived in the prairie at the time to give settler is a vice but when they were willing they told people to build the settlements at the junction of rivers because tornadoes

don't cross water. that is also false. so the tradition of bad expert advice goes back hundreds of years. if you live in st. louis that was built at the junction of the two greatest rivers does perfectly well with tornadoes to cross the river at no problem. also did not hit the interior of the city. completely false. 50,000 feet high is the column of the tornado so the building may be 1,000 feet high will not make a difference. all of these ideas are floating around because people need to have a feeling. and in some people refuse to talk about tornadoes at all.

from the late 19th century until after world war ii was the national weather service forbid the forecasters to predict tornadoes they could not even mention tornadoes. they said two reasons. of the first they thought it was impossible to predict tornadoes that a prediction would cause a panic that might be worse than the actual tornado. the other reason was they were under of lot of pressure from business interests and real-estate people who'd did not want people to get the idea to be worried because then they would not buy the land. said they refuse to talk about it.

and with the national weather service in iowa says iowa only gets one tornado per year. you live here. there is more one tornado per year in iowa they also said people shouldn't build strong sellers. that is one of the few genuine steps you could take a specially in farm country to say they should not build a storm cellar because the danger from catching a cold from the storm cellar from the dirt was worse than any danger from any tornado. so all along through the history of america people have had a strange and ambiguous relationship with tornadoes denying them being fascinated by pretending

they were not a big problem. so when i started to research the book the thing that fascinated me the most was how did people discover tornadoes and how did we live with them? the discovery was curious because when the european settlers came to america they had no idea at all what tornadoes were. they had never seen any common never read about any, it was a completely new phenomenon which they thought was a mysterious american storm. one of the things that confuses the issue with a history, it is hard to believe but up until about 200 years ago, nobody thought systemically about whether anywhere in the world. how long have people been on

this planet? how long have they been goofing off looking at this guy at the clouds? as far as we can figure out from the history of science not until 18 '04 anybody had the idea that clouds formed any consistent pattern at all. if you are skeptical, a sometime you are in the art museum go look at dutch landscape arch which is the most beautiful rendering of the physical world it is perfectly rendered and the clouds are a mass of chaos in painting after painting. nobody had any idea they formed distinctive shapes. you think that would be the most obvious thing in the role but nobody thought of it. as far as i know the first person to think of it his name was luke's howard who was an amateur meteorologist in england in 18 '04 gave a lecture that presented the idea there were nine

different types of clouds and he named them and all the names he used then is what we use now. serious, it cannulas cannulas, stratus, he invented those names out of nothing. they don't go back to ancient greece they are scientific greek and nobody views -- had to use those terms before but they went back to the one guy and we use his terms he was the first to suggest that they had distinct shapes but in the same way nobody believed storms took distinct forms. nobody thought there was a different train to a gale, a tornado, hurricane, the terms we take for granted they did not see those as distinct forms. if you would get early accounts of the weather they use tornado and hurricane and cyclone in bet dust and

storm complete lee indiscriminately. more than in one sentence but i found one of the worst tornadoes that never struck the midwest, 1805 the person riding the history said this was a tornado of the hurricane type. was it? he clearly had no idea and was just throwing words at it to see if its stock. when looking at the history of these things you have to be aware what you were seeing is not what they were seeing because unless you have the concept or the idea in your head when you get to accurate accounts of tornadoes not always but

they vary frequently describe things in those storms that no one has ever videotaped. the most frequent accounts i found was the tornados would skip and hop up and down they would destroy in-house then settle somewhere else. you find this up and tell the 1970's and 80's. no video ever has shown a tornado that has touched down rising up again and settle down. they don't do that. they stay on the ground until they break up. what were they seeing? i don't know but everyone saw it the same way they saw a strange lights and colors in the funnel cloud. very frequently in this description they saw a red glow at the heart of the funnel cloud.

strange lights running up and down the funnel with patterns of electrical sparkling and all kinds of will take others. in the end of this seven documented i have never talked to a modern tornado chasers who sought any of this. and with tornado reports what were they looking at? i don't know but what was happening, i think was they were so stunned by what they were seeing, this extraordinary thing that came out of nowhere that travel for the and 50 miles per hour to lovell a town in the matter of a few seconds seconds, if they were projecting their own tear on to it because it went by so fast they had all kinds of strange note -- notions. the divine, what was it?

