weekend, cnn contributor selena be zito and republican strategist brad todd report on how the swing state voters in the 2016 election might impact future elections. senator bernie sanders discusses his forth coming book, where we go from here, and michael pollen, how to change your mind on the medical and scientific uses of psychedelic drugs. that's all this weekend on c-span2's booktv, television for serious readers. now we kick off the weekend with rebeccaer belling at the holocaust museum providing a history of the war refugee board created by president roosevelt with the objective of assisting jewish refugees. [inaudible conversations]

>> good afternoon, everyone, and thank you all for coming. i'm a bookseller here at politics & prose. on behalf of the owners and of the staff, i'd like to welcome all of you to your favorite bookstore for this afternoon's event. as you may already know, politics & prose hosts hundreds of events like this all throughout the year. one such event is the one we're doing next saturday, may 12th, for the new book, "edge of chaos." a little bit of housekeeping before we start, first of all, if you could turn off silence your cell phones, we would really appreciate it. for the q&a, please remember to step up to one of the two microphones. we have one on this side -- oh, no, apparently it's only on this side. so please line up if you want to ask the author a question. not only so that we can hear the conversation, but to also insure

that it is also being record. for those of you who want to buy copies of the book, there are copies right behind the cash registers. we'll be doing a signing after the q&a, so if you'd like to get your book signed, please line up to the side of the podium. please keep the chairs where they are as we have another event after this one. now to the main event this afternoon, i am happy to introduce rebecca erbelding to all of you from the united states holocaust memorial museum here in washington d.c. she has organized the museum's new exhibit on the american response to the holocaust. rebecca has a ph.d. in american history from george mason university. she and her work have been profiled in "the washington post," "the new york times" and the new yorker and feature on the history channel, npr and other media outlets. this afternoon rebecca will be discussing her new book, "rescue

board: the untold story of america's efforts to save the jews of europe." this book tells the little known story of john pell who helped persuade roosevelt to organize the war refugee board in 1944. the agency mobilized dip promats, smug -- diplomats, smuggler in a dozen countries across four continue innocents. their work involved recruiting spies, leaking news and channeling food and money to underground organizations. in 20 months the board saved tens of thousands of lives. lynne olson, author of the book "last hope island," says that with her magisterial research, rebecca erbelding brilliantly brings to life the little known story of this transforming moment in american history and the young government lawyers who made it happen. and kim cuts calls the book is fine work of scholarly

perfection. ladies and gentlemen, rebecca erbelding. [applause] >> thank you so much. first of all, i'm incredibly excited to be here. i've been working on this project for about a decade, and the first caveat is when i talk about it, this is not a book that is a product of the holocaust museum where i work. this is my work. but for the decade i've been working on this, i always come here, and i look at all the books on the shelves and fantasize about the moment when it's going to be mine, so this is a really big day, and i'm grateful to all of you for sharing it with me. so "rescue board" givens on the first full -- begins on the first full weekend in august in 1942 in france. a 28-year-old was a californian who worked for the american fund service committee, a quaker aid organization. and in the book he's watching the first deportations of

foreign jews from france north to paris and, as we now know, to auschwitz where most of them will be kill on arrival. ross knew what was happening in very general terms. just a week earlier, he had gone to the capital of collaborationist france, and he had protested to the president of the french government arguing that the nazis planned to -- and this is a direct quote -- exterminate these people. la value had laughed at him at the time. it was a fiction, he said. and if the united states was so concerned about what was happening to the jews, why weren't we taking them? so "rescue board" is the story of how we got to there, how u.s. immigration laws were structured to keep out undesirable immigrants and how there was no refugee policy to speak of. it's the story of how the american people and their government were so anti-immigrant that a group of congressmen got together in april 1938 and vowed that they would not introduce any legislation to open immigration for fear that even raising the

debate would cause more stricter laws. it's the story of a refugee crisis that extended past pearl harbor as jews in casablanca and lisbon in southern france were still trying to get out. and it's the story of how a californian could be on the ground in an internment camp witnessing deportations. but mainly, the book is about what happened next. ross mcclelland wasn't the only person working that first weekend of august 1942. gerhart rigger in, who worked for the world jewish conference in switzerland, learned about these rumors of mass killings to the east and the deportation of j well,ews. he learned there was a nazi plan to exterminate and murder all the jews of europe. this seems really obvious to us now. it's hard to look back at the holocaust and not look at it with a lot of hindsight, but back then they saw no precedent to this.

jews had been subjected to to pogroms before, and they inevitably ended. but a plan was different. so rigner tried to send his news to the u.s. via switzerland which had a secure channel to the united states, and once the message to got to america, state department officials blocked it from being received. it seemed too fantastic, one wrote. another thought it must just be a war rumor. i can't see why they would put this thing in a telegram. so the news of the nazi extermination plan eventually made it through, and the press reported the story in november 1942. by that point ross mcclelland had escaped from southern france to switzerland, and the americans who remained behind in france were arrested and interned in germany as the nazis swept south. and for more than a year after that, for more than a year after november 1942, as more information trickled out of europe, the state department continuously tried to quell any attempt at public pressure for some sort of rescue action.

