festival that takes place in 70 venues across charlottesville and all the moral county. >> good afternoon. welcome to what i am confident will be a fascinating discussion about three gripping and important books, john

farrell's richard nixon:a life, and america and the world in the 1950s and sharon weinberger's the engineers of war, the untold story of darpa, the pentagon agency that changed the world. i want to welcome everyone on behalf of virginia humanities, producer of virginia festival of the book. before i start i have some announcements to make. first, please silence your cell phones. you may tweet about this event at hashtag va book 2018. we think the festival's many sponsors without whom the festival would not be possible. the festival is free of charge, not free of cost. please remember to go online with how to support your festival so we can sustain it for many years. we think the city of charlottesville as event sponsor and the host at this

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these authors will be available for a book signing after the program ends. we will discuss two presidential biographies and the fascinating agency created on the watch of one of those presidents. the authors will give brief synopses of their books and we will have a discussion appear and open it for questions from you, the audience. first up is william hitchcock, professor of history at the university of virginia and the randolph compton professor at the miller center. he received his undergraduate degree from kenyon college and yale university. before coming to you, at wellesley college and temple university where he was chair of the history department. is 2008 book the bitter road to freedom, in the history of the liberation of europe was the finalist for the pulitzer prize and tell us about the age of

eisenhower? >> thanks for being here and thanks to my distinguished co-panelists, great to be here. here is the question was why should we care about dwight eisenhower? i have a book here to answer that question. the book makes the argument that dwight eisenhower who may seem like a figure from a very different era than ours is one of the most consequential presidents of the postwar era. a lot of scholars and academics would how with laughter at that assertion is i have a book to show them. eisenhower had a significant impact on the shape of modern america since world war ii and i argue in the book in many ways we are still in a funny way living in the age of eisenhower in certain respects and that is what i try to make the case in the book, he really

shapes the evolution and development of the united states. i will give you three big themes, ways in which he did that. the first major way, ike shaped modern america was he helped to build and legitimate the warfare state. the warfare state, the military industrial complex, eisenhower did a great job to build it. he expanded the pentagon, expanded the defense department, sums of money on new technologies, the corona satellite or another things, enormous amount of money and prestige in waging the cold war, to win the cold war. whether you like it or not, the way he bulks up our ability to

wage a global cold war against the soviet union. he was enormously consequential, invested his prestige and money into building the strength to go on to win the cold war. the second thing he was significant for is he significantly shaped what did eisenhower do on the domestic side, he created a political space, neither right nor left, he ran to the center and popularized being a centrist and a politician, hard to believe that is not the world we live in now though i believe many americans still return to a more centrist set of debates or discussions in political life where politicians lived, they lived on the margins. eisenhower pulled the republican party out of isolationist camps to an

internationalist camp, a few t discuss. the third thing is eisenhower gave us a model for what presidential leadership might look like and still resonates, and the disciplined presidency. discipline in the white house is a huge advantage and he was a military officer so he knew something about discipline. that doesn't mean he could do a one armed push-up which i don't think he could but what i mean by that is tools of

governments, understood how bureaucracy worked, pursuing a limited number of important objectives. balanced budget, defense spending and infrastructure, said he would do that when he got into office, did it for 8 years and got results in all 3. that is being disciplined meeting with the cabinet, national security council and the press, he did that every single week. he got results. an interesting model how presidents could be effective even in a time with ours that seem so cryonic. make is a man for our times and we all live in the age of eisenhower. >> that is a great lead-in. >> we bleed into it but i will eat into it first.

sharon weinberger is executive editor of foreign policy magazine. she was national security editor at the intercept where she directed publications, defense and intelligence coverage, graduate of johns hopkins university and holds masters degrees from the university of pittsburgh school of international affairs from european studies. she held numerous reporting fellowships at her writing has appeared in the new york times and many publications. tell us about darpa. >> i was invited to be on this panel. when i have spoken about the book i start with what i think are the more amusing stories of darpa. whether it was the time of darpa during the vietnam war sent a rorschach test for an imprisoned vietcong fighter or the time they had a top secret program is that monkeys with microwaves, this is something

real about cold war and science, i talked about the relationship between eisenhower and the advanced research project agency. i want to talk about what the agency is. for some people are household name, for other people it isn't so darpa was created in february 1958 wins authorized by eisenhower as a response to the launch in october of sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite launched by the soviet union. there is some mythology that has developed around sputnik. it was a big deal at the time but the idea that it created instantly a collective panic is overplayed. it was in many ways a politically engineered crisis in washington. that is the way eisenhower responded which was very non-sensational. for the american public it represented two things, first

