[inaudible conversations] .. also on afterwards her mother of four military officers talks about what families go through during deployment. cornell west and robert george discuss bipartisanship plus the financial cost of damage and we

visit st. augustine, fla. to speak with local lawyers. check booktv.org for complete schedule. booktv, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend on booktv. >> booktv continues now. michael bohn looks at 17 international emergencies faced by presidents going back to harry truman and assesses how they were handled. michael bohn served as director of the white house situation room under president reagan. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> thank you for taking your seats, we will get started in just a moment. welcome. i am the acting dean of the school of government and international affairs at george mason university we are delighted to have robert guttman one here to a presentation based on his latest book, and we talked about it, some excellent work. and his experiences as well in the situation room in the white house. on will introduce the director of the center for politics and foreign relations and there's a formal introduction for a speaker.

>> i will show you the book if i may. i will get your thoughts on the presidency from jfk to obama to use for my next few classes. what i like about his book -- "presidents in crisis: tough decisions insaide the white house from truman to obama," at the end of each crisis, decisions of the making problem in the white house, from truman through obama he doesn't assess it which gives it an interesting background. you see what jfk did with decisionmaking during the cuban missile crisis and how cautious he wants. the book, the author has been a career naval intelligence officer, and worked in the nixon white house as social l.a. and

military aid. he ran the situation room in the white house under reagan's second term. since then he has been on atlantic council. very interesting background. also not what happens in the white house he writes about his own golf course and he writes about sports in the 1920s so i introduce the other michael bohn. >> thank you for coming. the interesting beginning of this book part of it was because i was at the white house and got to see how president reagan handle crises and then started writing about other crises that had happened and it occurred to me that people on the sideline and there are plenty of them don't have a clue

how hard it is to manage international crisis that comes after the 3:00 a.m. phone call, the unanticipated crisis. everyone that is on the law sideline, up opposing politicians and pundits who oppose the president's policies don't have a clue. they say everything they want without any consequence of them they don't have any skin in the game. the message is it is harder than it looks. and and anecdotes, the iran hostage crisis, jimmy carter in 1979 and in it the minute ronald

reagan finished the oath of office and arrange to but the hostages go in a difficult situation, he was too aggressive to solve a hostage problem that killed hostages. he tried to be cautious, he was generally except for one exception. but governor reagan was running in the republican primary in march april of 1980 leading up to the 1980 election. he had a lot to say about what jimmy carter ought to be doing and he said things like this is a national disgrace, if i were president, i would give the men ultimatum, do this and do it that. then hezbollah terrorists

hijacked a twa airliner over europe and so-called the passengers and crew hostage. they flew back and forth from beirut to algeria several times let some of the hostages of, killed an american, dunked him out in beirut and ultimately reagan made the deal with the israelis to meet the terrorists' demands and promised assad that he would not retaliate it was a no deal deal. if anybody asked about it we didn't make that deal but he made a deal he negotiated cautiously. then he was in jimmy's shoes he did the same thing as jimmy carter did end a couple weeks later the wall street journal called him jimmy reagan because he betrayed the policy made when he was inaugurated, i was there for a lot of the times when we

didn't take very affective action during crises. the point it is as we look back at president reagan i am here to tell you is much harder to do what governor reagan said he was going to do when he became president. i was active duty navy running the white house situation room. had nothing to do with the parties involved. i had been recruited to come of rivera and take over the situation room which is not just the conference room. is the president's intelligence center, his alert center with staff working 24/7 they write twice daily summary world events for the president. they call people in the middle of the night when things happen all those communications and head of state calls and it is

the nerve center of the white house. i have a perspective only a few people at and i had a front row seat in the reagan administration and that experience allowed me to gain interviews with heavyweights from previous and succeeding administrations. i spoke to two former presidents like bob mcnamara from the kennedy administration before they died and on and on, henry kissinger, plus cabinet secretaries and they all told me what happened in those crisis meetings. they left minutes and god bless john kennedy, he taped his conversations so we know what he said which was very helpful so i was able to develop an analytic model and a gain interviews in order to pull the information i need to recreate a crisis and i did it in a way that reads like

