culture. he enjoys popular culture itself. he's very interested in movies and music and television and so on and books in his own role in this. you see that in many ways. he's testing the boundaries of how far a president can go. as is michelle, the first lady. presenting an oscar from washington during the academy awards ceremony couple years ago. that is an example of how they are into popular culture. you see that many ways with president obama, the interviews he does come in the offense he cares to talk about and so on. we have to realize we are in a different world now. many ways for presidents to communicate, so we have to be careful in concluding a president is trivializing things

when many constituencies in the united states because he is trying to appeal to them that is a positive thing. he is going on in his way to communicate where they are in different types of media. you have to be careful to realize the world has changed in recent years and president obama may have a better understanding of that bennett's critics do. for instance, the next president will have to use the same message he is used to he won't be as adept as it because it's good that it played to constituencies that the next president will have to realize this is part of the presidency now going to voters in all her diversity of the country and appealing to them in diverse ways. >> host: president says spotters. want to read a couple nuggets from here. jfk had more influence on clothing fashion and style than

any other president and in fact the industry back then based in connecticut was not pleased with the president hapless moments. richard nixon wasn't responsible for many fats but he did start the trend of wearing a small american flag on the lapel of his suit jacket. the last caller was talking about sports a little bit. you've got a story about richard nixon calling them plays to a couple of teams. >> guest: it is so much a part of our culture. basically they are interested in sports. nixon actually was a big fan the extent to which he was a fan of folk all and he was actually devising place where professional college team and spend them in. i'm not aware any of them were very well. a famous play was sentenced to the football team in the

cultures you would use them to play from the president and give it a try. nixon fancied himself as an expert on foot tall but his play didn't work very well. >> host: we have been talking with ken walsh senior white house correspondent for u.s. news & world report of "c >> transfer takes a look at 17 international universe is faced by presidents going back to your return and assesses how they were handled. mr. bohn served as the white house situation room under president reagan.

non-mac -- [inaudible conversations] can and not welcomed here mark with the mark with malcolm acted in school policy government and international affairs hearing that george which i had the pleasure to read in draft form and we talked about it at length. it is an excellent work. i am thrilled that he is here to

make a presentation based on the research he has built-in his experiences as well in the situation room in the white house. i am first going to introduce my colleague, bob tubman direct or at the center for politics and foreign relation and he is going to make the formal introduction for speaker. >> i will show you the book. at the end of each crisis or a decision-making problem in the white house firm truman threw a bomb he does an assessment which gives it an interesting

background. you see which assay kit -- jfk did during the cuban missile crisis and he looks at how cautious he was and what have been. i think it is excellent, interesting and intriguing book. the author has been an intelligence officer for 20 years. he also worked in the nixon white house and then he ran the situation room in the white house under reagan's second term. the atlantic council. he brings a very interesting back around and insult though not only writes about what happens in the white house him about what happens on the golf course then he writes about sports in the 1920s. i introduce the author, michael bohn.

[applause] >> thank you. thank you for coming. it is an interesting beginning of the book. part of it because i was at the white house and i got to see how president reagan handled crises. and then i started writing about other crises that have happened and it occurred to me people on the sideline and there are plenty of them don't have a clue how hard it is to manage an international crisis that comes after 3:00 a.m. phone call and unanticipated crisis. everyone on the sideline, mostly opposing the policies and they get to say anything they want to without any consequence of their idea. both sides of the aisle. they don't have any skin in the game, so they don't have to

worry if their idea doesn't go well because nothing happens to them. my initial message is that it is harder than it looked. this is the cover. i will open with a little bit of an anecdote. during the iran hostage crisis commensurately carter in 1979 and it ended the minute that ronald reagan finished the oath of office on his inauguration and they arranged to let the hostages go. it is a difficult situation for president carter because if he was too aggressive to solve the hostage problem, they kill the hostages. he tried to be cautious and he was generally except for one exception. governor reagan was running in the republican primary in march

april 1980, leading up to the 1980 election. he had a lot to say about what jimmy carter ought to be doing. he said things like this is a national disgrace. he is just dillydallying. i would give them an ultimatum and i brought the reports and i'll do this and do that. five years later hezbollah terrorists hijacked a twa airliner over europe and took all the passengers in hostage. they flew back and forth returning beirut and algeria several times, let some of the hostages off, killed an american dump them out in beirut and ultimately reagan made a deal with the israelis to meet the terrorist demands and promised a solid that he wouldn't retaliate against hezbollah and iran.