they are very colorful. they're very strange and beautiful but not very trustworthy but it was a very, very long process and a slow process that i trace by various experts managed to sink, apparently about tornadoes. and not only science but human psychology that led to bitter feuds with the two leading scientists have opposing views on tornadoes. so james epsy said a tornado was a rising column of there

but redfield said a column of air rotated. james epsy thought it was a rising column and refused to believe tornado's rotated and redfield believe they rotated refuse to believe to the rising column but and there were presented the irrefutable evidence from either side they said you are wrong. you did not see it and they were both unshakeable for 20 years. and their fight was so vitriolic they actually manage to paralyze american science for the entire length of the few because everybody had to change dayside nobody would give credit to the other they were more respected than a guide to ford any of their opposing people and they were both right. a tornado is a rising column of there and their rotates. when people would see this

and would describe it they would say no. can to be. no way. because of that they were able to paralyze our country's development in meteorology up and tell the 1850's and they never actually saw the other viewpoint. they never cracked. they died and left the question unresolved and a later generation of meteorologist who took up the problem again and figured it out the solution. so we lost a whole generation of people studying tornadoes just as people were moving into the midwest and the information would have been enormously valuable. i want to tell you one story

about that. then we will see if anybody has questions. in the 1870's a man named john finley who was was with the signal corps. united states signal corps after the civil war had taken upon itself to become our national weather service. originally this was done by the smithsonian institution but for a variety of reasons, during the civil war they lost their spotters, the people from the south stop participating and everybody else was absorbed by the war. the networks of spotter's had dropped out and there was that bad fire at the smithsonian 1865 and a lot of old records were destroyed. so they went to the government to say we cannot do it anymore.

the signal corps made irresponsibility was communication on the battlefield where in those days looking for somreason to stay in business. this is the way bureaucracy's always work. this institution was created and served its purpose and america was at peace and the signal corps said instead of the disbanded they said we have to find something else to do and came up the idea we will take over the weather service. it sounds like a boondoggle but they took this responsibility very seriously. they began predicting weather, the first to issue a daily weather forecast and worked out a system. the texture of everyday life that we have completely forgotten but they set up a system where post offices and train stations and

government offices would fly flags each day to tell people what the weather was. that is how you got your whether. he would glance over at the train station and you would know the codes that white men to clear and blue meant rain and there was a special one particularly alarming was a red flag with the black circle in in a moment of the weather change would be a sudden frost and that is considered so urgent lot of the trains passing through the farm land would fly those flights from this side of the train so the farmers could see the warning flag as the train passed. they began collecting weather reports from all over the country and one of

the things they began collecting reports on were tournedos. thing to happen on the east coast but very rarely. there was one in the 1850's that try to put together a list of all recorded tornadoes in new england and he found 16. that went back 150 ears. when the weather service began collecting fees reports they were coming up with dozens of reports in the midwest every year. and they were sending the people ought to do field reports. if there was a really bad storm they would ask people what happened, what can you tell us?

they began hearing from people how often they had hit the town. nobody outside the town paid attention at all but they found, people still do this today almost every time they went to places that were along the way somebody would say we had a tornado 20 years ago and find out everybody dated everything that happened from that event. everyone in nebraska, kansas, illinois, iowa, every town would say we build the school house after the big tornado that was the big cultural landmark. we would collect reports of all strange apparitions the

multicolored tornadoes, those that would split in half, to tornadoes that would collide and form one big tornado, clouds with five or six tornados thing going down, everybody had a strange tornado story. the other thing they began discovering, they didn't know what to call it, today we call it the gse but in these towns people who had been through tornadoes, a lot of them never recovered. and when they say johnnie over there he went through the bad tornado and it starts clouding up in the sky and he will start crying when was that? thirty years ago. 30 years later they still had not recovered.