a narrative. i use a lot of dialogue which i didn't make out. was all a can from the meeting itself so it is fun to read, takes you through the suspense of the crisis. i got started on this in 2011 on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack. i got to meet an interview the people in this situation room that way, the head of the situation room traveling with president bush she explained to me what george bush did that day, all the places he went, all his conversations and all the stuff. gave me an insight into a profound presidential crisis and then the following year i did the same thing for the 50th

anniversary of the cuban missile crisis, a group of newspapers from miami herald, kansas city star a fort worth, anchorage, sacramento and wire services mcclatchy tribune news service and had the good fortune of having a journal from one of kennedy's advisers that had never been published before. he is head of fema, back in the office of emergency preparedness and was in many of them and kept his children gave copies to me and i wove it into this story and the chapter in the book. i wrote an article for the washington post magazine on the 50th anniversary of the hot line, which you hear about as being on the president's desk. it is never a telephone.

it was always record communications. in the beginning at teletype. they didn't want a telephone because would be -- say the wrong thing in the middle of a crisis. that is what life style told me. he and johnson used it 19 times in the 1967 war. i went back and recreated the weight each president is and what was the last person to use it for real. effort since 1985 all they have done is exchange text messages and this was a handwritten letter from gorbachev to reagan that came over the hot line facts into the situation room and my duty officers called in, i had three phones and they said what do we do? in response to a handwritten letter from reagan and 13 pages

and this was the thirteenth page so i called john poindexter and said do you want me to send it to state? no wait, we don't know what it says until we know what it says. i have the english translation from the reagan library but i had two nc as in the east wing who ran the white house in the hotline and they had rudimentary russian. and they got their dictionary out and work all my translating that handwritten letter. in idiosyncratic russian by the way and effort since then it has been mostly text messages and here's a picture that took the terminal of the hot line, the pentagon bones the hot line.

i forget what source but they gave me a bit to work and at an old telephone that wasn't connected to anything, the red phone holds it up. there's a chat protocols to coordinate with moscow and the text messages or e-mails so it has come long way and still there and actually we have -- i don't think it has been. vladimir putin and obama on the phone. d-backs on the hot line's front. and on and on and on. those three stories led me to the book. unanticipated crises starting in the 1915s 412 presidents, some

have won, some have two, some were most meaningful that could be teaching or learning experience illustrative of the demands of an international crisis. you can see the north korean invasion, eisenhower, kennedy through the missile crisis johnson, the two to 68 -- six day war, the pueblo, the october war gerald ford a mild seizure carter as i mentioned reagan, did three george bush the persian gulf war created a nation the iraqi nation of kuwait 1990, clinton, george bush 9/11 and two things from obama's arab spring, the libyan intervention and the syrian

chemical weapons red line crisis. what i did i tried to assess each of the 17 crises from two taxis. the first was how bold the president's response was on the horizontal lands whether it was successful in the long term or a long-term failure and applauded them based upon not just my analysis but assessments from experts throughout the foreign policy world, sort of an aggregated raid and rather than giving them a b c d, put them in their appropriate quadrants because none of us agree exactly where this one should go but we could agree where it goes in the squadron which means it is cautious and but failure and the

cautious excesses and over here are the bold success and these of the bold failures and the bottom line is caution succeeds more often than aggressive response and so people that find obama to be timid on going against history in crisis management at the white house and the best is kennedy and i get to that in that second. i want to briefly raise through each crisis, stop me if you have a question. just to give you a little higher light and key finding, the start of the korean war everyone is

given a lot of credit made some serious mistakes. and turned into a classic case study for the term group think which is when people get together, devil's advocates, they look for consensus among themselves, and pretty soon they are doing things they might not have done before because there is no devils advocate in the room and at came about because washington became intoxicated with mccarthy's success in pushing back the north koreans and changing the mission mission creep until it was not just pushing north koreans back but punishing them going all the way to the chinese border and the chinese with soviets approval lured them in so forces were divided and they counterattacked and we end ed up with a three year stabbing so it