finish activists staged elaborate rallies and pageants that toured the country, they placed full page newspaper be ads condemning roosevelt, condemning the state department calling on the u.s. to do something. in october 1943 hundreds of orthodox rabbis marched on the capitol. mass rescue, of course, was impossible. the allied armies were thousands of miles away from the death camps, and the u.s. has only a tenuous grip on the european continent. but much more, absolutely, could have been done. at this point in the story, a group of treasury department lawyers -- most of them in their 30s -- enter. the most unlikely of heroes. they had spent the fall of 1943 frustrated by state department delays in approving $25,000 in aid money that was to go to jews in france and romania. while they were writing a report detailing all of the reasons that the state department had given, all the excuses for these delays, they discovered evidence that the state departmented had actually been actively trying to

stop information about the holocaust from reaching the united states to stop that public pressure. if the americans don't know about it, they're not going to put any pressure on the state department to do anything. they specifically told the swiss, the u.s. delegation in switzerland not to send any more of rigner's reports about atrocities. so one of the best things about studying the treasury department is henry morgan thousand jr., fdr's treasury secretary, recorded all his meetings. in this book i was able to use the treasury department's own words and express their frustration. you could read through the actual transcripts of what they're saying. and at the end of december, 1943, a lawyer at treasury said, and this is a quote: mr. secretary, the only question we have in our minds, i think, is the bull has to be taken by the horns in dealing with this jewish shoe and get this thing out of the state department into some agency's hands that is willing to deal with it front9ally. for instance, take the complaint

what are we going to do with the jews. we let them die because we don't know what to do with them. and another staff member, randolph paul, quietly added, we are speaking as citizens now. the treasury department wrote a new report titling the report to the secretary on the acquiescence of this government in the murder of the jews, which this is a d.c. town, and a lot of us have read government reports, and that is not generally the title of any of these reports. [laughter] it began: one of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the jewish people in europe, is continuing unabated. unless remedial steps of a drastic nature are taken and taken immediately, i'm certain no effective action will be taken by this government to prevent the complete extermination of the jews in german-controlled europe and this government will have to share for all time responsibility for the extermination. it was time to go to fdr and demand, as one of them put it, a new deal.

morgenthau and two members of his staff met with roosevelt and convinced him to issue an executive order establishing a war refugee board, a new government agency tasked with relief and rescue of jews and other possess cuted -- persecuted minorities. it was housed on the third floor of treasury, almost all of the staff were treasury department lawyers, and 35-year-old assistant secretary -- assistant to the secretary john paley served as the director. so for the first time in january 1944, the united states has an official policy about the holocaust. by the end of the war in europe 17 months later, they had saved tens of thousands of lives. rescue board is the first non-self-published book about the refugee board, who they were, what they did, how they did it. this seems really strange given the tens of thousands of books that are published about world war ii and the thousands of books about the holocaust published every year. and for the decade i was writing

the book, i kept expecting someone to come behind me and get there first. the three self-published books have all come out in the last five year, and they're all kind of relying on similar older psychological hardship; why we watched the abandonment of the jews while six million of them died. many of them play this elaborate game of historian telephone where one person will cite a document, and that becomes this more elaborate story. and the story that they tell of american indifference has been really enduring, so enduring that the sheer existence of the war refugee board and the actual efforts that americans did make at the end of the war have been completely overshadowed. and that work is really important and matters. and there's another more basic reason that the war refugee board has been largely forgotten which is the archival records are almost impossible to navigate. so when i started working in 2011 and 2012, i was looking at

120 boxes at the fdr library that were still in their original 1944 and 1945 order. so they had a corps sponging series that was -- core responding series that was alphabetical by author, six boxes called turkey, six boxes called sweden. so the couple historians who have written about the war refugee board, usually longer pieces to larger books, have written these isolated stories. this is what they were doing in turkey, this is what they were doing in switzerland. so when i started, the first thing i did was photograph everything, all of those 120 boxes. ing after deleting out the duplicates, i had about 19,000 original documents. some one page, some a couple hundred. and then i had to fill in all of the gaps. so i ended up at the end with about 43,000 unique documents that i was working through. so i put them all into pdfs, and then i gave each one a unique title which gave the date that the document was created and what archive i found it in,

what box, what folder. and i figured out if you put all 43,000 in one folder in a computer with a lott of memory, it all sorts chronologically, and you can read through things as they were actually happening. so things that showed up, you know, a question that showed up in one archive, there was an answer dument in the other archive, and all of a sudden they're back together. and this is reading through and look at everything chronologically is important because the prospects for rescue changed so rapidly in 1944. options for what you can do changed before d-day and after d-day, before the battle of the budge, after the the battle of the bulge. and so by reading through chronologically, i could see how much time they were spending on prompts -- projects, whether or not they were successful, and i could avoid the historian's trap of hind seat is. -- hindsight.