that symbolically the soviet union had beaten the united states into space and second the ability to launch a satellite into space was linked to the technology to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile. the idea of the continental invincibility of the united states had been breached and bombers that might take hours to reach the united states, and icbm in under an hour. it was a political crisis, eisenhower tried to downplay it, he had access to classified information, he knew the united states intelligence community was working on the first earth imaging satellite later known as corona. that was not revealed to the public, we were not as far behind as the soviet union was often portrayed in the press. administration officials tried to downplay it. gen. curtis lemay called a hunk of iron and sherman i adams, eisenhower's chief of staff derided concerns about a space

race, a basketball game where people tried to put things up in space but nonetheless there was a lot of pressure on eisenhower to do something. he authorized the creation of what was then known as arpa, advanced research projects agency. this was the first space agency before the creation of nasa. there was arpa that later became darpa the consolidated all the space programs into one agency, that included winner von braun as well as the air force and navy programs. this agency was going to get the united states into space as quickly as possible but when darpa was formed it had a big mandate. the agency mandate said it is authorized to direct research and development projects being performed in as a part of defense as the secretary of

defense may designate which is anything, eisenhower's and others said they would develop the, quote, unimagined weapons of the future and what happened was it set up in the first days of darpa a tension eisenhower created, this agency going to be a science agency that did national security was at a national security agency that did science and that has existed in decades and gone back and forth. in its first year of existence along with launching the first american rockets into space, pursued on the science sides and outlandish projects was one was called operation argus which was going to launch nuclear weapons, set them up in the earth's upper atmosphere to create a force field to protect the entire planet from intercontinental ballistic missiles. it is going to be a force field. so they went off with the air

force and launched nuclear weapons and that was leaked to the new york times. >> some things never change. >> eisenhower's science advisor called the greatest experiment ever done and it was. it was also rather unsuccessful. turns out these, the force field was going to be killer electrons from nuclear weapons but turned out the way our atmosphere is they decayed too quickly to make for a force field and the first chief scientist said there could be another planet, another earth with opposing superpowers where shields like that might be possible. the second project that was emblematic of what darpa was was a project called orion, a conceptual spaceship that would travel to the stars powered by thermonuclear weapons. it was rather unbelievable. there was a mockup made that

pres. kennedy was appalled by, 500 nuclear weapons attached to the back of it and freeman dyson, one of the scientists who worked on it estimated that for every launch of this spaceship 10 people would die statistically on average from the fallout. on the upside, arpa in his early days did some amazing things, paid for early work on the saturn rocket done by word or von braun and german rocket scientists and that became the concept, the model of it became what eventually launched astronauts on the first moon mission. the other thing authorized by eisenhower was the first communication satellite from space which broadcasts president eisenhower's voice. you have a mix of projects in an agency at war with itself and the administration is what actually happened was eisenhower authorized the

creation of nasa. darpa lost the civilian space program to this new space agency. the military satellites went back to the services. were left with an agency that went on to find new missions, whether was vietnam or a nuclear war, nuclear test detection. my book is about what happens to this agency after its creation by eisenhower where tried to find its place in the world. >> thank you. finally, jack farrell's nixon biography reached the new york times bestseller list and won the pan-american prize for the best biography of 2017 and an award from the new york historical society is the best work in the field of american history or biography. jack's two earlier books were about clarence darrow and former house speaker to peroneal. jack is a graduate of the

university of virginia right here and worked as reporter on the famous spotlight team for the boston globe. tell us about nixon. >> thank you for giving us that talk and reducing temptation to reach forward and push one of these red button this. it says vote but i'm not sure that is what it is. i had the same question we face with eisenhower which is why nixon now? mine is an easier sell and it is not because eight years ago i said to myself donald trump is going to become president and there will be a special counsel and a break in at the dnc at a saturday night massacre. it is because i thought this was a very interesting character whose life encompassed a lot to do with my

generation in particular. somewhere in his well-deserved place in the afterlife richard nixon is looking up at us and saying you see, bob? they will miss me when i'm gone. look at what we have now. he is a caricature. one of the things i wanted to do in the book was to reach the man. one thing that i was struck by was this almost protective tenderness of people who knew him or members of his family, that there was a lovable human being passed the nixonian shell. i thought if i could portray that human being that would be

a story worth telling. he is a joke on the simpsons, the only president to resign, one of the most famous and funniest stories in washington is the ex-president gathered to go to anwar sadat's funeral and there was gerald ford and there was jimmy carter and there was richard nixon and bob dole walked in and said see no evil speak no evil and evil. the words and yet were almost part of the title, and yet with almost every bad story you tell about richard nixon there is a flipside to tell about him and in all's case, he went to war in 1944 and was horribly wounded in the italian front by a mortar shell, to the point