is a classic case of galloping consensus in the oval office if you will. intuitively that is a good thing but it is one edge of a two edged sword and by will get to the other one later on. at the end, right here at a press conference got mad at some reporters and miss spoke about giving macarthur the authority to use the atomic bomb if he chose to which was entirely wrong and wire service people ran out of the room, it was a case of a president losing control of his emotions, some of his advisers said his mouth got ahead of his brain lot of times. eisenhower the night of the

war, what it was was nationalizing the suez canal and the british and french didn't like it at all because it was important in that place. and created a secret agreement with the israelis attacking egypt, they would come to the rescue of the canal and take control of the canal back and when they do that it made ike mad. telos his temper relied on principle, very energetically and aggressively pushed back on the french and british and israeli and he was worried about losing the 1956 election if he had to push too hard on israel. domestic politics is never much further than this in an international crisis.

it is always a consideration. and he stopped it, force them to back out but he later called it his greatest foreign policy mistake of his presidency. may never regain their status as of world super power, france withdrew from the nato system developed nuclear-weapons because they didn't think the u.s. would come to their assistance and britain and france never helped the u.s. when we got stuck in our quagmire in vietnam because we didn't help the fringe in the mid 50s and was -- nixon was the vice president at the time. the other one was the 1960 shootdown flying high altitude reconnaissance aircraft for years and helped dispel a missile gap everyone thought we

were suffering from, and the -- we had some good information on where we were relative to the soviet weapons systems they were successful, the one that was shot down in 1960 was the 24th mission over the soviet union. the anti-aircraft missiles couldn't get that high up to get the plane. and so the imagery, as they take off to southern neighbors of a soviet union, a 1-way trip. they got lucky on made they 1960 when the soviets shot it down. the united states government thought the pilot had perished and the plane had disintegrated. they had him in custody, the wreckage of the airplane. i didn't know that so he law and covered up the whole thing and

khrushchev would this strings going deep enough into the trap and the bottom fell out and through the kremlin showed pieces of the plane and i was stuck because he had been lying about it and this was a terrible mistake. that is one way not to handle the crisis and it gives rise to one of the fundamental rules of crisis management which applies to your ordinary scandal in washington d.c. to tell the truth and tell its early. when is the lesson everybody can take from a lake's handling of the shoot down? his son john in the oval office showing imagery from what the you 2 look like afterwards the cuban missile crisis, everyone is kind of familiar with that but remember the mythologies it came out of that crisis had

kennedy forcing the soviets to back away. it was overblown, really made a deal through his brother and the soviet ambassador, we would remove missiles from turkey if they would remove their missiles from cuba and we promised not to invade cuba. both men back to each other they didn't want war. it was the best handle serious crisis of the 65 years that i looked at. this is from the day after the crisis they would not let photographers in those meetings during the crisis. there were two 67 war, but six day war, the seizure of the uss

pueblo. this is a photograph in 1967 the early version looked like a room in a holiday in, sort of basement paneling, smoking was obviously a okay, he is burning smoke out of his nose and-grays, through the whole six day is, trying to keep it from expanding, getting superpowers involved. they exchanged a hotline messages, there was a little humor is there. from the u.s. to the soviets they didn't know how to address the letter from johnson so they had the technical people in the kremlin how to address him, they put that on the cable and

the russians thought we were being flippant. but it was an honest mistake figured it out later. again it was a middle east war. israelis, it put lbj in a tight spot with the domestic political side of supporters of israel and what he did publicly was a back out of the fray but privately the wind through covert channels, go ahead and get it over with and make it quick and they did. on the pueblo, north koreans seize it, it was intelligence gathering in international waters. they overwhelmed the crew, sees it the skipper had no time to scuttle it, tried to defer a classified information over the side. one sailor was killed during the

exchange with north korean gunboats and in the deliberations in the white house it was we don't want to start another war in asia over these guys. we want to be patient and that is what they did and it was all been an interesting way. the desk officer for korea with the state department one day at dinner said why don't we just say when we sign an apology that we don't mean it? that became the solution. they went to the state department and the u.s. signing this apology to the north korea, inside territorial waters but we don't mean it. it is all law, we are making this up in the north koreans took it because they just wanted to show it internally. we could do whatever we want to do internationally which was to disavow the agreement but that is how it was sold.