it's hard to explain their work, so i'm going to give you a couple of overall facts and tell a few stories before we get to questions. so the same day in january 1944 that roosevelt issued the executive order, the board staff streamlined the procedure that agencies would use to send relief money overseas. so they argued that it didn't matter anymore after january 1944 if little bits of humanitarian aid got into the hands of the nazis. by the end of the war, the wrb had authorized more than $11 million which is about $154 million ford in humanitarian relief money to a host of different aid organizations. and that money was used to buy guns for the french underground to pay people who were hiding children in their homes, to pay guides who were taking people across borders. the board appointed representatives in most of the neutral nations in turkey, switzerland, sweden, portugal, north africa and eventually in london, most of them treasury

department employees who were already there or humanitarian aid workers, though the representative in turkey is a narcissistic bloomingdale's marketing executive who gets in a lot of trouble. and they are really working on leverage are. they're trying to leverage this near-certain allied victory by 1944 to convince all of these nations that the u.s. cares about what's going to happen to these people and that they can curry some favor if they at least pretend to care too. so from washington john paley, the war refugee board's director, lays out a strategy for the board; persuade the nazis and their collaborators to stop killing and take action to rescue those people they thought they could still be staved, to either move people on border countries like romania or bulgaria and france, move them out to safety or keep the people who are deep inside nazi territory alive long enough to be liberated. so i'm going to give you an example of each. the board launched a propaganda

or way fare -- warfare campaign using radio broadcasts and leaflets intended to dissuade would-be perpetrators by saying we will see what you're doing, we're going to punish you after the war, it's late in the war, why become a perpetrator now? you're going to lose. roosevelt issued a statement drafted by the board, quote: in one of the blackest crimes of all history begun by the nazis and multiplied by them a hundred times in times of war, the wholesale, systematic murder of jews in europe goes on unabated every hour. so march 24th, only a few days before that, germany had invaded hungary was home to the largest and last intact jewish population, about 8,000 still alive in hungary. and the board quickly added a new paragraph to roosevelt's statement. as a result of the events of the last few days, hundreds of thousands of jews who have at least found a haven from death

in hungary and the balkans are now threatened with annihilation as hitler's forces descend more heav un these lands. that these innocent people who have already survived a decade of hitler's fury should perish on the very are eve of triumph would be a major tragedy. so we can't measure the results of psychological warfare. you can't count up the number of people who survived because of atrocities that are prevented. but i did interview an elderly german man who remembered as a teenager finding the leaflet containing roosevelt's statement after an allied bombing raid in his town, and that is how he told me he learned about the holocaust. and since all of the other things in that leaflet, all of the reports of local bombing raids over his town were true, he figured that was probably true as well. so the u.s. government, through the war refugee board, also launderedded money to help refugees sneak into sweden. and i talked to sanctions people

at treasury department last year to see if i could actually call it money laundering. they hemmed and hawed for a couple minutes and finally decided it's laundering if money is used for the commission of a crime. so i've decided that whether or not the u.s. launderedded money or not depends on whether or not you're sweden, because sweden definitely would have thought this was a crime. [laughter] the war refugee board's representative served as the financial attache, but he was also an oss spy. he was code named kristin, and he was tasked with monitoring the movement of money and war ferrell between germany -- material between germany and sweden. once he added the war refugee board to his duties, among other things he he recruited the now-famous swedish businessman who traveled to budapest funded by american jewish organizations through the war refugee board. and as most of you know, he established safehouses and issued letters of protection saving thousands of lives in

budapest. but i'm not focusing on that today. you'll have to get the book for that. but for much of the summer of 1944, olson is focused on a very hazardous plan to rescue refugees from latvia, lithuania and estonia by water. he would need, he wrote, quote: the most skillfully organized type of underground operations because the baltic countries are now virtually sealed to everything. he thought they might be able to rescue 5-700 racial, religious or political refugees from each country. the war ref i few gee board paid for this project directly out of funds from roosevelt, but they realized that such a large deposit in a swedish bank would be suspicious, and they wanted to avoid any impression that the u.s. was funding unregulated refugee arrivals in sweden. even the swedish jews, olson wrote, quote: are very interested in jewish relief and rescue operations so long as they don't involve bringing them to sweden. so john paley, who had been

tasked with keeping money out of the hands of the enemy, decided to sneak olson's funds past the swedish government and people. and at his urging, at paley's urging, the staff at goodyear tire in their headquarters in akron, ohio, agreed if the board transferred $50,000 to their factory, their subsidiary in sweden would give olson the similar amount in swedish krone. so there are no references to the goodyear tire deal in any of the board's papers. it's clear that they had scrubbed that out. but henry morgenthau got a daily briefing folder of all of their work, and the wrb staff forgot to purge his records. [laughter] so this aa rangement worked well. m olson reported from stockholm in a cable only found in morgenthau's records, and although not full proof, it's desirable from a security point of view. at this time we do not recommend bank transfers, unavoid my