where the medic who came along roads on his for it in his own blood don't worry about this guy, we have given him all the morphine he is going to get but he did make it back and if you remember, he lost the use of his right arm and his shoulder and lost the ability to perform the most basic of political functions, the handshake. of all the chambers of commerce and all the state legislatures and politicians in washington bob dole ever ran across, he always said there was one, always remember to extend his left hand to shake his hand and that was richard nixon. if you look at bob dole giving the eulogy of richard nixon's funeral, the same man who came up with a story about see no evil hear no evil and evil breakdown, wracked with agony as he gives the eulogy at an's funeral. there was something more there,

i thought. and yet, at one point the working title for the book was going to be richard nixon, an american tragedy because he almost was a shakespearean figure of greek tragedy. he did awful things in watergate. he delayed, undermined lyndon johnson's efforts to end vietnam war in 1968 so he could get elected and yet as mr. spock told us when he encouraged captain cook to negotiate with the klingons, their is an old falcon proverb, only nixon could go to china. nixon went to china. with a stroke of his pen, the environmental protection agency, he signed legislation that increased tenfold the number of young women who were able to get athletic scholarships, the social security cost-of-living increases that some of us rely

upon came into being in the nixon administration and were signed by richard nixon. he was the single most, to supervise desegregation of 7 schools. what to make of him, what is the lesson about richard nixon. if he would say if he were here. and the polarized nation, teams tearing at each other's throats. i say that because of the last scene in the white house to leave washington and go back to exile in san clemente, when he sums up what happened to him and his own shakespearean tragic story, those who hate you don't win unless you hate them and then you destroy your self. that is the main reason why nixon now, a cautionary tale of what can happen to good souls who destroy themselves because they give into the baser

passion of things like 8 - hate. [applause] >> i want to start will and jack two pres.s who had a relationship, nixon started, the vice president, nearly didn't make it because incipient scandal but the checkered speech saved the relationship between 2 terms of eisenhower presidency. my sense reading both of your books is it was a very fraught relationship, not a close and warm one. talk about that, each of you. >> first thing i have to say is eisenhower is responsible for darpa and for nixon.

>> you are taking credit. >> getting myself into the trough. the nixon eisenhower relationship is fascinating. jack has written about it in an illuminating way. eisenhower didn't know nixon before he met him, before nixon had been nominated by the proverbial smoke-filled room of republican insiders who picked the control of the ticket in 1952 because he was young, he was from california. most important he was a ferocious anti-communist which was a huge advantage on the eisenhower ticket because eisenhower was a political unknown. it was known the democratic party was interested in running eisenhower for president in 1948 and maybe 1952. the republican establishment was not sure whether ike was reliable enough so what better way than to get a hardcharging

young dynamic senator with impeccable credentials of going after communists? dick nixon had unmasked the soviets by alger hiss. .. the regularship never warmed. their families would be tied together by marriage between eisenhower's grandson and nixon's daughter but a they were a generation apart. very different world experiences. nixon was very young on the ticket and eisenhower was arguably one of the most famous americans over the century, and eisenhower never pulled nixon into this personal embrace,

never brought him into the white sox family quarters. just another guy on the family cabinet and no mean this most important person in the cabinet. >> tom, richard nixon was born in the outback of california. it was a californiaian and that a major ron why ike pick him, looking towards the west and set of southwest. but heyed a a blow hard of a four who was emotionally abusive to his sons and a very reserved, cold mother, who as nixon once hall of fame -- famously said, my under never said she loved me. he had a brother two died and the oldest brother, the sort of the favorite son of the family, died of -- both of forms of tuberculosis, ruining the family finances and making nixon a bit are -- all this left him as a

bitter and insecure man,en security which fed that tragic flaw. he was like iogo to his to his ohno the low. you're not handsome like jack kennedy, the press hates you, the press hates you, over and over again. then picked within six years of coming have as a houston commander from the -- lieutenant commander from the south pacific. going from a complete nobody to vice president of the united states and he is a very happy guy, and he -- all he wants to be is admired and be a working man of ike's team, and you really can't fault eisenhower. he just spent five years liberating europe, working with churchill and de gaulle, major historic figures, and he saw nixon as staff, as this young

lieutenant who was useful to bring in a bunch of papers and put them on the desk and go somewhere else. i it wasn't an active disdain. was ignoring this guy him thought hi was kind of quirky, which he was, and eisenhower puts him off and then eisenhower has a heart attack and richard nixon rises to the occasion and shows why it took him six years to become vice president. he handles everything perfectly. not too proud or too modest, not too brash or too strong or too walk bit eisenhower has been lying in a bed, staring at the ceiling, realize his mortality is upon him and wonders whether or not he really wants to turn the united states of america over during the cold war to young ripped nixon, and despite nixon's excellent performance, ike comes back, resumes his duties a president, calls nixon in and says i don't want you on the ticket next year.

for somebody as insecure and fragile as richard nixon, that just shattered him. almost a physical breakdown, it was so bad, and so the relationship probably got better, especially after the -- after dick's daughter married ike's grandson. but there was always that feeling in there of nixon wanting to get in to the inner circle and never getting a chance to do so. >> sharon, darpa had its share of fascinating characters, not household names like eisenhower or nixon, but in reading your book, i was struck -- will talked about the disciplined president. there war number of people, specially early the days of darpa who were not disciplined but fascinating casualties. you open the book with a story about william goodell.