johnson had more flexibility under those circumstances because a couple months after the seizure he declined to run again so he didn't have to worry about what people would say about his actions and his actions came back around when carter found himself in the same situation. another middle east war six years after the 67 the yom kippur war. in this particular case, and was a dodge wanted to start the war to use the hostilities to make peace. but it happened several times, the watergate investigation october 1973, saturday massacre was october 20th, the crisis was in its second or third weekend president was desperately trying to -- how he was handling the

crisis. he was always after henry kissinger to tell the press what he was doing but he was completely withdrawn, never attended a crisis meeting which was modus operandi. when it came to push come to shove on the 24th of october henry kissinger told the israelis to ignore the cease-fire backfired because israelis keep fighting and they surrounded the third egyptian army so they sent a cable to kissinger threatening to intervene if they didn't stop the israelis. meeting that night the meeting happened in the situation room what do we do about the soviet

threat? he was drunk and not participating. one was to raise our military readiness condition, the soviets a signal to stay out. that got a lot of attention in the media. it turns out that henry kissinger told the soviet ambassador to not pay attention to the military readiness upgrade. it was for domestic purposes only. it was to help the president in his hour of need during the watergate investigation. again the president trying to divert attention to his domestic problems. it was not dangerous moment. it could have been and maybe that was the best thing to do at any rate.

domestic purposes -- it was discouraging to say the least. ford became president, cambodians had seized u.s. merchant ships in the gulf of thailand. here we go, pueblo again, had to take aggressive action. it turned out to be an overreaction. everything we did militarily tried to free people and cambodians most of it happened after their release and so in mainland, where as the crew had been released. and for the upcoming 1976 election. >> it was an aggressive action. loss 41 military people after 40

crewman had been released. trying to prove he could be the president's and a lot of other people share that. back to jimmy, a hostage very cautious, it would be at national disaster with his rhetoric. presidential rhetoric drives crises. you don't have a crisis unless the president says it is a crisis. in this case he said it was a challenge to national honor but didn't want to do too much. he didn't want to get out of line. large numbers and the embassy, they really were students but after that, sending government, took over. january, february, march, 1980, 1980, loses a couple elections,

we better do something. this is not going away we want it to go. and pursuing sanctions. that led to groups think. it was unusual for him decided to attempt it rescue operation. the 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 put pueblo negotiations where johnson, the negotiation payoff

comment and the secret staff to carter said that wasn't an election year. back to domestic politics, it is always in the room no matter what. is patience paid off, but two parts to the ending, a friend of mine was on staff in a book called the october surprise afterwards and made the case the reagan campaign people made a deal with the iranians to keep the hostages until after the election and part of the deal was to keep them until reagan was inaugurated. the other side of the story was the iranians wanted to release them before reagan got into office but it got too complicated. and in an algerian plane in tehran sitting on the runway looking for word from washington that reagan had been inaugurated and i talked to the guy on the

phone listening to that conversation between the cockpit and the tower and as soon as reagan said so help me god, they would go, jimmy had to go to planes georgia and announce their release to a couple people at the airport where they were in the capitol luncheon after inauguration, and toasted the release of the hostages as if he had done it and so it depends who you want to believe on some of these things which gets us into the tricky part of reagan and i looked at three crises and i was there for two of them. >> on the military operation for the hostage release, various circumstances to say it did succeed? would it have made things even

worse? >> it was terribly risky and everyone knew it was risky. as you recall they went on minutes, special forces, planes came in with fuel and the rest of the force and in the middle of that loss three helicopters for maintenance, mechanical problem and worst of all one of the helicopters ran into the fuel ship and set everything on fire and eight people died and it was a terrible outcome. it appeared as if the president put the risk aside, the long term potential and ford circumstances that might arise because he felt he had to show backbone to the president. what allowed them to release the