and a lot of people do have tornado stories. and people will tell me when i was a kid i still have nightmares i still freak out if i see a bad storm coming from the southwest. end there was a tornado 1878 and this man john findlay the first tornado surveyed with the signal corps was and how to report what happened. with the perfect farmland community that we sees to kansas and iowa and the midwest, a very lovely little town one afternoon a bad storm came up, saw the funnel cloud that cut

through the heart of the town, and knocked out of lot of buildings, injured a lot of people, then was gone. and as often happens with tornadoes, though weather immediately afterwards was gorgeous. everybody emerges from their shelters, the s a lot of damage but then they see the beautiful countryside and blue skies. when they looked back in the direction the tornado had come from they saw something. they saw nothing they had never seen before. i found there are other tornado reports like this but this is a very rare form that tornadoes took. they describe it looks like there was suddenly a black mountain in the southwest with a complete the flat face more than 2 miles long and thousands of feet into the air, appeared out of

nowhere moving straight toward us. but it came through the town and reduced it in a matter of seconds through splinters and left an enormous trail of damage and killed several of the people that were through the early tornado and were coming out of the wreckage and a sudden they were killed of this operation out of nowhere. the top -- the storm pastor and disappeared to the northeast and was gone. know when ever figured out what it was. and when findlay arrived in the santa do the report these are resilient heartland people the worst had happened but they were pulling things together and bury the dead and care for the injured and starting to rebuild the core of the town with a pathway just cut

through the heart this is the resilience of the american people but the longer he stayed in town the more he became aware that is not all that was happening. the people that had been through the tornado couldn't sleep any more. everyone else, the families families, they would go to bet each night and these people would lie awake and able to sleep shaking with terror. the only thing they could figure out to do, they did not have an explanation but just do it, dozens of people scattered through the town in the middle of the night get out of bet, i carry a lantern and walk over to the damage track of the tornado and would just in there all night looking at the southwestern sky waiting for the tornado to come back.

and they did that every single night and it is when findlay saw this he said to himself, he had to figure out a way to predict the tornado. if you want to know what happened. read the book. thinks for listening. does anybody have any questions? we will have a microphone. anything i can follow up on? >> it is interesting said native americans take on the tornado. >> there is a lot of that in the book. also a lot of legends and stories and they work out ways to deal with them. the tribes that were in essentially nomads during the summer would work out ways in this part of the country you could see the storm's coming four hours

ahead in they could recognize potentially tornadic storms from a long way off so they would dig trenches to hide in or hollow out the hillside to use it as the impromptu crawl for the animals. . .

>> i can hear you. that will work. >> this particular one. >> i was in the middle. the very afternoon. >> really? i was thinking that time. why they were going out. >> that figure was just my reaction, since it said completion of know where they thought, we have to keep watch. and back up in the town, that would be during the night begins nubbly concede, said that was why there are out there watching. i think that was the thinking. begin was also just reaction to, the thing you are most afraid of and you can sleep. it was kind of practical response. maybe it was a way of managing

the ptsd. >> when did people start noticing the birds and animals preparations for the storm? >> well, that is something that the native americans have always aimed to have used as a weather side, how true that is -- >> why not true. >> okay. you know, the tornado i was and that did not see any birds living a before and, som economic in the guess myself about that. >> you're no doubt heard all about the will be at year. eight years ago or never was. >> yes. >> thank you. >> you know, i start reporting in earlier books where i describe the earthquake. there was a report that all of the squirrels in that part of the midwest have been left to this before and. i don't know whether any squirrels went anywhere, but this is the sort of thing that people love to say about animals

since storms before and, whether they really do or not i think is , you know @booktv and think of as much to do with just what you want to believe, said that axa to have evidence is actually a there. you could be right. you know, i don't want to destroy anyone's dreams about this. i just don't know of any actual data says that is true. >> the really strong images in your book for me. people who had coins melted the pockets. now, this was a tornado that was combined with a fire. but are there a lot of a tornado type arctic fact that people hold on to? did you -- have you collected some? >> i have a collection of images that was trying to get the publisher the put and. double the price of the book. but a some publisher wants the book about tornado, a lot of

samples of this. people do tend to cling to these things as magic tokens and they do tend to drop tornadoes. in the 19th century there were a lot of survivors, and made earth in jugs. very common in the midwest. very common motif in american folk art. so there's quite a lot of that. but a special case. it is really one of the most freakish events, not just about an open and the elegy, but anything that is a verbal report on the planet. for a long time, people of -- there has been a huge controversy as to what really happened. now, in my book i have a reconstruction of what the eyewitnesses said, but as i . out, that is not necessarily scientific the accurate. the thing is, the gigantic firestorms that formed in forests create their own

