books have been read by millions around the country and around the world. if you are a reader plan to join us with an interactive program the first sunday of every month to call in talking directly to your favorite authors >> good evening welcome to the kansas city public library. his second presentation in the

hallowed halls. [applause] a graduate at the university of washington with a masters degree in from columbia school of journalism from the observer and wall street journal and editor in chief of congressional quarterly and more recently of the american conservative. it is collaborative but it sounds like a description of their philosophy with fiscal prudence and sound monetary policy protection of civil liberties and restraint of foreign policy and we adhere closely to the maxim and the

ads of the principles over party. that could be part of the true conservativism around the beltway empire and analysis and american foreign policy. so the rehabilitation of james polk and now president mckinley. but of those he makes the case in that geographical sense expending boundaries further than the louisiana purchase. and mckinley did bring us geographical expansion with

the acquisition of puerto rico but more importantly of american power with a world power with the battles of cuba and the philippines so the open door to china and the expansion of the american economy being called the most successful president to incorporate core oregon and california and texas you can see me after class to explain that but the only president who saw his entire program written into law also one of the most morally degraded which makes that program

possible. his diagnosis of a successful politician but just as important to give a new place on the international stage. a city campaign was on tariffs more than what anybody else identified. but to make a strong case over the empire. but the deliberate mastery of mckinley. this book is a continuation of an ongoing effort to reverse the trend of contemporary academics to devour our heritage. anachronistic moralizing and as such has created a character study of one of the

architects of the american century. [applause] . . . . sort of picked up on that in writing the headline into the view of my book and that is my

effort to emulate donald trump. [laughter] i didn't set out to solve the mystery. i didn't really know that there was a mystery. i didn't understand well enough to understand there's something strange or mysterious about him and can be explained perhaps into sentences which is given all the consequential things that happened on his presidential watch, why does he not rise higher than america's historical consciousness of today or put another way given the fact that he was such a sort of non- flamboyant undramatic how did all those consequent things happen under his presidency? so, as i guided through the process it started to drive me

crazy because i have a hard time getting a handle on it. he wasn't a forceful man and yet all these things happened under his presidency and i was having a sort of hard time in bringing this to light. the historical consensus was okay, things have bee happen ons watch. but he didn't have anything to do with it. and that didn't strike me as being totally credible. i quote this a lot in the book it's not just about mckinley but it's about how the president works. they have a chapter on mckinley. but then they add he found himself benefiting in part from

circumstances beyond his control. what i talked about here in this whole sum years ago he comes in part exactly the leverage with me the other average he comes in with maybe 14 occasionally and often such distinguished given his background but nevertheless the caretaker president and martin van buren who is a failed president presides over a terrible recession he couldn't control under the basis of some

of the history group or a cleveland as we all know served non- consecutive terms and was objected bus making him the only two-time and one term president in the history. and john quincy adams who was at the behest of andrew jackson. so, the mystery deepens to think about what happened and i want to urge you to not just ticked off the bullet points on a piece of paper but think about the political drama. it ended up being a huge success

and we destroyed the spanish empire essentially in the process spanish fleet the atlantic and pacific and we became an empire by acquiring puerto rico and the philippines and liberated cuba. we made a commitment that we would end. he kicked them out of the caribbean and turned it into for good measure as it was historically noted they figured the acquisition and annexation and set in motion the events. they reversed the policy of the expansionist and said we are going to move on this and set in

motion the actions that led the planning in the canal. he brought about the open door in china that basically says he carved up by the industrial powers the european and japanese powers. he created the concept, which when i was covering the trade policy in the 1980s in "the wall street journal" the reciprocity is than what was called fair trade to make it even so that we can have these exchangecould have theseexchangd forth across the borders. he crafted the concept of the non- colonial imperialism which ultimately was picked up by franklin roosevelt when he was transforming the world through world war ii and that i in amert the center of it. they established the special relationship of britain just a previous couple of years earlier

under the cleveland administration. the question on the watch is to what extent does he deserve the credit. so i set out to expose the myth in the buck.

you can't decide. [laughter] for the modest flail his father ran. all these things i talked about

and these buildings and what i think about her is she took a train to columbus later in her life. you have family there? i have a son there. they couldn't go back to college because the economic difficulties have rendered the need for all the fame of the members to go to work so he got jobs as a schoolteacher like 17

at the time and he was a postal clerk and i should say that he enlisted immediately. he gave himself two days to think it over and whether this was the right thing to do and he was a very strong abolitionist and subscribed to the weekly tribune. he had i think i can accurately describe as a war record heat and purpose and 18-year-old private and immediately his commanding officer and a great mentor was an officer.