if anybody asked about if we didn't make a deal but he made a deal. he negotiated cautiously and all of a sudden he was in jimmy's shoes. he did the same thing jimmy carter did. a couple weeks later "the wall street journal" called him jimmy reagan because he betrayed the promise he made that he would take swift and effective action. i was there for a lot of the time where we didn't mean to take effective action during crises. even as people look back at president reagan, in some cases the good old days i'm here to tell you it's much harder to do what governor reagan that he was going to do when he became president. this is not going away. they be running the white house situation i was not political, had nothing to do with parties involved. i had just been recruited to

come over there and take over the safe room, which is not just a calm picture appeared as the president's intelligence center. stafford24/7 over there. world events for the president. they called people of the middle of the night when things happen. the happen. they handle all the communications, office head of state calls and it's the theme of my first book, the white house. i have a good but only a few people i had a friend seat during the reagan administration. that it periods allowed me to gain interviews with heavyweights from previous and succeeding administrations. i spoke to two former presidents. people like.mac to merit from the kennedy administration and on and on. henry kissinger you name it. all the way through both cabinet

secretaries and they all told me what happened in those meetings. a lot of times they left minute and he taped his conversations so we know exactly what he said which is very helpful. so i was able to develop an analytic model and gain interviews in order to pull the information i need to re-create a crisis. i did it in a way that reads like a narrative. it is as if you were in the room. people are talking. it talking. they came for the medium itself. it is kind of fun to read and it takes you through the suspense of the crisis. i got sort of started on this one i wrote an article from a classy news paper in 2011 on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. i had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing the people on

duty in the same room that day. and the head of the situation room who was traveling with president bush that day as condi rice's representative. she explained to me what bush did that day. all the places she went and that sort of gave me an insight into a profound presidential crisis. the following year i did the same thing for the 50th anniversary. that is a group of newspapers that ran from "miami herald" 24 words to anchorage. i had the good fortune of having a journal from one of the kennedy's advisers had never been published before. he is what is today the head of fema. it was the office of emergency preparedness. he kept this journal and his

children gave copies to be and they will that into this story into the chapter in the book. in 2013 i wrote an article for the "washington post" magazine on the 50th anniversary of the hotline, which you hear about has been a red telephone on the president does. it never was a telephone. it was always a record communication. in the beginning a teletype. they didn't want to telephone because they would be staying around being in the crisis. that is what they told me. he and johnson is it 19 times during the 1967 war. so i just went back and re-created the history which each president used and my research led me to believe i was the last person to use it for

real. ever since 1985 all they have done this exchange text messages. this was a handwritten letter from gorbachev to reagan that came over the hotline faqs and into disfavor when i peered me to the officers called them in the middle of the night. they said what do we do? who is 13 pages. this is the first page. i called john poindexter and i said to him to get it translated? he said no, we don't know what it says. and it's really kind of fun. i had the english translation. i got this from the reagan library. but a two ncos in the basement of the white house in the east wing who ran the white house and of the hotline.

they made rudimentary russian which they needed to make up their dictionary out and they were on it translated the handwritten letter. ever since then, it has been mostly text messages. here is the picture that i took at the pentagon terminal of the hotline. the pentagon of the hotline. the white house was just a consumer. i forget what ford is fun but they gave me a tour and they had an old telephone that wasn't connect it to anything. anyone that comes in polled said. must've been as a joke. what they do is use a chat protocol to coordinate with moscow in the text messages or e-mails back and forth. it's come a long way but it still going on at still there. we've had some opportunities to use it recently.

there is a separate line to secure back from hot line that goes over by satellite and fiber optics and on and on. so their stories kind of led me and what i did was i picked anticipated crises in the 1950s for 12 president. they had one some had to pick the crises that were most meaningful that could be a teaching or a learning experience of love for illustrative of the demands of an international crisis. you can see chernin up in the invasion of the south. eisenhower kennedy in the cuban missile crisis. johnson had two of the six day war, the pub of.