hostages ultimately is gaining control of the parliament. once he got that he didn't need the hostages anymore and kept them until that happened no matter what and when that happened they made an overture, let's negotiate. you can freeze my assets and i will let the hostages go so it wasn't because of what we did. it is what happened internally within iran that allowed hostages to be released but i am not going to speculate beyond that. reagan's for crisis was the marine barracks bombing in beirut in 1983. handled it badly, didn't have a clear admission. weinberger was supposed to it. i can't say much more than he handled that one worley. the next one was the twa

hijacking, the no deal deal, found himself in carter's shoes made a deal as i mentioned earlier, one american petty officer, navy sailor. the worst thing was 1988 1981-'88, back and forth with libya. we try to poke gaddafi in the offer, they responded we went back and forth and in 1986 the libyans bombs a disco in berlin. a lot of americans were killed. lot of people were killed, we bombed targets in libya, reagan wanted to show he would take bold and effective action but immediately libya and their agents hijack a pan am plane in karachi, purchased three hostages in beirut and killed

them and ultimately -- it was tit-for-tat. we didn't deter anybody. it was bold but ineffective so that was reagan's theory. and it was successful in pushing the iraqis out of kuwait but looks more complicated than that and i want to read you, bush 41 stopped before a lot of people thought he should stop. i want to read you the title of some books that tell you very in reaction to this crisis, one by james baker. he called it a triumph for american diplomacy and military might. u.s. news and world report called it a triumph without victory. michael gordon and bernard trainor called it an incomplete success.

it was called strategically inconclusive and you get a little farther out, an american historian said publicly it was a botched work and brown university professor said it was the nothing war that resolve nothing and settled nothing. everybody can look at a 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 his son did that later on. it is harder than it looks and everyone sitting on the sideline can appreciate the complexities of crisis management. this is one of my favorites. again back to domestic politics 1998, august, al qaeda bob two of our embassies in east africa.

clinton was deeply mired in the monica lewinsky scandal at the time, to testify before the grand jury about his activities with that woman, and he suddenly decided completely out of character, made a quick decisive decision to retaliate against al qaeda. usually he did it over different policy decisions but not on this case. the shot over 100 cruise missiles into training camps in afghanistan and what appeared to be nerve gas factory in sudan. it was really a pharmaceutical factory. did not make nerve gas or any components of deadly gas. the strike on a training camps killed six people they were back in business in two weeks and it put al qaeda and osama bin laden on the map made him into a huge figure in the arab

world's. in my view it was a clear case of the tail wagging the dog. there was the movie at the time with dustin hoffman and the president made up of phoney crisis to take attention from his sex scandal and i believe that is exactly what clinton did in 1998. closer to home, 9/11, that really was the terrible jolt but as i mentioned, i interviewed the people involved at the time. this woman is that navy captain that was head -- traveling with george bush and she told me everything they did. people in the situation room elected not to follow the orders to evacuate. so they stayed behind and faxed their names to see i a and called it the dead list at that was the origin of the newspaper

article i wrote about 9/11 indicating this chapter. people were curious why george bush stayed away from washington. he lapsed into the continuity government program to get the president out of town in the event of a threat to washington so he took off on air force one and they went to the louisiana where they landed, taped a message to the nation because air force one did not have broadcast capability for tv and they wanted to go one step further they went into strategic command's bunker in the mountain, had a video teleconference and that is when they came back to washington and the toward needed the pentagon, i told you about the most disturbing signs you have ever seen. and the thing about this crisis

is they responded against the taliban and afghanistan to drive al qaeda out of safe-haven is but immediately shifted to iraq, turned their attention to iraq because two hours after the plane hit the pentagon rumsfeld was meeting with his advisor is and told them you need to sweep iraq into this problem because a lot of people believed iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks which they weren't. and so it was not long term crisis management success because the government, the president turned away from afghanistan and al qaeda. osama bin laden escaped. over to iraq. so had long term consequences. a lot of people called it the biggest foreign policy blunder of modern american history but finally obama, the intervention as you recall, gaddafi wanted to