>> so, darpa has this -- william goodell was very close to eisenhower and a seminal figure in the intelligence world, and i hope someone will write a book about him. he he has a history in which darpa is an important part. 1958 there were three figures who were key, which says a lot out eisenhower. the first director or darpa was the vice president of general elect and followed in the moldovan industrialist, and the idea being that it's about managing science, not necessarily science itself. so roy johnson was chosen as the first director, and he really thought he was going to bring men in uniform into space. this military would control space. that part eisenhower was not crazy about. he was listening to science advisor who wanted a civilian speights agency so roy johnson,

and then herb york, a young physicist from california, practice, arrogant and smart, and then in the background this guy, i interviewed the first financial administrator and she said i had no idea where william goodell came from. the just showed up and nobody said who we was. he first headed what was called the office of foreign development. so william goodell was a famed world war ii intelligence operative and had been in special operations office in the pentagon. he had been the pentagon's liaison to the cia and the national security agency, and the reason he had been installed very quietly at darpa was because publicly darpa was the first space agency. it one talked about the cia's earth imaging satellites were being swept up. so goodell was to represent the interests of the intelligence community but ended up being this very seminal figure because

when the first year things blew up. nasa was created and they lost their civilian satellite programmed. herb york worked to the pentagon and lobbied to take the space a programs so he could be the space czar. you have a space agency that now had no mission and the senior person wag william goodell and he says, this can by kind of good for me. good for him in terms of what he saw. he saw the conflicts in the world that, yes, nuclear apocalypse against the soviet union would be bad but the more likely way would would face off would be through proxy wars, ininsurgencies and he transform darpa into an agency that could fulfill missions he thought were important, which including jungle warfare in vietnam. he was written out of darpa's history because he fell out of favor with secretary macna

anywhere a, an investigation and he went to jail for fraud after vietnam. he what seminal in the agency. >> you have the read the become for the story of how he wound up in jail but a it's quite fascinating. it's striking when you read the three books, eisenhower and darpa, clearly the agency founded in his time, he had great interest in it. it's a black hole. there's nothing there that i could find with nixon and darpa. what's the story there? >> nixon whereas prepared to run for president in the late 1950s when this little silver bleach -- beach ball went up called sputnik, and it's tough to overemphasize the impact that had on the american population. a lot of the subsequent jfk, we

must move further, faster, ahead with vigor, came from the shock that the russians were beating us into space and that's the main reason we ended up with the moon program. and nixon was a vocal lobbyist when the eisenhower administration for more defense spending, for more money for rockets, for a robust american space program, and particularly when jfk, john kennedy and the democrats con connected this thing called the missile gap and convinced a lot of people in the united states that the russians were gaining a superiority in possible nuclear war on the delivery of h-bombs, and so nixon was very much a hawk, very much willing to spend that kind of money, and yet met this resistance from eisenhower because eisenhower was getting

the reports from the u2 flights which were saying the missile gap stuff was for the birds and the threat was not as major it's was. when you get to the actual nixon administration, nixon had a way of writing off huge amounts of the government as it operated below him. he wanted to focus on his great peace initiatives, china, ussr, and treaties and of course he was consumed by vietnam. so a lot of these things like title ix and others came upon his desk, defense spending, the space shuttle program and he would sign off for them based on some political considerations at the time but he didn't have this great feel for what he wanted to do with american technology. >> i think that's absolutely correct. it's funny because i dealt with most of the presidential

libraries in doing research nor book and i was not much of any substance in the nixon library. thick was just not on his radar screen, and there were always things going on that the ways in which the nixon administration dealt with darpa was twofold. first you had -- darpa had been very, very involved in the vietnam war, which is something that had been written out of its history. it was financially the third largest program in darpa for ten years. they don't talk that today. it was numerically in terms of personnel the biggest program in darpa for ten years, responsible for introducing agent orange to vietnam and doing some good work as well. a mixed bag the vietnam war is winding down, darpa is trying to get out of the conflicts abroad business and reinvent itself and then something else happened which is the leak of the pentagon papers. darpa had been a big funder of rand in those years. daniel ellsberg had some