general ford. carville as i mentioned, reagan. bush of course the persian gulf war, the iraqi invasion of kuwait. clinton, bush 9/11 and two things from the obama arab spring. the libyan intervention in this era and chemical redlined crisis. so what i did is i try to assess each of the 17 crises on two axes. the first was how bold the president's response was on the horizontal and whether successful in the long term for a long-term failure and plotted them based on not just my analysis but assessments from experts throughout the

foreign-policy world insert is made aggregated grade. rather than giving it a b. c. d. e., i tried to put them in the appropriate quadrant because none of us would agree exactly where this one should go. we could probably agree it would go in this quadrant which made a cautious and it was a failure. up here for the cautious success is end over here in the bold successes, both of which have an asterisk on them and these are the bold failures. the bottom line is the caution succeed more than an aggressive response. so people that find obama to be timid are growing against the history of management in the white house. the best one was kennedy. i would get to that in a second.

so what i will do is just very briefly go to reach crisis. stop me if you have a question at any point. just to give you a little highlight of the key findings. the first one is the start of the korean war. everybody gives true that a lot of credit these days but he made a really serious mistakes and it has turned into a classic case study for the term groupthink, which is when people get together and there's no devil's advocate today but for consensus among themselves and pretty soon they are doing things they might not have done before because there is no devil's advocate in the room and that came about because everyone in washington became intoxicated with macarthur's success in pushing the north koreans.

they let him change his mission. mission creek and tell it was really not just pushing them back to the 38th but punishing them going all the way to the chinese border and the chinese with the soviet approval led them into his traps that they were divided in the counterattack and this is where we ended up with the three-year stalemate. so it is a classic case of consensus in the oval office if you will. you take intuitively that is a good thing, but it is one end of a two edge sword and i get to the other edge later on. at the end after the chinese counterattack, truman in a press conference they spoke about giving macarthur had the authority to use the atomic bomb messages do, which was entirely

wrong. the president is going to use the a-bomb korea and then that is not the case. it was the case of a president losing control of his emotions and some of his advisers said his mouth got ahead of his brain a lot of times. in this case he did. eisenhower -- the egyptians nationalized the suez canal and the british and french to like that at all. they created a secret agreement with the israelis. the israelis would attack egypt. britain and france would come to rescue the canal and they would take control of the canal back. they really made by combat. he lost his temper. he relied on principle and so he

energetically and aggressively pushed back on the french and the british and the israelis. and he was worried about losing the 1956 election if he had to push too hard on israel. so let me tell you domestic politics is never much further than this in an international crisis. it's always in the background. always a consideration. he stopped. he forced the entrance to back off. but he later called it his greatest foreign-policy mistake of his presidency. they never regained their status as a world superpower. they developed nuclear weapons because they didn't take the u.s. to come to their assistance in both britain and france never helped the u.s. when we got

stuck in our quagmire in vietnam because we didn't help the french in the mid-50s. it was kind of a mass and so did nixon and the vice president at the time. they had had assigned a reconnaissance aircraft for years to help dispel the missile gap everyone thought we were suffering from. and the two cryptography spelled all of that. we at connecticut information on where we were relative to the soviet weapons system. they were successful. the one in the night in 60 was the 24th mission over the soviet union because the antiaircraft surface-to-air missiles couldn't get that higher to get the plane. so the imagery they would take

off from the southern neighbors of the soviet union to fly all the way and land on a one-way trip up and over. i got lucky on mayday in 1960 and we thought the pilot had perished in the plane had disintegrated. well, he is survived. they had them in custody, the wreckage of the airplane and i ache didn't know that. so he lied and covered up the whole thing and then khrushchev just pulled the string and mud in deep enough into the trap and they played out through the moscow -- showed pieces of the plane and ike was stuck because he had been lying about it. he said it was a terrible mistake. that is one way not to handle a crisis and it gives rise to the crisis management, which applies to ordinary scandal in

washington d.c. tell the truth and tell it early. that's the lesson everybody can take from ike's handling of the shootdown. they were showing the imagery. then the cuban missile crisis everyone is familiar with that. remember, the mythology that came out of the crisis had kennedy forcing the soviets to back away and he really made a deal through his brother and the soviet ambassador that we would remove our jupiter missiles from turkey if they removed their missiles from cuba and we promised not to invade cuba. both men back each other into a corner and then they both realized they didn't want war.