they made him a quartermaster sergeant if he was taking care of the supplies. he had gotten caught and trapped essentially in the area of the battle that they couldn't move or get out or nobody could get in to help them and they were starving and had run out of water. the battle began in the early morning and now it is late afternoon and they hadn't had lunch. they had run out of water well before that so these troops and

young mckinley loading up a wagon with bread and coffee and water and a few other thing and getting the wagon to these troops. they had him load up the wagon and a handout to surrounding force and encountered two officers tuesday that ki the cos associated carter and went on and got to the clearing and then they made a run for it. bullets were whizzing by and the back of the wagon was a shot away in the positions.

he immediately as a result of that, he was promoted to the commission and then if you put them directly in harms way and each time he caught another promotion so he ended the war as a major, 22-year-old major. so, she goes back to poland and decides he wants to become a lawyer and go to congress like his mentor, rutherford hayes. he sends a letter this is what he wants to do, basically what you did, sir.

mckinley carefully preserved the letter and he knew what he wanted. after he becomes a lawyer his sister becomes a schoolteacher and becomes a civic leader. he joined the veterans groups, the church, the chamber of commerce. immediately he was pulled up in the positions of leadership so there was something special about this guy and they turned to him for leadership even though he was not a flamboyant person. and i have a little passage in my book here describing him after his civil war experience. and i think that we can see in

the book the first hint of what becomes an element of the mystery. it was much as his father is transformed to the more sophisticated uses. an unseasoned teenager and left the army in adulthood and then the questions of intellect, administrative ability, leadership and courage and passed the tests and then gravitated naturally to his side for the mentor should. but it settled upon him softly without bravado. it's the temperament to produce the demeanor and he learned the power of mystique of leaving

unfair that which didn't have the expression of keeping people guessing his intentions or motives. he didn't seem bothered by it and there was a congenial shrouding increasingly restless ambition. so he serves 14 years and the chairman of the ways and means committee in the position to approach this issue with terroristterroriststariffat thes burgeoning as a productive machine and even crafted a bill

of 1890 that turned out to be a bad move. it's sitting in his office as they come in messed up with posters everywhere and papers and buttons. sitting there smoking a cigar and in walks his editor of the newspaper and he says it's all over. what am i going to say in the newspaper. mckinley looks up with a look on his face and says in the time of

the darkest travail, victory is near us. she just couldn't get pessimistic about anything. so he lost a seat but then runs fofor governor two the governore terms and now is ready to run for president of the united states. he runs for the campaign and says that his good friend that served him so well the industrialist of ohio he sat out on a very important mission he wants to find out those who had all the patronage and those who worked under them because he was

the front runner anyway and would have the nomination and it wouldn't even be a battle. so then they go into the study and light up their cigars and he says it is all over but the shouting. they will all vote for you. they seem disturbed by these conditions. what are they? they want to hold new england and they pitched off a couple of others to be the treasury secretary. it seems that each years earlier

at the beginning of the administration, he had gotten similar commitments from his support, but the treasury secretary should never have materialized. mckinley stands up and walks a cup of steps back and forth and says it's come at too high of a price. it's worth nothing to me and it's worth less to the american people. i am just stating we can beat these guys. they were so upset they went to other major politicians to deny the first ballot nomination in which case they thought maybe they could pull up somebody else but they beat him and became the

nominee and then he have t had p against william jennings bryan. we know this story. 36-years-old two terms in the house and he lost that seat and ran for the senate and lost. he was the greatest orator of our history, and we all know he got himself on this platform of the democratic convention and gave the statement you shall not press that upon our head. and the reason was the panic of

1893 and the south end of the west end of areas were really suffering and there wasn't enough in their view so that is what became of the man who was going to read that charge and he crisscrossed the country and was all over the place spending amazing amounts of time at seven in the morning and the last speech at 10:00 at night. mckinley couldn't compete with that. we can talk about that in the q-and-a and it's interesting i will try to keep this going. he didn't want to take her on the tour so he concocted this famous front porch strategy of

750,000 americans who came to canton ohio and lined up and came and spoke. it was amazing you know what they say in the politics of the message. mckinley control the message as a church group or labor group or african-american organization they sent a letter saying if it works for us it works for you and they have all these people working on this. then what are you going to say, what is the point you want to make so he knew exactly what they were going to say and it was all somewhat cloisonné

orchestrated. it worked and he became president. so, now i'm going to step back and describe what kind of a man had emerged. it's whether he was a leader he was an incrementalist in terms of the way he managed things. he didn't try to push too hard. he wasn't a visionary or man of imagination. in his day, roosevelt was a man

of imagination, henry cabot lodge, these were men of imagination and great vision of american greatness and how america can burst out into the world. but it turned out he had an amazing capacity that was unfolding with clarity and find ways that would allow him to sort of dodge these in the vapor extractiofavored direction in te subterranean force. he always seemed to get his way somehow and she did it by

convincing people to do what he wanted them to do by thinking that it was their idea. he said he didn't care who got the credit. it just wasn't important to him at all. he had a friend who said i don't think mckinley ever let anything stand in the way of his own advancement. and the wife of a very prominent ohio politician at that time and intermittently and ally and adversary. he was a pleasant phone and generous, but behind the mask was this iron will and the

desire to succeed. butterworth i came across him in the papers because they were very close friends and had letters back and forth. i initially conclude that he must be part of that clustered around so it was a little weary of mckinley and then we came across a "washington post" article in which he is talking about mckinley and he uses a kind of illustration.