attract notice and suspicion. so olson used this money to purchase boats and guns because the treasury staff who had spent 3 war keeping money out of the hands of enemy now argued humanitarian aid was more important than adhering to the rules. in switzerland which was, like i said, surrounded completely by enemy territory, the war refugee board recruit ross mcclelland are, the californian who had been in the internment camp cans at the -- camps at the beginning of the book. most of his work involved jews deep inside enemy territory. among a myriad of oh things -- other things, he participates in ransom negotiations with the nazis who were trying to use america's supposed newfound interest in refugees to offer, basically, jews for sale. the u.s. is never going to agree to pay ransom, but mcclelland and sally meyer, who was the

american jewish joint distribution committee's representative in switzerland are, managed to string along a pair of high ranking nazis for six months. in november 1944 ross even travels to zurich and meets with becker dressed in his crisp ss uniform, he personally worked for himmler, as proof that roosevelt was interested in the negotiations. during world war ii, an american government representative held a top secret, unauthorized meeting with a high ranking ss official to negotiate on humanitarian matters. and as a result, mcclelland and meyer got more than 1600 jews released from bergen belsen as a good faith gesture on the part of the nazis. the board opened a refugee camp in upstate new york and brought nearly 1,000 refugees from europe to live there. they argued the nazis must not be given the pretense of justification, that the allies -- while speaking in horrified terms of the treatment

of jews -- never once offered to receive these people. they sent 300,000 food packages into concentration camps at the end of the war, they passed along requests to the war department for the bombing of the rail lines, the crematoriums in auschwitz or to wipe out the entire camp itself, and they with no authorization from the rest of the government gave the american public detailed information for the first time on the process of arrivals, selection and gassing at auschwitz. in response to this information, a washington post editor y'all introduced -- editorial introduced americans to the new word genocide. i don't have time to get into all of these stories or many others including how the war refugee board saved the parents of zsa zsa gabor or the time which is now completely forgotten when the u.s. offer to evacuate all the jews of hungary, so i hope you'll pick up the book and find out about those. but in conclusion, the war

refugee board's creation was and remains the only time in american history that the u.s. government founded a government agency dedicated to saving the lives of civilians being murdered by the wartime enemy. the 21 months between january 1944 and september 1945 mark a period when american action met american rhetoric about our democratic values. in contrast to many subsequent human rights efforts, the war refugee board had no cynical secondary motive. of they've not trying for overseas prestige and power, they are not trying to help people who they intend to ever become american citizens. most of the people that the war refugee board helped never had any knowledge that the american government was interested at all in their survival. the refugees finish sorry, the refugees were not intended to become americans. a historian wrote, and this is a quote: what made the wrb such a unique body is that it was officially permitted to break practically every important law of a nation at war in the name

of outraged humanity. so one of my hopes with this book is that the war refugee board will start to enter our public narrative when we talk about american response to the holocaust, because i think it's relevant history. they debated a lot of the same challenges we debated today, they talked about whether or not the u.s. should pay ransom for a captive population, they debated the push for providing relief for the many of trying to rescue the few. they talk about how to bring refugees to the united states while addressing legitimate national security concerns, and they discussed how many resources can we permit to fall into the hands of an enemy that we're at war with. and while it's clear that the united states could have done much more to aid jews and other nazi victims especially in the 1930s before the war began, what the war refugee board staff did really mattered, and i think we need to remember it to honor their efforts, to bring greater knew that want to our -- nuance

to our american response and to study their work as we continue to confront these challenges that keep coming up and up and up as we look at the newspapers every day. so that is the story of "rescue board," and i'm happy to take anybody's questions. i think they said the microphone is right here, so if you have a question, please line up, and i'm happy to address anything. ask me anything. >> so it sounds like a wonderful book. >> thanks. >> what lessons can we take from what went on then to deal with the situation now especially muslim refugees from places like syria, afghanistan and iraq who are turned away for exactly the same reasons that jews were turned away in 1939 on the st. louis? alleged security problems. >> right. well, i mean, i think it's clear that our security apparatus is much more sophisticated than it was back then.

i think one of the things that's really concerning to me is humanitarian aid being cut off because there's a lot ofs we --f things we could do, and i read this week about cutting off aid to the white helmets who are doing amazing work in syria. that's something that we need as individuals to pay attention to and to make it clear to our elected representatives that that's not something that we'll stand for. one of the things, one of the reasons that the war refugee board exists is because there was public pressure in 1943. americans made it clear that they were paying attention. and since they felt like we were winning the war, they were okay with sending some humanitarian aid. and even if that falls in the hands of the enemy be, we're still going -- enemy, we're still going to win. so it's not losing heart, and it's continuing to make it clear that this is, these are our values. i don't have a magic bullet for it because you need, you need an administration are that is listening to that.