i think it was the best handled serious crisis of the 65 years i looked at. this is from the day after the crisis ended because they wouldn't let photographers in those meetings during the crisis. and then john said, there were two, 67 war, six-day war and the seizure of the uss pueblo. this is part of that. in this they brewed in the early version of website a room in a holiday inn sorted casement paneling, smoking was obviously okay. you can see them blowing the smoke out of his nose in the ashtray. they were down there virtually the whole six days and as i mentioned earlier, trying to keep it from expanding and getting the superpowers

involved. they exchanged the 19 hotline messages during that day. there is a little bit of humor. the first one from us they didn't know how to address the letter from johnson to chris egan, so they have the technical people ask the folks in the kremlin had addressed him and they said comrade chris egan. so they put that on the table and the russians thought we were being flip and but it was an honest mistake and we figured it out later. but again, it is a mideast war. the israelis but it put lbj in a tight spot on the political side of supporters of israel. what he said publicly was stay back out of the fray, but privately he told the israelis

to just go ahead and get it over with and make it quick and they did. on the pueblo, the intelligence gathering ship in international waters. they just overwhelmed the crew. they had no time to scuttle it. they try to throw some of the classified information on the side. in the deliberations in the white house, we don't want to start another war in asia over the skies. we just have to be patient and that is indeed what they did. it was solved in an interesting way. the officer for korea at the state department, the one at dinner he said why don't they just say that when we sign an apology that we don't mean it in that became the solution.

it was the u.s. signing its apologies to north korea that we were inside the waters, but it's all a lie. we are just making this up in the north koreans took it because all they wanted was to show it internally. we could do what we wanted to internationally which was just about the agreement. johnson had more flexibility under those circumstances because a couple months after the seizure he declined to run again. he didn't have to worry about what people would say about his actions. his actions came back around when carter found himself in the same situation. six years after 67 if the yom kippur war.

and where sadat wanted to start the war so he could use the hostilities to make peace. that is what he said in his memoir. i've never talked to him. but it happened at the watergate investigation. saturday night massacre was october 20th. the crisis was in its second or third week in the president was trying to talk about how he is handling the crisis and he was out to tell the press about what he was doing. he was completely withdrawn. he never attended any crisis meeting. when it really came push come to shove on the 24th of october, kissinger had told the israelis to ignore the ceasefire banished the military objectives

cannot backfired but the soviets from israeli kept fighting. and so the soviets sent a cable to kissinger, threatening to intervene if we didn't stop the israelis. so that night the meeting happened in this room. what do we do about the soviet threat to intervene classics nixon was upstairs drunk and was not participating. they decided to do several things, one of which was to raise the military readiness and signaled them to stay out. that got a lot of attention in the media. wow, nixon is really handling. turns out kissinger told the soviet ambassador did not pay attention to the military readiness upgrade. it was for domestic purposes

only. it is hoped the president and his hour of need during the watergate investigation. it was the president trying to divert to his domestic problems. that really wasn't a dangerous moment. it could have been and maybe that was the best thing to do at any rate the kissinger later admitted that he overreacted for domestic purposes, which is discouraging to say the least. ford remembered became president when nixon resigned and seized the goal for china. here we go with pueblo again. so ford had to take very aggressive action which turned out to be an overreaction. everything we did know it's early to free those people from the cambodians happened after they were released.

so we were bombing targets in the cambodian mainland and where is the grad already then released and taken back to the ship. it was apparent they were trying to prove him presidential timber for the upcoming 1976 election. it was an aggressive action that the crew was already lost 41 military people after 40 crewmen had already then released. so trying to prove he could be the president a lot of other people share that. and then the u.n. hostage, very cautious, but he made it to be a national disaster with his rhetoric. presidential rhetoric dries crises. yet another crisis must the president says it is a crisis. in this case, it challenges our national honor.