weather. and they do create thunderstorms we are not aware of it because the heat of the fired usually causes the brain to flush away and become steam before it hits the ground, but they can sustain celt -- grace of sustaining weather systems and there have been a few instances where the stars are so severe that they spawn tornadoes, and the one that happened in this house and was actually the same night as the fire. a huge drop in the midwest. the fire broke up several areas. and the thunderstorm form over this intents forest fire. a tornado was spawned at the heart of the storm, and the updraft drew flames from the force into the -- so what people saw coming out was a gigantic tornado may have a fire. yeah. now, on youtube you can find

videos that people have had of those small, sometimes called fire world war fire tornadoes have formed over intense fires, so it does happen. it is very rare for it to be at that level of intensity, and it came to the kind of -- it just destroyed. reduce the town to ashes and and matter of seconds. and the people who survived plunged into the river, but the problem was, there were so spellbound by the sight of these tornadoes coming toward some and a lot of them women above the water but just could not look away. and they had permanent eye damage because their eyebrows were scorched. so this is a rare phenomenon. the one that happened in tokyo in the 20's after a major earthquake where a fire turn in a form in the heart of this fire and was burning the city down. i also found one that happened and drought region of australia. no one actually witnessed it, but in the aftermath of this

enormous fire they found that distinct paths of the tornado that lasted for 20 or 30 minutes and get through the heart of this fire zone. so they do happen. it's kind of hard to believe they actually do happen on this plan as opposed to some other planet, but they do happen. there are quite rare. quite astonishing. and they are very -- the physics of them is still quite mysterious. a lot of the more, like you're saying. people have that close untouched but declines in the pockets. all kinds of strange things happened for people cannot account. it's just not something that happens enough that people have really worked at the physics of it. anyone else? >> you mentioned these images. they're too expensive to put in a book like this. at the thought of the book? >> they were talking about that,

maybe camille know, if there's enough interest from people putting together that stuff. so we will see. well, that is a whole separate discussion. yes. >> not that simple to have random house. >> the thing about publishing is that it is not that simple to do anything. so you would be amazed at the things that you think would be simple that turn out not to be simple. i have had discussions with my publishers about subtitle's the bucks. they said to me, oh, yes. we had all be better septet and we don't think it works. we have to change it. and i looked at this and thought, are you serious? oh, no. these people who are grown people, adults and who actually have professional jobs are sitting around arguing about what word should happen in what order in the subtitle. when he said i don't think it

really matters they're like, oh, yes it does. we are certain that it matters. so -- >> sure. sure. restoring money added. >> local mod to let any money. that is an unjust to mind. so if nothing else happens i might. but something among website for free for people who are interested following a. >> blocks. >> i don't know how they do it either. if someone would tell me, my block. i will see what i can do. thanks. check my website. that may be something coming up. >> one more question. >> i am wondering what sort of traveling he did in researching the book. >> well, i grew up in the midwest and spent a lot of time travel and when i was under. for this book i am too old to do

this stuff anymore. i really am. the other thing is that the last really that strong my song was actually so frightening that i thought, what on earth am i doing trying to get anywhere near this think? so this one i did just steady. i talked to people who had done strong chasing. people would say it's a reasonably accurate picture. it's a whole industry now. all of people do it for fun and a lot of people do it for money. you can go look at tornadoes combinatorics that would secure around the midwest to it -- chasing tornadoes. did you not guarantee the you will see a tenable we guarantee you will see severe weather, but we cannot predict whether there will be a tornado, and people to do is coming from all over the world to a chance to see a tornado. >> well, we could -- the

mississippi, and it is kind of an exciting swashbuckling tale. you were invited to write and other similar thing. >> you know, they wanted a good story. actually, we just did have the topic of tornadoes. when i started researching it is what i found all this stuff up about fenway but as far as i can tell nobody is really written much about. and it is a part of the american history that is largely forgotten. sir it was a pleasure to try to reconstruct this. >> i know the next book is about your past. this sort of background. >> says. it is a family history, the 1850's up until the present. >> to you have another historic? >> actually, i do. down the road, i have some contracts for this. i will write about the early days of electrification in