and so we need to vote in an administration that is more willing to listen to that. but not giving up is important too and continuing to pay attention even when it hurts. thanks. >> hey, becky. congratulations. >> thank you. >> in addition to writing this incredible book, you also did this work with those 43,000 documents and taking a really impossible challenge of archive archivery -- [laughter] so one of the stories that are left undone in the book, what are your hopes for further scholarship, and are you planning to share that companion of documents with other scholars? >> so when i finished photographing everything at the fdr library, i actually gave the library my scans, so they're available online now. they don't have my organization, my chronological organization because i wanted to get the book out there, and i'm not quite sure -- because i used

proprietary software that i paid for, i don't know how it works to then donate that to an organization. i've always, like, been happy to look things up for people if they want to know is my relative mention here, i can do that sort of thing. you know, there are lots of stories, the story of ford ontario, the refugees who came to the u.s., there was one book about it in the 1980s. they deserve another new book. the horti offer that they offered to give over all of the hungarian jews if the u.s. will take them, as far as i know, there's not a lot out there about that. a lot of these things could be pulled off into different chunks, and i might pull one or two of them off into something coming up. i'm still working on that. but there's plenty in here. i mean, one of the things that you do when you write a book is you try to lay your trail and, hopefully, something in it will reach someone, and they can go into it and find something and take it their own path. that's kind of the point.

this is not the definitive book, this is the first book. i mean, it's a pretty definitive book. [laughter] but it's also the first one. >> yes. some have suggested that when you prepare the good that the war refugee board accomplished to what roosevelt could have accomplished, that the feeling is that the war refugee board was really a sop to morgenthau and the jewish community to get the jewish community off of roosevelt's back. how would you respond to that. >> i e think most most of them e fairly reliable democrats, and there isn't a lot of evidence that he was at risk of losing them in the 1944 election. which, when he created the board, he wasn't -- he at least had not publicly said that he was running.

and it becomes clear, i think pretty early 1944 at least internally, that he's actively dying. and so there are some questions as to whether or not he should or could have -- he should have run in 1944. that being said, i think the phrase that you always hear related to the board is too little and too late. and i accept that phrase in the realm of 1933-1945. the war refugee board's creation is too little and too late, what they're trying to do in 1944 is too little and too late. what they themselves are is not too little and too late. they are work as hard as they can and doing almost everything that is ever proposed to them, they try to follow up on. one of the interesting things and the first things they to is write to all of these aid organizations who had been working in this space and pressuring the u.s. government to do something and asking for ideas. they wrote to over 120 organizations asking for public

input on what they should be doing. that is definitely something the state department was not going to do. but it shows that the board staff was going to leave no stone unturned in 1944 to do whatever they could do that late. and i think what they accomplished is remarkable. that doesn't discount the fact that so much more could have been done earlier. finish -- sure. >> hi. first of all, thank you for all your work on this book and the research and bringing this pretty important topic to light. given you did do a lot of this original research and you had a lot of good material to work i through, i imagine you got a pretty good idea of exactly how much was known about what the nazis were doing, and i just wondered if you could just comment on that for a moment, particularly what you thought about that and exactly how much was known. >> so the 30,000-square-foot view is fairly accurate.

so they know that jews are being deported to the east, that there's killing centers there, that there's mass gassing they're not quite clear where those places are. they know names but they don't -- for a long time they don't know that auschwitz and berke now are together. or that it's a work camp. so the details get really fuzzy in part because they don't have reliable journalists on the ground, they don't -- everything is third and fourthhand for a long time. so when the board actually does get reports from escapees from auschwitz, that's what they publicize in 1944. so we certainly know much more than they did, and it's hard now to look back without trying to, without saying, well, that's not true but this is, and why didn't they follow this one. well, because they don't know that that one's not true.

so i get into it a little bit in the book, and communication is also such a problem because if you want to send something securely, you have the go, it has to be coded, it has to -- the state department has to decode it, it takes about a week to send coded communication and have it actually delivered to its intended recipient. so all of these times when, you know, if we did something right now, it would help this particular group of people that are endangered, that particular moment, they just don't have the capacity to act quickly almost ever. and and so it does get really, it does get really hard. >> hi, thanks for the talk. ing my question, i know you said at the beginning that you don't speak for the museum at this point, but since the new exhibit just open around the same time as your book was published, i'm curious if you could talk about the chicken or the egg, did your book come first or did the exhibit and how your work on this book influenced the exhibit

or how did that get put together for a different audience than necessarily a book audience. >> sure. so i'm a historian at the holocaust museum. i was an archivist until about 2015 when i worked over to -- moved over to work on the new exhibit. at that point i had finished my dissertation and had graduated. my dissertation is 800 pages long. i don't recommend it. the book is much better. [laughter] it's shorter, it's much more interesting. but if you really want, like, the inside scholarly view with, like, all of the documents, there's an 800-page dissertation just waiting for you to google9 google9 -- google. [laughter] i got brought in because i was an expert on this topic and because no one had written this before. so to that extent, this is -- whichever comes first, the chicken or the egg, this is the one that came first, and the exhibit came second. but the museum has been working on that exhibit for five years.