he didn't want to do too much because he wanted to get him out of line. you remember large numbers and the embassy. after that sending the government took over. but january, february march 1980, he loses a couple of election primaries. wow, we better do something. this is not going the way we wanted to go. so he has put his advisers into two groups. one pursuing sanctions and negotiation, one pursuing the level and not lead to the latter segment. in april he decided quite out of their in a manner that was unusual for him to attempt the rescue operation. his secretary of state resigned

in protest because he kept urging caution and patience. but i have a passage in the book in which the secretary of state plus the pueblo negotiations where johnson's caution and negotiation paid off and hamilton jordan who was chief of staff to carter said that wasn't an election year. back to domestic politics. so his patience paid off. but there's two parts to the ending of the gary who is a friend of mine wrote a book called the october surprise afterwords. he made the case that the reagan campaign made it till to keep the hostages until after the election. they're part of the deal was to

keep them until reagan was inaugurated. the other side of the story with the iranians wanted to release them before reagan got into office but it just got too complicated. so they had the american hostages in an algerian plane in tehran sitting on the runway, waiting for word to come from washington that reagan had been inaugurated. i talked to the guy in the phone listening to the conversation between the cockpit and the tower and as soon as reagan said so help me god, poor jimmy had to go down and announce the release to a couple people at the airport where reagan stood up in the capital luncheon that they have after inauguration raises glass and toasted the release of the hostages as if he had done it. so it just depends who you want to believe on some of these things which gets us into the

tricky part. i looked at three crises and i was there for two of them. >> will you accept questions throughout quek >> yes, go ahead. >> on the military situation for the hostage release for the various circumstances, could you project that to say if it did succeed, would it have made things even worse quite >> well everyone has a view that it was terribly risky and everyone knew it was risky. as he recalled they went out from helicopters. the special forces came in with the old and the rest of the force and in the middle of that they lost three helicopters mechanical problems and worst of all was one of the helicopters ran in and set everything on

eight people died. it was just a terrible, terrible outcome. but it appeared is it the president put the risk aside in the long-term potential toward circumstances that might arise because he felt like he had to show backbone as a president. >> not holy because what allowed them to release the hostage is ultimately his the ayatollah gained control of the parliament. once he got back he did it the hostages anymore and he kept them until that have been no matter what. when not have been made an overture sayed unfreeze my assets in the united states and all of the hostages go. it wasn't because of what we did. it is what happened internally but not the hostages to be released. i'm not going to speculate beyond that.

reagan's first crisis was the marine barracks bombing in beirut in 1983. it was the debacle and he handled it badly. the marines didn't have a clear mission. weinberger was opposed to it. i can't say much more than they handled that one poorly. the next one was the twa hijacking and i talked to you about that no deal deal that he found himself admitted theo as i mentioned earlier and i was successfully done as navy sailor. the worst thing was 1988 -- 1981 to 1988 back eight, back-and-forth with libya. we try to poke and try to polka try to poke and off via the eye. he responded, they responded. we went back and forth and in

1986 a lot of americans were killed. we bombed targets in libya and reagan wanted to show he was going to take bold and effective action. immediately they had their agents hijack a pan am plane in karachi. he purchased three hostages in beirut and killed them and ultimately it is a for tat. he didn't deter anybody. it was bold, but it was in effect they've been on and on. and then the persian gulf war which was successful in pushing the iraqis out of kuwait but much more complicated than that. i just want to read you because bush 41 stopped before a lot of people should've stopped. so i want to just redo the titles of some books that tell

you the varying reactions to this crisis. one by james baker. he called it a triumph for american diplomacy and military might. the u.s. news & world report called it a triumph without victory. michael gordon and bernard traynor from their book called it an incomplete success. burzynski caught a strategically inconclusive and then you get a little bit further out. theodore draper, american historian said politically it was a botched war and brown university professor steven brevard senate resolves nothing is settled nothing. so everybody can look at the single situation and make a different conclusion about how successful it was. bush 41 didn't want to have a quagmire that would drag on for years but then his son did that