savagely put the end to demonstrations and rebellions in libya and march of 2011 beginning the arab spring and obama decided to intervene with nato and others and it worked over a period of months but he wasn't aware of the lesson john kennedy learned in the cuban missile crisis. don't take a first step unless you know what the last step is going to be so the first step was intervening in libya to save lives. last step, he couldn't take because ultimately libya descended into chaos of the didn't view it as a success. he admitted he wasn't thinking about the last step when he awarded the intervention. the second part was drawing a red line on syrian chemical weapons. if you use chemical weapons we will do something bad.

and he made that statement in august of 2012 before his upcoming reelection. was not in the script, shouldn't have said it and he regretted saying it and kennedy did the same thing in the cuban missile crisis. he drew a red line over offensive missiles being introduced in cuba and when they were he had to do something and told bobby if he hadn't done something he would have been impeached. one of my rules about crisis management is don't draw redlines. you may want to but it will box you in and other presidents of chosen not to adjust for that reason. a lot of people criticized obama for his timidity but -- the fact that he doesn't have the doctrine. you can't have a lot 1-size-fits-all solution in the world today like we did during the cold war, as against them,

west friezes east, you have to think about pragmatically looking at each crisis as it comes up and decide what is more important? humanitarian idealism, national security interests? you make decisions on a case by case basis. which appears to be what he has done but all we know is what his people tell us. it will be a generation before we really understand his decisionmaking the process he has used in the last four or five years. just to summarize wagging the dog syndrome nixon, 73 war, to divert attention from watergate. carter during the primaries,

clinton, monica lewinsky ford's overreaction. these -- to bold action which happened in every circumstance most of the time, to understand what is going on, things that cause you to be cautious in a crisis, take incremental steps, the threat of escalation especially during the cold war, the group think that i talked about advisers, the reagan administration couldn't agree on anything. a lot of time the u.s. didn't have leverage. there is no wait to affect the outcome of the crisis. that intelligence, bad intelligence interpretation and as i mentioned a first step, the take away in my view on crisis management, presidents and the message by where they meet

during a crisis. if they think it is serious and the public needs to know they're taking it seriously they hold their meetings in the situation room. if they want the public to think it is not a big crisis but business as usual they meet in the oval office. it is all perception management. talk about the red lines, the balance of idealism democracy for the egyptian this versus national interest. hosni mubarak was called an ally what do we do? in every instance, humanitarian demands means military intervention. that is the only way to save people's lives like libya or wherever. white house civilians, pentagon in general don't understand each other's problems. they just don't. they have different environments different principles and on and on and on. you need an adviser that can

bring those groups together during a crisis because they can create problems for you. the military doesn't like white house civilians turning a 10,000 miles screwdriver and for military operations on the other side of the world. generals don't understand politics especially geopolitics, international politics and 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 is an expectation gap between what the public thinks the president should do and what he can do. i talked to you about the skin in the game, telling the truth.

one midwest's story. henry kissinger in his office in new york seven years ago, talking about the 73 work, had a conversation with the israeli ambassador sharon was in the desert at the end of the war and threatened to intervene so finally henry kissinger gets on the phone urging the ambassador to call the israeli prime minister and have her order a stop to hostilities and henry gets all excited. finally he says don't you understand how important this is? there was the eyewall and he proceeded to tell me with a huge grin on his face, my country might be more persuaded by your arguments if you invoked the name of a different profit.