i came into it two years into it when they were getting the narrative set, and it's been one of the privileges of my life to get to help work on that exhibit. but i think it gets tricky, because i read through the exhibit and i think, oh, that's what i think, and i'm not sure if it's because, you know, that's what we all agreed on in the room, or i was in the room and i said this and then that's where we went with it. so i think, i think they work well together, i think the narratives stay the same. this, you know, the exhibit talks about the bombing, and it talks about ford ontario, and it doesn't get into any of the other things that the war refugee board is doing. so for that, you know, 99% of this is not reflected in the exhibit which covers 1933-1945 and will be on display at the holocaust museum until 2021 and please come. [laughter] it's a very good exhibit.

anyone else? >> this isn't what your book addresses specifically, but was there any look-back at the state department for what went on there during the war? >> there are a few books. there's a really good one from the 1980s called "the pretty good club" which the title alone gives, is a bit sarcastic. there are books on foreign diplomacy that talk about the state department at that time. there isn't really a look specifically at them during the war. interestingly, they wrote their own history of the war, the state department did, in 1946 and 1947. they asked all of the different divisions to write their history of the war, and all of the major consulates and legations overseas -- i'm probably telling you guys too much, because i might be doing something with this, so don't go to the state department to look.

[laughter] but they wrote their own history and wrote about, you know, this is how we funked, this is what we -- functioned, this is wt we did, this is how the war changed that, and it was never published. so there was all these different can chapter drafts in the national archives in the war history at the state department -- >> i guess i'm asking a different question. of. >> okay, sorry. >> the state department itself -- >> yeah. >> -- or the government look back at this awful history of turning jews away? >> oh. yes, yes, yes. the state department has officially apologized for things like the st. louis. and, you know, at the museum we do trainings for state department officials. so i present on this history to them. they're receptive of it, they understand. and i think the summary of the state department during that time is that it was little c conservative. all of the other kind of branches of government changed fundamentally with the new deal and with roosevelt coming in, and the state department really doesn't. it's the same people, it's the

same kind of aristocratic -- >> [inaudible] >> yeah. anti-semitic. they condoned anti-semitism. not everyone, of course. there are state department officials who do amazing things to help. but they certainly condoned open anti-semitism. and that was definitely different than the treasury department which had the first jewish cabinet member in place. and so it is just corporate culture wise a fundamentally different place. and they are actively and have actively reflected on it. i -- as far as i know. i mean, all outward appearances. so yes, sure. >> thank you for this very important and compelling work. not that the book is the most important aspect, but has there been any speculation about a movie being made about compelling story? [laughter] >> i mean, every author casts it in her head, don't you? [laughter] are i would love that. if you know someone, my agent's

over there. [laughter] hi. >> thank you for being arctic rate in -- articulate in your description of what you communicated in this book. i was particularly interested whether you covered or in your research saw any kind of fragments or events related to middle eastern jewish communities as you researched your book. >> one of the big heroes, i think, in getting the board -- getting enough public support for the board was a man who had been born in lithuania and raised in palestine, peter bergson, who after the war goes back to palestine, now israel, and joins the knesset. and he is a very big activist in the u.s. during the war. he's staging the pageants and doing the full-page newspaper ads. the story of palestine in this history is really complicated. i don't get fully into it in the

book except to say that the white paper, which was the rule from 1939-1944 of how many jews could enter prestate israel, enter palestine, that is mandated by the british. that supposedly limited how many people could come and, obviously, terrible timing, 1939-1944, to limit the number of j well,ews who could enter. the war refugee board basically doesn't let them publicize it, but they get about 8,000 jews out of romania and bulgaria, gets them to land in turkey, cross into syria which was mandated by france and into fall stein outside -- palestine outside of the white paper in that last year. so it does get really complicated because of all of the middle eastern politics that continue to reverberate today. all of that is still in its messy, messy origins back then.

but they are trying to negotiate to get jews at least out of the border countries and into palestine during the war. >> [inaudible] >> 8,000. >> hey, becky. >> hey, ryan. >> congratulations. >> thank you. >> this is maybe more of a technical and dry question, but you touched on earlier this was the outgrowth of your dissertation. i was wondering maybe you could speak your approach from an academic paper, an academic disser oration to something with a more general, wider audience. >> i mean, my add a visor's here, and she'll know that i wrote my dissertation thinking that this was it, like, this was the book. this was the most interesting thing that i could possibly have written and then realized, much to my disappointment, that nobody reads 800 pages unless you're thomas piketty. nobody will read it. so i realize also there were --

realized also there were parts that bore me inhe dissertation -- [laughter] but nobody had written it before, and i thought i'm just going to put it all there. that way if somebody wants the know about labor licenses in great britain and how they were used for aid, you know, there's a dissertation for that now that gets into all of that. but it's not, it's not the core story. it's not -- and it wasn't the story of people doing things. and that, you know, to me, is the best nonfiction, is the story of people who do things. that was, that book is the book of an agency that's trying different bureaucratic avenues. and this is the story of john paley and ross mcclelland and iver olson and who they were and what they're trying to do. and so i think there's a lot more heart in the book than there was in the dissertation. and that is probably the fundamental difference. and it's why, if there's a movie, it won't be based on the dissertation. [laughter] >> thank you. >> sure.