interactions with -- darpa was funding rand to do social science work in vietnam. the second thing was that nixon wanted to basically retaliate against the defense department so started cutting billets. didn't trust the office of the secretary of defense. so what the bureaucracy do when under attack? they protect themselves. the myth with darpa was the d was added and became darpa -- what the pentagon did to protect bullets being cut was they made all of these agencies independent agencies that weren't -- the numbers wouldn't be counted. so you had the advance research projects agency, the defense advance research protect agency that defended it from cuts. that's why the d was add he, not any redirection of the agency that was about it. i think darpa was under nixon's

radar, signs and technology did not occupy a lot of his time, at least not at that granular level. >> well, i'm going to shift gears a little bit. many who live through the eisenhower years tended to see him as a -- yes, great general, an amiable grandfatherly figure, kind of distant and removed, perhaps, and maybe heaven a bit of a bumbler, the garbled sin tax in public, disconnected from what was going on around her and certainly get a bad press in his day. talk about that and what happened to change the perspective -- the perception of him so he has grown in history has time has gone by. >> it's a mystery, really. a fascinating political story

that eisenhower was thought to be a more ron and itot and bumbler and as? er and a rube because he was so intelligent. one thing that surprised me goings through his papers. i don't know what his iq was but very had. an ability to digest huge amounts of complicated information make decisions quickly. science is one area which he loved. invested a ton of time on darpa or arpa, and loved having scientists reason. the funds them, passed legislation, the national defense education act. he was very smart man. sometimes he got tongue tied when giving press conferences. not the first president or the last who suffered that particular affliction. but during his presidency the press the -- the practices what as times very praiseworthy and liked him a lot. he gave a weekly press conference, weekly 30-minute,

live televised press conference. incredible. so available. so they liked him for that. obviously he hid a lot of things from the press and they didn't like that. the damage done to eisenhower's reputation was don by camelot. in 1960 john kennedy ran against dwight eisenhower, not against richard nixon, he ran against the men of that era who he felt had their turn. it's time to turn to a new generation them torch was passed to a new general and that was kennedy. he used eisenhower as a foil to say those anymore and their generation are out of ideas. the field of idea has withered for sentence and -- seven and a half years, so kennedy did a great deal to promote the idea of eisenhower has an old, frail, sort of figure who should not

longer be in office and his reputation never recovered really until we started getting into the documents at the eisenhower presidential library and realizing eisenhower was fully engaged in running the presidency, are you thing country, he was intelligent, broad base in his interests and his capabilities. the other thing just would say is the other puzzle -- look at the cover of the book. eisenhower color was a magnetic figure. everything i've read about him from the times tells he was enormously charismatic, a great athlete, played football for army, am went pro as a baseball player, known to be a very physical man. whenever he walked in the room, every head with expel -- swivelled and there he was. hi is a handsome man. it's a odd that his reputation every sagged as minute as it did

but it's come back in large part because of his accomplishments and his style and dignity and citizen patriotism and his leak of cheap political partisanship that is just common in our politics now. >> i would ask both of the presidential biographers. there's been quite a bit in the news about rankings of presidents -- >> i got this one. >> i'm not going to ask who is at the bottom. that's not my question. my questiones, i how do you think each of the presidents you have written about is -- each has risen, i believe -- is that not correct -- where are they headed? >> well, just quickly say, ike has again up in part bass of the way the poll are done the most recent one was done with the

c-span poll, and it put eisenhower as fifth. that's pretty high. the highest he had been after washington, lincoln, franklin, and teddy roosevelt. in part because the poll -- there are ten questions and deal with how did he handle the economy, the cold war, the budget, what kind of moral figure is he? and in every one of those categories when you ask that way, eisenhower always has a my mark. just to poll this room who is the fifth best president, in your mine -- maybe ike would be in the top ten but maybe not five. if you do it in these topical ways he is highly ranked. the polls ask you to evaluate how did he do on a, b, and c in these areas and he tends to get very high marks when the pollutions done that way. >> it's tough for you, jack, yours is the only forgot resign in disgrace. >> done pretty well considering. i'm sure there were people at the presidential library in

you're -- yorba linda would like to see him go up. he has crept interest the high 20s right now, and i think it's because of two things. one, for somebody like myself, it's a shock and yet the vietnam experience is receding from american memory, being put up on a shelf with korea as something that happened a long time ago, and china is of such importance in our world, and the domestic accomplishments of the nixon years have become much more valued in time. so, he certainly has ceiling over him. the only forgot resign and it's a deserved ceiling but i would not be surprised to see him in the high 20s for a while. one thing think is fascinating when you look at the polls of historians, is that they really do rate presidents based on -- through the prism of the burning