19th century america. that will be out, i think, in about two years. yes. >> with a faster if you just love listed as an e-book? >> no. [laughter] there will be an e-book. there is an e-book of this and there will be one of that as well. yes. >> it was wonderful. it was very entertaining to me to see how you took this phenomenon, this terrible catastrophe that happens rather commonly. a rounded you discussed cultural, sociological, historical, psychological. human reaction to a. they tend to understand how the mind stores things for various reasons, these kind of hallucinations, the early

accounts. >> and i assure you, i never met this gem of four. he is not a plant. [laughter] >> there are a lot of culture. for example, that controversy. that was two guys, half of the story. that is an amazing story. okay. >> i'm not minding it. >> what that reminds me of is the cultural wars. >> one of the things you discover when you read american history enough is that the things have not changed all that much. in the same way if their is a lot about that governmental bureaucratic infighting. in the 19th century it makes you feel like things like the government shut down now, just

the way that people have always run governments in america. >> i just want to ask one question. >> says. >> it is a powerful subject about this incredible violence that exists in nature. all the time. really, different forms. >> sure. >> so, the question, what was the nature of your attraction to this subject to iraqi no? it is really the powerful subject. >> as far as other than just growing up in the midwest, i was in one when i was 17 which haunted my imagination when i started working on this. the thing that is actually most striking about that experience, it happens to be -- it was a beautiful summer morning. i had just -- it had been raining all day and suddenly cleared out. was standing at the door of my house, about to go out. i had my hand on the door.

all of a sudden the street outside cap pitch black in the second, and everything that wasn't nailed down with straight up into the air. and this is a week tornado. all the debt was not done a bunch of trees. a few minor injuries. nobody was killed. but one of the things that i found most useful about it was i knew intellectually that that had to be a tornado, but i did not see any funnel cloud. i did not see anything that resembled the classical tornado, and never realize, that was how mysterious because i knew, about 100 years ago would not have a clue. i would have had no clue at all. that was a good insight as to how people back then thought about these things. >> i need to get the book. >> please do.

>> i will. but the answers came from scandinavia in the early 1870's. one of them had a daily diary where she wrote the memo was happening with the weather. danish english. and i was fascinated by your mentioning that a the recounts, the recounting so that people would see lights and colors, your reference to it could be parlay there fear and that they were so wrapped up because they came from not ever having any kind of experience with that. >> yes. >> and still to this day, i grew up in fargo, and what you talked about is the weather first among other things all over town. still, whether first. the unix -- de suppose that the power of suggestion, someone heard that someone said that this thing was so amazing and

they saw lights and colors and that that is what they're looking for? >> i don't know. it is an interesting theory. part of the problem is that you define trained scientists to plenteous seen the same things. i found a report from the early 1970's, a tornado in alabama passed by a nasa installation, so all the scientists were working for nasa went outside and watch this tornado come across. it was nighttime. there was a lot of lightning, but they all reported the same mysterious colors. that was something where we have actual trained observers, trained scientists, and they're seeing it. fadel think it was the power of suggestion. might have been because there was some slight income and lightning in clouds can cause peculiar, you know, if yeltsin the lightning, the way the clause light up sometimes can be very strange. and so that is possibly what they're seeing, but they did not

think it had anything to do with lightning.

>> have there been any contemporary of the black mountain the you can describe? >> not that i have been able to find. i saw accounts of tornadoes in the early 20th century, especially the worst tornado on record which is called the tristate tornado which was in 1925. it started missouri across all of illinois and indiana. the people who sought, no one reported seeing a funnel. they just saw this black moving shape. so there are some reports that there are more than one funnel with in this cloud. but it is not exactly the same, but is similar enough. that might have been was happening with this strange thing in kansas. it might have been @booktv since we've ever seen that the

surrounding cloud and multiple funnels inside. that is just a guess. no one really knows. yes. >> if a teenager in night school science class has to do a study of anything, would that give you something you can keep an have a hypothesis to test and approve, test everything not been tested and provable the size the tornado? i mean, the daily weather patterns. >> it is an interesting question. the weather service relies on a gross array of information. didn't have a lot of fine grain and all other places. a teenager were keeping a weather log now, and you could do with computers because you would be much more accurate than just writing down, that kind of thing is actually used by permission of the long haul to see how microclimate developed.