>> i, so i work for hi breath which is -- >> oh, cool. yeah, yeah. >> refugee resettlement agencies, and they were active at this time, so is i'm curious if there was any clap are ration happening for the refugees that were broughting to the u.s. >> yes, absolutely. hyeth had some of the best letterhead, it was give through rescue or rescue through -- shoot. donate and rescue or something like that. it's this very elaborate, color letterhead. yes, they're very aware. they're one of the organizations that the board approaches right off to ask about what they're doing. a lot of what hyeth is doing or had been doing is helping refugees in lisbon and spain to escape into lisbon and helping them pay for transport to the u.s. the board is less involved with that kind of thing because in their consideration the people who were in portugal are already

safe. it's still incredible work that hyeth is doing, but they're less involved in the day-to-day operations with the board. the board is more involved with the world jewish conference because they have representatives who are still in enemy territory, and hyeth at that point, most of their people had gotten out and had kind of coalesced in new york and in some of these neutral cities as opposed to, you know, the joint which had fingers still in hunkly and in poland -- hungary and in to and lines of communication. >> thank you. >> yeah. i can talk about anything else you want. [laughter] >> congratulations ares -- >> thank you. >> and thank you for your excellent talk. so i think it's fair to say that before your book historians were largely stuck on could the u.s.

have tone more, but your -- have done more, but your book answers more questions and more important -- or more useful questions. [laughter] so i was wondering which questions to you consider your book to answer and which questions does it ask. >> so i, i'm really hesitant whenever or historians say this is what should have happened because i don't think that's the role of historians. i think the role of historians is to say this is what did happen, and these were the possibilities, like, this is what likely would have happened had this happened. should have is for all of you to debate. so you should read this and then say, well, should the war refugee board have been established earlier. and i would, you know, kind of poke at that, because historians like to poke at things from different angles, and is i'd say, well, what was the leverage that the u.s. had during the war, and you could pipe back and say, well, in 1942 these neutral

nations, nazi germany offered them jews of their nationality if they would take them in, and the neutral nations said no. the war refugee board could have stoppedded that. and i would say that's a good point, maybe it should have been established earlier. so i think what the book gives you is a lot of places to poke in on this history and to say, you know, they're trying stuff now, i wonder what would have happened had they done this earlier or late err. i -- later. i mean, one of the things the board shuts down in september 1945 when there are two million displaced persons in europe, when there are people in displaced person camps, when jews have just come out of hiding or been liberated to then close an agency that has so many fingers in enemy territory and is, you know, has this whole humanitarian aid network, what would have happened had they kept going. what would happen if we tried to

establish something like this now. are all of these bases being covered by the different agencies that have come up since the end of the war. that is, i think, a very valuable question. to say how are we dealing with those challenges now, are we dealing with them in the right now, should we do something more like the war refugee board for places like syria or burma. >> so let me ask one more. how did the war refugee board deal with the populace as a whole? did they try to keep what they were doing quiet except for the jewish community? did they try to fly under the radar of population resistance to refugees coming in? >> they're very aware of public opinion. so the question was, was the board's work secret at the time. some of it was.

the offer to take hungarian jews certainly was. much of it was public, you know? you can't really bring in refugees to the u.s., a thousand of them, without getting "life" magazine involved, and there's a whole spread when those refugees come. you know, ransom negotiations, those are secret, of course. they are very aware when they do something public that they need public support. so before roosevelting announces -- roosevelt announces the refugee camp at fort ontario, the board goes through about a month of propaganda within the u.s. getting sympathetic journalists to write columns or make radio speeches. they even, there's even one where it's, the radio announcer gives a fake letter to john paley over the radio. like, john paley, you're such a great war refugee board director, and i really think it would just make your life easier if we opened a refugee camp in the u.s. because we're asking all of these other countries to

take refugees, and we're not taking any of our own. so they kind of planted all of these seeds so that when they went to roosevelt, they had all of these letters to show him and these columns to say, look, the american people want this. they obviously can't to that with everything. sometimes they're just doing it anyway even if they think that if the public knew about it, they would say no. but that's, you know, that's probably why they scrubbed the records about sweden, is to prevent some sort of public scandal in the future. but they didn't realize that i had gone in and gotten morgenthau's papers too and was trying to delete duplicates and found out that there weren't any there. so yes and no. yes, some of it's public, but a lot of it wasn't. yep. do i close this?