later on. it is harder than it looks. everybody on the hyde beside mine can appreciate complexities on the white house. this is one of my favorites. again, back to domestic politics 1998 and august, al qaeda bombed two agencies in east africa. clinton was deeply admired him with a scandal at the time. he was due to testify before the grand jury about his cavities with that woman and he suddenly decided completely out of their errata quick decisive situation that retaliated against al qaeda parties. usually did it over the foreign policy decisions but not on this case. he shot over 100 cruise missiles in the training camps al qaeda training camps in afghanistan

and what appeared to be a nerve gas factory in sudan. it is really a pharmaceutical fact treat they did not make nerve gas or any components of deadly gas. the training camps killed six people and they were back in business in two weeks. they put al qaeda and bin laden on the map. it made him into a huge figure in the arab world. in my view it was a clear case of the tail wagging the dog. he was a movie at the time with dustin hoffman and they made up a phony crisis to take attention away from his sex scandal and i believe that is exactly what clinton did in 1998. closer to home 9/11 that really was a terrible jolt. as i mentioned, interview the

people involved at the time. the woman right here was a navy captain, traveling with bush and so she told me everything they did. the people in the sit room elected not to follow the orders to evacuate when the area craft was still up in the air. they stayed behind and fax their name to the cia and called it the death list. that was an origin that i wrote about it 9/11 that was in this chapter. people were curious why bush stayed away from washington. he lasted to the continuity of government program to get the president out of town. so he did often air force one and they went to louisiana where they landed. he taped a message to the nation because air force one didn't have a broadcast capability for tv. they wanted to go one step

further. they went into the bunker on the mountain up there and had a teleconference and that is when they decided to come back to washington that night. detoured near the pentagon and the holocaust there amongst disturbing sight. and so the thing about this crisis is they responded against the taliban in afghanistan to drive al qaeda out of safe havens. that immediately shifted to iraq because two hours after the plane hit the pentagon, he was meeting with his advisers had told them need to sweep iraq into the problem. people believed iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, which they were. and so it is not a long-term

crisis management success because the government of president turned away from asking the hand and al qaeda. bin laden escaped over to iraq and so have long-term consequences. a lot of people called it the biggest foreign policy blunder in modern american history. finally, the libyan intervention as you recall gadhafi is very savagely put them into the demonstration with guardians in libya in march 2011 in the beginning of the hairspray and obama decided to intervene with nato and others that were over a period of months. he was unaware of the last 10 learned in the cuban missile crisis. don't take the first step of months you know what the last going to be.

the first step is intervening in libya to save lives. the last that he couldn't take because libya ultimately descended into chaos. so he didn't view it as a success. he admitted they weren't thinking about the last step when he ordered the intervention. the second part was trying to redline is dear and chemical weapons. if he used chemical weapons it will be something bad. he made the statement in august 2012 before his upcoming reelection. it is not in the script. he shouldn't have said it and he regretted saying it. kennedy did the same thing. in the cuban missile crisis he drew a red line introduced in cuba. when they were he had to do something and they told bobby if they hadn't done something he would be impeached. one of my rules about crisis management is don't draw

guidelines. you may want to, but it will box you had another presidents have chosen not to for that reason. so a lot of people have criticized obama but the fact he doesn't have a doctrine you can't have a one-size-fits-all solution in the world today like we did during the cold war. now you have to think about pragmatically looking at each crisis as it comes up and decide what is more important here. humanitarian, idealism, national interest in the make decisions on a case-by-case pieces. which appears to be what he has done. all we know is what his people tell us. so will be a generation before we and the decision-making

process that he has used in the last four or five years. just to summarize the wagging the dog syndrome nixon and 73 trying to divert attention from watergate carter during the primaries about clinton lewinsky overreaction. these are the hindrances to bold action, which happened in every circumstance most of the time to understand what is going on. these are the things that cause you to be cautious. the threat of escalation during the cold war that create advisories, which is terrible

for the reagan administration. couldn't agree on anything. a lot of times the u.s. didn't have any leverage. there's no way we can affect the outcome of the crisis. that intelligence. bad intelligence interpretation of the first step, last. here, the takeaways and my view of crisis management. the president sent a message by where they meet during a crisis. if they get serious on the public needs to know they are taking it serious, they hold their meetings in the situation room. if they want the public to think this is not a big crisis business as usual, it's all perception management. talk to you about the redline. the balance of idealism, democracy for the egyptian versus national interest. what do we do?