a lot of people and the community doing it, you could actually, you know, help build up -- the more data be whether meteorologist have, the more raw data they have the better they're able to predict the weather. part of the problem is that you just lose the fine grain if you're looking at a large area. you just don't have an affirmation. as one of the reasons why tornadoes themselves are so hard to predict. no one has succeeded in protecting them because a tornado forms with in this gigantic super selz other -- thunderstorm and it is this huge environment that forms in a very, very small space initially and it just may be that we can never get a close enough work -- look, a detailed enough look at what is happening and start to see that moment of formation. now it may be that somebody finds that tonight, you know. it could be they will announce tomorrow morning may have done it, i talked to people who thought maybe we will never be

able to. but, yes, the more information we have. and when people do that we are becoming more aware of the weather. a continuous process and not just something that happens in occasional freak events. it is useful if you're trying to learn about the urology. >> thank you. >> all the information. for those of you want to learn more, which should be all of you , we have storm king said 25 percent off. also, which could river. thank you all for coming tonight. thank you. >> my pleasure. thank you for having me. [applause] >> for more information visit the authors website. up next from mesa, ariz., we sit down with valerie adams. in her book she examines his use

of civilians in helping craft, foreign and domestic come policy. >> what role the civilians play in domestic and international policy? >> well, for advising purposes for presidents an important role , and i think that eisenhower, president eisenhower did an excellent job in utilizing the resources of civilian advisers. the 1950's was a time of tremendous technical change. and with the attention on the cold war, eisenhower had to rely on experts in science and technology, government and politics to come together and give him some recommendations to how to develop a strong national defense because, quite frankly, the united states was in new territory at this point in the cold war. how do we guard against a possible surprise attack from

the soviet union? what resources do we have? and so what eisenhower did was he brought some of the best minds, president of mit and caltech and former state department employees and so on and so forth in order to give him recommendations on how to proceed. and in doing that, an ad hoc committee, they do not have a political stake. they're not republicans and democrats. rather they all have the best interest of the nation. and he can accurately make his own decisions, but having these civilian communities he was able to get by in from a lot of people and have some humility that he did not know everything in the age for technology. a lot of these deport sierra and various other organizations and committees and groups. a lot of them came from world

war ii where the united states utilized some of the bigger engineering schools for, you know, the manhattan project, the lavatory. and so it is in that work of people who had experience even though not an elected official capacity. so in his national security adviser was very well-connected and was able to craft really good committees. perhaps the most important would be one that happened in his tenure called the technological capability panel. two things that came of that committee is an emphasis on intercontinental ballistic missile technology or icbm programs, what eisenhower would call bigger bang for your block. and probably what the audience

has some name recognition with is the reconnaissance planes, that is where the united states was able to get to the overflights. some members of your audience might remember the cuban missile crisis. that first brought back photographic evidence that the soviet union was placing missiles in cuba. so that program came from one of the civilian ad hoc committees that eisenhower had. >> out of these committees get along with the actual administration? >> it depended upon the committee. the first to committees that i looked at in my book got along very well. eisenhower had a lot of oversight in picking a committee member, having the committee embers. the third community kind of came to him from some political pressure. the third committee was looking at whether or not the united states federal government should allocate resources for fallout shelters, a massive national

fallout shelter. eisenhower did not believe that made sense, but a resource, that money should be used for active defense, not to pass a defense theory he was also concerned with the kind of message it would send to our allies and the soviet union if we embark on this massive fallout shelter program. and so that committee disagreed with eisenhower. and many of the members leaked information to the press which indicated the united states was in the greatest danger. eisenhower had not prepared us. our defenses were weak, and that did not go over well with eisenhower, and you can look at that committee as really the end point of him using the civilian ad hoc committees. my interest in this topic when i was a graduate student, in fact, stemmed from my interest in science and technology. as used by presidents and then as i was revising my dissertation for the manuscript,

the warren chair had just begun. i started to see a lot of parallels between the cold war and the war on tear. and the challenges that george w. bush faced in terms of, you know, preparing for the long haul. eisenhower spoke a lot of it. and so i began to look at the role of civilians being played out in presidency's after eisenhower. and my conclusion is that each president use them in different ways. in know, the committees are a reflection of presidential style . one thing that really did surprise me was how good eisenhower was at creating a team spirit. and that came back to his early days i was point. and he really was personable. people like tim. he really felt