issue of today so that right now, race is a burning issue in the united states, and you see people like eisenhower, who handled the race issue in little rock, and lyndon johnson, for everything bad he did in vietnam, soaring into the top 15 and andrew jackson plummeting off of the $20 bill and even mr. jefferson, slipping from third fourth or something like that. so, it's -- and yet, you go back to the 1930s when the new deal was such a influence on american scholars and that's when all the -- andrew jackson went soaring up because he was thought be the populist forerunner of franklin roosevelt. so if there's any part of the polling you don't like, wait 20 years. >> where do you think you -- you mentioned his domestic

accomplishments, the environmental protection agency was created under nixon. when there was inflation, wage and price controls came into effect, which would be vigorous use of central government. where would he figure in today's fit -- fit in today's republican party? >> he wouldn't. one thing i was very leery of in riting the book whether there would be an odd gonzalez today's polarizes politics bus nixon was the vanished breed of northeast moderate republicanism, even though he came from california. when a president is elected they get to pick port tray portraits to hang and the ones he pick were dwight eisenhower, teddy roosevelting and a democrat, woodrow wilson, definitely of the progressive strain and not -- really is no place for him in the republican party today as far as i can see.

>> for ike, will? >> what? >> host: where he would fit in today's republican party. >> right. that's a great question because it's -- the reason i paused, it's a rick one. on the one hand i would say he wouldn'tment clearly he is much too progressive in many ways but the republican party of the 1950s was itself a very fractured party and there was a substantial group of people, called the -- referred to as the old guard who were significantly -- they were in effect the van guard of the tea party today. these were people who are extreme anticommunists. not just joe mccarthy but a significant knob of republican senators who were -- i don't want to use too many pejorative terms but they were loony. nixon fought the right wing

vigorously and they ongot the better of him. when joe mccarthy was finally censured, 22 republican senators voted against the measure send century. -- censure. eisenhower would look today and say, politics is tough. we're divided. some people are never trump, others are tea-party republicans i. it's the job of the leader of the feature fit it together. on the one hand he done ticket. o the other hand he would say we have always had difficulty with the range of opinion in the party. >> sharon, i'm going to ask you parallel question about darpa. this is an agency that at various times, as you recount in your history, has been searching for a mission for itself. where does it belong and what is it supposed to be doing?

as you look forward from where we are now, what is the future of darpa? what is it going -- we're in an age of asymmetrical warfare, hearts and minds rather than hardware. where is the agency. >> the question is where is the white house or the secretary of defense seeing the agency? i think unfortunately they don't think about it at all. darpa was at it best when it had a mission, and the mission under eisenhower was immediately get the abuse space and then it was technological superiority against the soviet union, and then for a while counter-insun insurgency. they would brief presidents and called before congress and always kind of went up and down. went down for a while, up again under the reagan administration,

and they hit the '90s and were lost as other parts parts of the defense department in and they found it again after 9/11 and were really kind of shot down. they tried to get into data mining and pattern analysis and before the edward snowden revelation they were shot down as creating an orwellian system. now it's hodge pock. talk about aseptember mitt trick warfare, talk about creating technological surprise, whatever that means. they do very good work today. the biggest push back from the book is not -- it's front current darpa, they want to believe what they do is good. they fund good science and technology but a become irrelevant in many ways to either the white house or to senior pentagon leaders. the problem with that is that it becomes very easy, if you have

one major screwup, which all agencies do, for people to kind of swoop in and take your bug, they are very much a solution in search of a problem these days. that's their challenge going forward. >> turning now to questions from the audience. please raise your hand and we'll gate microphone close to you. please, ma'am. >> i don't need one, you you do for television. >> right. first, thank you all for a fascinating discussion. my question is for sharon and i don't even really know where to start. my father spent the year of 1959 in vietnam as an adviser. then we were sent to edgewood chemical arsenal for three years, where lsd tests were done and then he ended up being the inspector general for the tests and evaluation command in aberdeen approving grounds.

from what you said you need to know what darn to is to what extent would darpa have been drive thing chemical testing in the early '60s, testing defoilants and that kind of thing. i have a lot of research to do but curious to know what darpa's mission was in that period of time. >> well, actually, this is a fascinating history. so, i want to be careful saying that darpa was responsible for all things. certainly aberdeen had its own work and the work you reference with chemical hallucinogenics has its own history. what darpa was very involved with and like to joke about their failures but this afailure they don't talk about. pioneered the first experiment with chemical defoilation in vietnam. we northern chemical defollowation with agent orange