he picked the apples, took a bite out of the other one then turned to me and said do you like apples. they talked about some of the elements and examples of the mckinley resolve that emerged in big ways during the presidency.

now the book on gimli, and i'm going to talk briefly later about why and what has kept him from that reputation but the book is he didn't really want to go to the war and state and of the american people and congress basically pressed him against his will towards a war that he didn't want. my view is if you study this carefully and understand this hasn't happened at all. when he was elected, there was an insurrection going on for indigenous folks that want independence and this had been going on. there was a previous insurrection that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and they had settled finally but

now they sort of reemerged as destabilizing those trying to do this with cuba at risk. it was also opening up the possibility that other european powers could see the chaos coming in and taking over cuba, which would be the last thing the united states wants. it's one thing to have a daily life like this in the caribbean where there is a legacy of power but it would be unattainable. much of it based on humanitarian and mckinley comes into the

presidency and takes over. they figured the spanish of the cubans because he was a status quo by and everything will be stable and fine. that isn't very realistic. there's a sort of program of diplomacy and he realized america is becoming a powerful country and this is our

neighborhood and there will be very difficult if they went to war with us, so they entered into this diplomacy as well. but pretty soon they could see that this diplomacy was behind this affability with an iron fist and we want this war to end but we don't have to do it. they would accept that and they don't seem to lost that there's a possibility. you've got to get this over because if you destabilizing the region and its unattainable if they will have to put up with it for much longer.

i got more and more angry and who knows what would have happened. but the fact that it was theirs is also a testament to mckinley's resolve that he was going to make sure they were out of the caribbean because ostensibly it was to protect american lives.

it is an amazing story and not a particularly entirely favorite stories about americans. but ultimately, they settled there and mostly sugar plantations getting wealthy in the process. they had financial practice to go with it and ended up along the governing and presiding.

he even contemplated going in there and he didn't really want a war so that was the state of clay. mckinley again rejected the policy of the predecessor and made it very clear he liked the subterranean diplomacy and he was very interested. but there wathere was the anti-t sentiment for other places. they got the negotiation and he sent it to congress. he didn't give up and it was to

be filled with by both houses for the majority vote of both houses and that's how we got hawaii. then there was the philippine. after three months of the war, he basically said okay fine. here's the deal. we will take them temporarily but it's going to be independent. so that came out of nowhere but we had conquered puerto rico and

spain has to give us an island in the pacific and before we were even entering into the negotiations. they asked them to operate to negotiate with a gentleman who said you can't get any more glory than you've already gained in this war of yours so i assume you will be very generous than

the question was what was he going to do about the philippines and while the negotiations in paris were going on. we are building this big global navy annavy and you couldn't hae station without controlling territory over the world and it was the best place that he couldn't really control it unless they moved on but the whole rest of the philippines they were not able to keep them at all so now that they've been defeated the question was who is going to have the philippine

senate will have to be us or germany or some other power for the colonies and if they have all these other islands they basically decided i'm taking the whole thing. as you know it is very much like the vietnam war and it was a difficult. as i say, that seems to be a consequential presidency.

what he could do with the brain of his was pretty amazing. in the second term, teddy roosevelt immediately when he became president said i intend

to govern just as my predecessor did in his agenda will be my agenda and within two days he gets to the white house and he didn't feel like he had to say those things anymore. i intend to govern and it was a remarkable thing to be said. they were in the capitol rotunda that roosevelt was always conscious of the narrative and put himself at the center of the narrative and over the succeeding decades, the adoring biographer's basically bought the narrative and didn't quite work. it's these marvelous incredible things that foundation was laid

out by the predecessor. so mckinley kind of gets the short end of the stick in terms of that interpretation. describing this historical narrative building, i described jr and i will quote a little bit here. prone to the major safety and caution as they described it he took them on a political roller coaster ride and to me it was thrilling and significant and helped to define america but behind him was william mckinley

who may be mysterious but is a consequential president and i think perhaps in the years of toil that i put in. can you come up to the microphone if you have a question for people on tv can hear you.

it was considered failures are not specific consequential a thy certainly put him above those people. so it was within my pantheon. i haven't focused on where you put them directly. that's shaped the public's compassion. it was encountered after a whi while.