[laughter] thank you very much, everyone. [cheers and applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this weekend on c-span,en tonight at 9:30 p.m. eastern the weekly standard's annual political summit in colorado springs with a debate on president trump's foreign and domestic policies. sunday at 9 p.m., former u.s. attorney general eric holder at the new england council's politics and eggs event.

on booktv's c-span2, saturday night at nine eastern syndicated columnist and cnn contributor selena zeto and brad todd on president trump's swing welcome back state voters and how they could impact future elections. and shortly after 11 p.m. sunday, author sam klineer discusses his book, the flying tigers: the untold story of the american pilots who waged a secret war against japan. and on american he'sly tv, c-span3, saturday at 6 p.m. eastern on the civil war, the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 14th amendment with clemson university history professor orville vernon burton. and sunday at 6:30 p.m. eastern on oral histories, u.s. army veteran dennis haines talks about his experiences, injuries and long recovery during the vietnam war. watch the c-span networks this weekend. >> when i first heard that the

president had immediately accepted the offer of kim jong un to meet, my first reaction was, oh, my god, what was he doing. and then i thought, well, nothing else has worked, maybe we a ought to try this because, frankly, maybe they do have an opening. and i would just say the following if i were talking to the folks who are going to have to manage this. the first thing is we do know that there's a north korean pattern, i was the last secretary of state to try to negotiate with the north koreans, with the father, kim jung-il. they get in trouble, sanctions start to bite, they get isolated, and then they go on a charm offensive, they come to the table, they make promises and don't live up to them. or as in happened to us, they actually do live up to a number of promises like dismantling or destroying the cooling tower, but then you learn that they've got, actually, a hidden, highly enrich uranium program, and they

won't admit to it, so you have to end the negotiations. so it's not a good history with the north koreans. i mean, ask madeleine albright and the clinton administration and so forth. but there are a couple of things that look different to me this time. kim jong un is a different leader, maybe that's it. i do think because north korea was getting close to a capability to be able to reach the territory of the united states with a nuclear weapon that people began to take the american president more seriously when he said that's not acceptable. it was one thing to say that, and i know this isn't good from an alliance management standpoint, but it was one thing when that threat was regional. it's another when it threatens california or alaska. and so i think people, including the chinese, began to take more seriously the threat that the united states might actually go to war. secondly, i actually think finish and we have change in secretary of state and i think secretary pompeo's going to be a very good secretary, but let's give rex tillerson credit for

the isolation campaign that he organized against the north koreans including the expulsion of north korean workers from 20 countries. that was hard currency for the regime. finish the regime was also -- the regime was also starting to run out of spare parts, military spare markets. and, oh, by the way, some of the luxury goods -- one of the most effective sanctions we had was on brandy and cigars because that's what the regime wanted. so they've set the table now. they've set the table, i think, in a very effective way. the question is how do you now deliver, and i would say three things. the first is remember that others have equities here like the japanese. so be very careful not to go around others with equities. secondly, i would say take your time. don't be too quick to promise things like removal of american military forces, because american military forces on the korean peninsula are a

stabilizing force not just for the korean peninsula, but for the region as a whole. so don't, you know, structure, be careful about the structure. and the third point you make, kim jong un and that regime never forget the nature of who you're dealing with. this is a regime that murdered an american less than a year ago. this is a regime where the leader killed his half brother who was under chinese protection in malaysia using vx gas. this is a country that has death camps for its own people, and so never forget who you're actually dealing with here. but if you can get inspectors on the ground, do it. our intelligence on north korea is never terribly good, so inspectors on the ground can matter. but take your time and, oh, just one other thing. don't try to negotiate it at the table with kim jong un. let the experts do that. finish. >> you can watch this and other

programs online at booktv.org. >> join us live sunday at noon eastern for our year-long special "in depth" fiction edition featuring best selling fiction writers. gish jen will be our guest. >> i would have to say if we're talking about creativity, of of course, i know many writers and so on, that people who have a lot to say are not, are completely undaunted by being told -- [inaudible] or if for that matter the rules of storytelling. i mean, the whole idea that there is a storytelling, you know, that there's a fly tag triangle, and that you must learn to do this, it's necessary but not sufficient, right? you learning to do this is not going to make you a great writer. but then you sit down with faulkner or anybody, and you discover that, actually, they could all do it, you know? and i think there's nothing

about learning to do those things that impedes creativity. >> herr books include -- her books include typical american, mona in the promise land and who's irish. watch our special series "in depth" fiction edition sunday live from noon to 3 p.m. eastern on booktv on c-span2. .. i suggest that you take a moment to create or revisit your safety plan. should something happen that brings up a traumatic experience for you, what will you do? take a few deep breaths, take a drink of wat s