it was one of the light moments of 65 years of crisis management. [applause] >> time for a few questions. what percentage of domestic politics play in this crisis? 50%? >> it is in the background of every crisis i looked at. in others, played a greater role, there is no decision ever made in the white house on anything without domestic political context and i have seen it firsthand and people told me about it. think i could put a number on it but it is probably in the area of 10% or 15%. a lot of times presidents go on principle like a lake is that hole with a 56 election. i had a conversation he had with

the senator, he thought about it and what it might mean to his reelection in chances if he opposed israel. there was another one. >> you said there was the gulf between what the inside knows and understands and people have no idea what is going on but didn't stop him from criticizing and everyone -- just wondering if you could suggest -- may be a naive question but england, to get people to calm down and try to understand they don't know everything. >> it can be sounds condescending. it is grandstanding. i looked all 12 presidents no matter what their party, the

opposing party criticized the hell out of them. is built into the fabric of the capital, but what the critics have to say i just generalities. and that, if they got specific on something would lose some votes somewhere along the lines of politicians have a tendency to be vague so they don't be afraid their real feelings. the don't think there is any way to solve that one. >> i'm intrigued by the crazies you left off. what about the berlin airlift or the case of clinton, the bombing campaign. this direct association between crises, seems the question of the calendar being kind for a

president. >> the issue of caution and aggressive response. the north korean invasion was a complete surprise the unanticipated crisis how do we respond? the balkans thing was complicated. it was a question i could have done 30 of them but nobody would have looked through 30 of them. my criteria was what does this crisis tell us? >> how the other side operated

in any examples? >> there are a couple scholars who had written books about what really happened in the u.s. soviet competition in the cold war. they recreated all these things in an interview in 1973. and you can hear debate on whether he was trying to shut himself with the watergate program or knew when he was doing and the bates to intervene or what we do and i put him in their to show how often they knew what they're going to do and didn't know what we were going to do a lot of time is.

that brought a little more meaning to the deliberations so if you have a chance to look at those things. i don't have a lot on the top of my head but there available and i used them. >> in looking at the material now and case studies other people have done everything seems quite clear. going through them the lack of information, and the operations center. and you don't necessarily know. >> i tried to write each crisis,

even with participants, and introduce that as it came along. so not to create tension but to show how ignorant they were. it was easy with ford because we could reconstruct that. but to my point, a lot of the stuff you don't know is happening. don't take a giant reaction. if you take a little step you might know tomorrow than you do today. is keeping your powder dry waiting for a better option to come around. in every circumstance especially with obama all his options during the arab spring were bad. and -- how bad they were. that argues for caution and

incremental steps. i call it muddling through. my editor didn't like that but it is the preferred method of crisis management in the u.k.. the science of taking incremental steps because that way you don't go so far that you can't pull back and start over again. that is how i saw them cope with the fog of war and the lack of situational awareness and clarity. any more? >> to comment on that, part of it depends on what fools you have in your tools kit. debate are attuned to muddling through because they can't do much. we have toys that we deployed. >> going back to leverage can he use those? aircraft carriers can't solve everything. if there's a threat in this

town, boots on the ground so tired of hearing that. do you have a son in the military? anybody? that is the question. there has been a sea change about how decisionmaking his changed since the abolition of the draft. .. >> that was just part of the movie,

that's part of the myth. khrushchev had told the ships to turn around the day before, before the blockade started. world war i, which was full of nuclear weapons, he said go ahead and get into port so they won't board you and steal my nuclear weapons secrets. so whatever. yes, sir. >> i wanted to go one rayier below -- layer below. are there any advisers that really stand out over all these years from, you know, from dulles to restingier? was -- kissinger? was there somebody who seemed to have a good world view and get it better than anybody else? >> i'm a fan of brent scowcroft. i know him i like him. he's been very helpful to me on my projects. kissinger had an extraordinary grasp, but he was very manipulative and had a lot of agenda items. and i enjoyed talking to him.

very knowledgeable guy. but, you know, you asked me a question that i hadn't really thought of before. but i'm inclined to go with scowcroft because he was practical and wasn't driven by ideology. that's the best answer i can give you right now. of next time we get together, i'll think of another one. [laughter] >> i think we have come to the end, so i want to express my gratitude to mike bohn for this really wonderful presentation. buy the book. i read it really worth it. and thank you for coming, and a round of applause for our speaker. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. >> okay. thank you, everybody. see you next time. [inaudible conversations]