the daughter of an her grandfather bought a newspaper and started the repository and it was a successful newspaper and then her father went in to banking and everything and was quite lovely and they sparkling personality. nonetheless it is a big occasion at the time and was just about moving up to the politics. their first daughter arrived.

during the presidency she learned her mother is dying during cancer and affected her greatly presidency she had trouble in her daughter was five monthlookedfive months and senta depression and he coaxed her out of it with a lot of patience and just refusing to let go.

it's described and nobody knows exactly what happened. she developed epilepsy which those days was considered a mental illness that affected their lives and isaacs tremendously. he was traveling around and said a young woman in her 20s was running this bank and was very

unusual in those days. now a sort of sedentary life, she crochets and does other things like that and becomes rather sort of narrow with her outlook, very devoted to her husband but she becomes peeved and difficult. he never wavered in his devotion to her and basically just accepted that as a part of life. so when this became known that he was emerging as a figure politically, it became an element of identity and he took care of his troubled wife. i don't engage in the saddle for those that suspect that it was manipulated to some extent as a

political advantage, so that is the story. yes sir. >> what happened to him that jr was able to get him on the ticket? " died of cancer in the middle of the term so the result was mckinley didn't have a vice president for a significant part of his first term. and jr meanwhile had been his assistant navy secretary said he wasn't sure he wanted to get him that job. he didn't know him al all that l but knew that he tended to be sort of contagious and he said to one of his friends pushing for him to have that job and they promised him he's not going to do that.

but he did amazing things. if. it was to the point of insanity when he ran up san juan hill and becomes along with george dewey of the greatest heroes from that for. so when the second convention comes up.

mark hanna sent a note to mckinley at the convention. your job now iour job now is tot 40 years. and when he died, he is quoted as saying cowboy of the president of the united states. yes, sir. >> i am curious how he handled the confederacy at that time. of course the south was still sort of in and out of the union. and of course that brings up civil rights and things like that. but what was his policy towards the former confederate states? did he want them back, was he a forgiving person and reconcile of the south and indirectly how

diindirectly howdid that then ae civil rights positions? >> that is a very good question, and it can't be ignored. here's what i say about that. you have to go back to his great mentor, rutherford b. hayes became presidenwhobecame presidt you might call the deal to end reconstruction and a lot of historians who are giving a revisionist view of the reconstruction consider that to have been a terrible thing because it kept them down for the next 100 years. the deal was essentially we've got to stitch this country back together and it's not going to be easy. we are probably just going to have to sacrifice the civil rights for the period of time.

they were abolitionists and liberal in that they cut a deal. by the time he was president, he still was concerned about bringing the sections back. i'm drawing a blank now. he kind of moves and lost sight of where he was and says we've got them on the run. his position towards african americans ended up being what i would call patronized, and there

are worse words you can use the basically there was a good relationship with a lot of the organizations. you are doing wonderful things, keep at it but h he was inflictg a finger for them and ultimately towards the end of his presidency, some of these groups were becoming quite agitated against him. he wanted to give somebody who was a southerner and assumed to be sympathetic in the south from maryland and that is as far south as he got.

who would you say was most similar to mckinley? >> i would say eisenhower. i see very significant paralle parallels. it's how they manage from the shadows and who managed direction. they would say this guy can't even express himself, but it was all with a purpose and that is somewhat the way that mckinley operated so i think that they are quite similar.

>> in 1898 there was an anti-imperialist william james harvard professor was strongly against imperialism if you can say something about mckinley and how he reacted to that criticism and the other question is about his fascination in the word about the? >> and yes, there was a very strong anti-imperialist wave of sentiment that emerged. mark twain is involved in it and various other people of prominence. he never took any of the turmoil politics personally, so he also had sort of traveled a lot and

maybe a lot of speeches. some of them were designed to be major policy address yours and he explained what the policy was so he understood that he had the supposition that it is bad when the foreign affairs were created in the resurrection and the defensive but he basically just handled it. he was supposed to be at buffalo in the spring but was traveling to california as a part of that policy and practice. he thought that was very

important. one of the academic biographers nevertheless developed an infection in her blood and almost died. they went immediately back to washington and san francisco. so his appearance postponed and that's when they concocted the idea. as part of their optimism about the prospects anybody could harm the presidency would talk openly with people but he didn't worry

about it very much. he would reach for his left hand and put a pistol in his chest and fires at point blank. they fired a second time and it got launched there. they operated rather quickly but concluded what they were looking for was far more dangerous than leaving it, so they did it he was recuperating nicely but in those days they didn't understand infection and those things, so that emerged and took them down and i think that he lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of west in two weekwest in twoweeks after the f 49.

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this is part of our 2018 special fiction addition of in-depth . >>host: david ignatius what is the premise of the quantum spy? >> the united states is locked in a new manhattan project to build a piece of technology that