because it was the most widely used in vietnam but in fact there was agent purple, and agent orange, and another few -- i forget which colors. four or five different agents which were different chemical configurations and then darpa said we did that about it wasn't a bigday deal. they had a check defoilation department. the air force took over the operational program but this was through and through a darpa organization. you don't do it to humiliate the agency but talk about successes, then you -- the failures are not free. yes, darpa invented arpa net which is internet but there's defoliation in vietnam. so a lot of other work at

aberdeen, may have overlapped with but was has its own history. go to the national archives in college park. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you, i am thoroughly enjoying your panel discussion. this is a lighter question. jack, my question is, what, if any, impact did the opera, nixon in china, have on his reputation >> i think it probably helped it. it was one of the first sort of counterarguments to the caricature. this -- it got beyond the tricky dick persona. showed the had ideals, amazing dances with he and kissinger in the air force one coming in, and

i'm surprised we haven't seen it revived more consistently. i'm not a music critic so perhaps there's something net music that is not great but as far as people and americana, it's spectacular production. >> other questions. >> microphone is coming to you. >> i have a question for professor hitchcock. i grew up in the '50s and remember saluting ike with a glass of mick in my school room in boston when -- there was a television program in the morning and we were all supposed to salute the president. i also grew up as some -- under the reign of fear not unlike the fear that came after 9/11, where it was inculcated in us that at

any moment soviet rockets do we raining down upon us and in our public library they handed out cards, little wallet cards explaining to you what the different sciences would mean i. if you heard three long blasts, that meant that an attack was probable, get home. if your head three short blasts, attack imminent. take cover immediately. to two extent do you think that eisenhower was part of promoting or promulgating this sense of fear, of imminent communist attack, which i so vividly remember. >> he was central to it. i say that not necessarily to be -- to criticize but to say eisenhower embraced the problem and referred to the fact that quote-unquote we live in an age of peril. he used that term in public all the time. david of the prospect there might be a nuclear exchange in

the 1950s 'when he came into office, even before he was inaugurated he was briefed on the development of the hydrogen bomb, and he is sitting in his -- in augusta and gets a visit from the atomic energy commission secretary to say we have done another explosion and can tell you now that the h-bomb we just tested in the pacific has been a success and here's the size of it, the scale of it, the epic dimensions of this thing. this is just as he is entering into this presidency. and throughout his eight years in office, the united states would continue to develop and expand those nuclear weapons. so as a military man, eisenhower felt these were weapons -- he wanted to have them viable use if necessary. he thought that by dealing them it would be back likely you would never have to use it because it was deter the

soviet union. but the amount of money spent was enormous and the power of the nuclear deterrent was terrifying. so, eisenhower spoke in his -- with his advisers about how to tell the public how dangerous all this stuff is without scaring them into a panicment he gave a number of public speeches designed to answer this question which things are really bad but don't panic. and i can tell you, they weren't very effective because as the capabilities grew and grew, most people began to fear that living in a state of constant panic is exhausting. the duck and cover movies where you have a little turtle walking down the street when the bomb comes, remember, duck and cover. turn it into a caricature, game almost. that's the way of domesticating the fear, making it accessible and manageable. so we have the reality of the door and a way of making it seem

kind of comic and almost charming. those are both elements of the decade of the '50s. >> but i'm knock the only person in this room who remembers getting under my desk in school for the -- another question over here. yes, sir. >> this is sort of a followup to clark's last question to sharon. to what extent do you think darpa has been increasingly relevant because -- has proven the private sector can do this stuff more effectively than the government. >> that's a great point. it is one that darren -- t.a.r.p. pa talks about today. who then pioneered commuter networking, arpa net that led to the internet and funding of the first computer science department in the 1960s, they

were the game in town. wasn't anybody else funding it. they could create the direction of computer science in this country, and they did. in 1980s went back into is less successfully, with the strategic imputing issue in initiative that failed to build artificial intelligence but the generation of graduate students that funded are the ones out in silicon valley. darpa takes some credit with the nsa of saving steve jobs' prior company, called the -- his venture before -- when he was -- national security agency and bought -- yes, you're right, and so -- now what darpa spend once computer science, it's minuscule. i don't think that is the biggest problem that darpa faces in terms of irrelevance. it's not darpa's fault. there's been a change in the relationship between the pentagon and science industry,

used to be the chief technologist, the was the number three position in the pentagon. now it's well below that. they're trying redo it now. eisenhower, for example, he really relied on his scientific advisers on creating darpa and creating a nasa, which direction to go. in scientists don't have that influence on the administration, predating the current administration. i don't think scienced a viewsers have been as important in recent areas. the big question is if darpa is to be important again, swone white house or the pentagon leadership has to decide, we have this problem and we need darpa to solve it. in to iraq war and afghan war when roadside bombs, and ids became a big problem think crated a new agency and spent billions off dollars. people said that -- darpa doesn't do that.