and never instant that means military intervention. it the only way you can save people's lives. white house civilians and pentagon general don't understand each other's problems. they just don't. they have different environments, different principles than on and on. you need an advisory that can bring those two groups together during a crisis because they can create problems for you. the military doesn't like white house civilians with a 10,000-mile screwdriver. a military operation on the other side of the world. generals don't understand politics, especially geopolitics, international politics. so you can't just turn it over to the military because presidents don't want some general on the other side of the world threatening his political future and on and on and on.

domestic politics are always in the background. there's an expectation gap between what the public thinks the president should do and what he can do. i talked to about this skin in the game telling the truth. one last story. kissinger obviously in his office in new york several years ago when we were talking about the 73 war he told me in a conversation he had with the israeli ambassador and the cyanide does the with the third egyptian army threatening to intervene. he finally gets on the phone and is urging the ambassador to

called goldwater the israeli prime minister to stop the hostilities. henry gets all excited. he's on the phone and starts to yell and finally he says don't you understand how important this is. there is a little and then he proceeded to tell me with this huge grin on his face when he said in return which was my country might be more persuaded by arguments if you invoke the name of a different profit. that was one of the late moments of 65 years of crisis management. [applause] >> thank you. time for a few questions. all of the first one. what role do domestic politics play in this crisis? 50%? >> others played a greater role.

there is no decision ever made in the white house on anything without a domestic political context. i've seen it firsthand and people have told me about it. i don't think i can put a number on it, but it is in that area 10%, 15%. a lot of times president say we are going to go on principle. ike said with the 56 election. a conversation he had with his son. he thought about it and what it might mean to his reelection chances if he opposed israel. there is another one. yes, sir. >> you already said the big jump on what the insight no one understands and the people on the outside with no idea what's going on but are criticizing all the time. politicians by nature, posture just wondering if you could suggest any of this anyway

someone will calm down and stop trying to score points and admit they don't know everything. >> that is a tricky subject because they can sound condescending. it is grandstanding. i looked at all 12 presidents. no matter what the party the opposing party criticizes them. no matter what. so they are chilled into the fabric of the capital but what the critics have to say or just generalities. that is what distracts me because if it got specific outcome that would loosen both somewhere along the line. they have a tendency to be big so they don't betray their real feelings. i don't think there's any way to solve that one. yes, sir. >> i am intrigued by the crises

he left off thinking back to truman what about the berlin air lift for the case of clinton campaign. and this kind of direct association between the crises than a political event seems to be more a question of the calendar then sorted the crisis being time for a presidential election. >> ones i saw were illustrative of the issue of caution versus response. the berlin air lift would've been a good one, but the north korean was a complete surprise. what do we do. the unanticipated crises. how do we respond, which is what i was trying to get to. the bulk and save the outcome of that is complicated here does a bit of a story. it is the question of an illustrative crises. i could've been her to have

done, but nobody would've read through 30 of them. my criteria was what does this crisis tell us quiet that was the basis of it. >> there's always two sides that these two in a crisis. do you have any sense of how the other side operated in the examples he picked and anything that would be the start of? >> quite. i relied on them heavily. a couple scholars have written books about what really happened during the u.s. soviet confrontations in the cold war. they are cited in the book. lepore was one of them who created all these things in the interview the participants get the minutes of the meeting in 1973 when nixon reacted and you can hear them debate on whether he was trying to shut himself or

he really meant what he was doing. intervene, what do we do. i put them in there whenever i could find them to show how often we really didn't know what they were going to do. and they really didn't know what we were going to do. ..

and what is the moment where the president says -- when i tried to write each one even with the participants knowledge but introduced that as it comes along soon off to create tension but we could reconstruct what happened but you get my point. a lot of the stuff you don't know if it is happening. it don't take a giant reaction because if you