they do future science and technology and that's untrue. in she vietnam war they were the agency. it rae create itself as a futuristic science fix version of its. so somebody has to decide darpa is the agency to solve or problems and that has to come from above hem. >> two more question cozy then we'll wind up. >> thank you. sharon, i've read your book and i loved it. >> thank you very minute. >> read your other ones, too, and will continue reading. i'm going address my question about the presidents, though. when you were talking about robert dole losing an important function, i thought you were talking about miss vie viagra ads which many of us will remember. and eisenhower had a famous affair with his driver, was it? and of course the revelations of kennedy and lbj and the other

presidents and now with our current situation with the payoffs and such. i'm curious if was nixon really as straight as his reputation leads to us believe and. >> some are some indications in his own awkward way, he would reach out to other women when things got very tense at home. pat nixon -- you look at the dictionary, long suffering there should be pat nixon's picture. she was run of the biggest surprises in doing this life with how much i dime like pat nixon, a wonderful, sarcastic sense of humor, a piece in bob woodward's latest book about nixon on the helicopter ride coming back from camp david and reaching out and putting his hand on knee or the thigh of one

her his secretaries and it's not a harvey weinstein, sound more like somebody wants to get some kind of human contact into his life. there was one alleged mistress he had that -- the relationship was serious enough the cia investigated it because she was a hong kong hostess at the hong kong hilton and worried she was an agent for the red chinese. so you have a cia investigation -- he was not president at the time -- of richmond -- richmond richard nixon and a leak "the new york times" publish surprise surprise -- and a story about richard nixon having an affair with a red chinese spy. he had a basic awkwardness with all human contact and probably his sexuality or sexual relations with women throughout his life reflected that to some extent. >> yes, sir. >> so, i've encounters darpa in

my day job and epitomizes the industrial cop complex and eisenhower warn about that. can you talk about the context of that speech and did he have change of heart. >> that's a great question. i read the speech differently than a prophetic speech but -- my goodness, if we keep going in this direction, we'll end up with a military industrial complex that will be terrible. what he says is, we have had to create a military industrial complex. that's done. check. we did that. and we did because we live in an age of peril women live in an age when we have real enemies who want to do is harm and we need to build up our defense

capabilities and. then he says it's incumbent on you citizens and we have to croyle and guard against in the unwarranted influence on the military complex in our politics and press and congress and the way we spend money. what kind of leaders can do that? well, leaders like dwight d. eisenhower. that what's point of the speech which was essentially i know how to contain the military industrial complex. i created it. those guys are afraid of me and i can say no to the generales. but the guy we just elected, john kennedy, 43 years old, lieutenant junior grade, might not be the kind of guy who can control the military industrial complex. i think it's a warning which is -- he was very angry about thank you results of the election and felt that maybe kennedy's generation, which had scorned eisenhower's generation, wouldn't be strong enough to control and contain the military

industrial complex. in that sense it's a political message which is you have to elect tough people to be safe and secure, and control the powers of this beast that we have created. so i actually think it's a fascinating and rather complex message that he sends in that farewell address which he gave just a few days before leaving office. >> i would say that sharon. i you'll forgive me, the darpa i read profiled in your book is hardly the disciplined military industrial complex that comes to mind when we use that phrase. i've told you my favorite factoid out of the book is a man from mcdonald's, the hamburger company, calls the pentagon with an idea because he figures out how to wrap food more san terribly and gets passed around until someone at darpa takes the call and he takes the call because the thought the man

worked for mcdonnell douglas and the kicker is they hired him. >> he did. two points about that. first, it's funny when they created darpa in 1958, a joke was like all these nut cases were coming -- calling pentagon officials. i know how to stop a soviet attack, i can design a missile shield. so now they finally had place to send the nuts. but actually that exists until today. if someone -- there are these people who call around to different offices in the pentagon and still sort of send them over to darpa. i came away from the research on the book very impressed with eisenhower and how much he thought about the issues of science and technology of the psychological aspects of the technological race with the soviet union as well as the

scientific speats them way he listened to the debate between the science advisers who were advising him one way, sometimes agreed and types didn't and the people in the pentagon who advising him in another way, and the didn't always go one way or the other. i came away very impressed with his mastery of not just the science but al of the psychological aspects. >> i had to fight to keep more eisenhower out of my book. as i do the research -- >> terrible. >> amazing american hero. >> well, i have a feeling this discussion could go on for quite a while but we do need to wrap it up to allow time for you do buy books and the authors to sign them for you. want to thang everyone for coming today. this has been a fascinating discussion from three trick authors. -- three terrific authors and please complete the evaluation forms, either online or in

paper, and we have books up front that are for sale and available for signing. so thank you all very much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]