but one of the most decorated writers of our time and this will continue. so thank you for letting me spend some time with you thank you so much by lots of copies and give them away and do all that. thank you so much join us septed for john meacham to talk about what you can see behind him. >> it is not as interesting as this. >> have a great night everyone

. >> like the office they commemorate presidential libraries are living institutions. certainly it is my hope the reagan library will become a dynamic intellectual forum where scholars interpret the past and policymakers to be the future. our public affairs programming offers forms giving perspective on public policy issues of the day. we bring up to 30 events every year politicians, authors,

media and military leaders. because of the closure of many businesses the reagan foundation now puts events online to ensure we are still delivering world-class content even if you can't get to the hilltop to watch it in person. in this week's event we bring chris wallace anchor of fox news sunday and 2014 marked his 50th year in the broadcasting industry has participated in coverage of every major political event and secured high-profile interviews with dignitaries and leaders. and the reagan national defense form each year chris wallace countdown 1945 extraordinary story of the atomic bomb and the 115 days that changed the world. the ordinary american as well as american soldiers fighting in the pacific and to look at the impossible invasion of japan howard 116 days to be

cut out the white house the story of the scientist and others enjoy our virtual program coming from the air force one airship academy and from the executive director here is chris wallace. >> congratulations. where the terrific book as you may know i'm not able to read them all. but really a historical thriller i just loved it so congratulations not just the first of but a great first effort. and it seems to be out there because one of the "washington

post" and i'm thrilled distant past this now we wanted to do in the moment countdown 1945 in those days from april 12 so when truman is summoned to the white house he finds out roosevelt is dead and then henry stimson takes them aside afterwards and says i need to tell you about an immense project and one of the things

president truman has is the existence of this contract and to take not just truman as he is struggling like lost alamo's as the atom bomb would even work until 21 days before the bombing and the enola gay who on the mission to hiroshima they don't know if the balm if it's ever been dropped out of a plane of the aftershock would knock them out of the sky. that's what i was trying to do that you have said so i am thrilled.

you put us in the room were happens on many occasions. >> thank you that's exactly what i was trying to do and he has a meeting on his war cabinet on june 18 and the general of the army is there and all of the top brass. and how they would kill the trade season the invasion of japan how many troops, how long and how many hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides and then at the end the assistant secretary of war

who ended up becoming a major victory midcentury america when truman says no way gets out of the room without telling what they think. and mccauley asked stimson his boss and he said i think we should have our heads examined if we don't at least discuss the problem. and that was literally in this war cabinet the first time in this meeting. they were to about the casualties and the length of the invasion and nobody talked about the bomb and then basically it was dismissed at that point largely because it had never been tested and just 21 days before the bomb was used against hiroshima and that in june to view that as a science project.

what made you choose this particular moment to have the idea with a key moment in history to put you in it and at the time they are faced with these momentous challenges and they don't know what will be happen more what happening and with the control of gorbachev i was fortunate enough to cover six years of reagan and those summits but having covered it in real life the drama of reykjavík in these discussions and the possibility they could be in all nuclear weapons i meant it all falls apart.

but he said they feel was one thing they go with the hopes and have the meeting so in februar february 2019 president trump was going to deliver the state of the union address and then to invite those tv anchors over to the hideaway in the capital and those that a lot of the speakers have and the prediction and washington was is the republican president democratic speaker and vice versa that they word deliver the rebuttal even before the president delivers a speech so we are sitting in the room and nancy pelosi says that altogether folks in the room knew, but i knew that it was

the sam rayburn hideaway and this is where he would have people come after hours to gossip. and vice president truman was a regular there. so as he was presiding over the senate am policy is telling us the story that in this room truman called the white house wanted to speak to him and speaks to a white house official and says you need to get to the white house as quickly and quietly as possible and truman puts down the phone and says jesus christ and the general jackson. which i had never heard before. [laughter] but i thought to myself that is it. that is my story and the one i will delve into to have a historical thriller and as it turns out i did not know 116

days from the day he is alerted that roosevelt has died until the bomb is dropped on hiroshim hiroshima. >> some writers report after the first book how did you find in your first book? >> but it is a very odd experience. . . . . they only an

july 201st or i'm sorry, july 16, and 21 days before, they ended up using it so now they were at the launch pad for the flight to hiroshima about 500 miles and somebody said if we put this 10,000-pound bomb that was inappropriately called little boy in the front of the plane and then we have to put extra gas in the front so that it won't fall down, it will be more weight than we have ever carried into the plane might crash on takeoff. and we could have an atomic explosion.

and he says i never have but i guess i learned. so he gets in the plane on the ground in the island in the sweltering heat and then when they finally do take off safely and they are on the way to hiroshima it's only then midway through the flight. so moments like that it's a joy and there were times -- i said

to her writing a book is hard work and she rolled her eyes and said i'm glad you discovered that. [laughter] >> it's tough to make a living. chris, did it surprise you it did seem true men didn't know the first thing about this bomb and roosevelt had only spoken a couple of times during this fourth term of the presidency but i guess that is the case. >> a lot of people have asked me about that and it does seem and credible. he had been vice president for

82 days and met privately with roosevelt twice in those 82 days and the fact was you've got to remember this was his fourth term, it wasn't his first or second vice president, so he had gotten pretty good at ignoring vice presidents and i think he thought i've got my cabinet and those are the people i count on to make these decisions and he just had shonda truman off to the side so i mentioned the fact that he takes him aside on the day that he is sworn in and says i'm going to tell you about this project but he knows that he is overwhelmed and has just become the president so i'm going to give you some time to settle in and then i will come back on april 205th, 13 days later he comes into the oval office to brief president truman now that he's settled in and meanwhile,

the general who was the real military commander of the project snuck in through the underground tunnels and one of the reasons it's given a lot they thought they had come in the front door together and people will wonder he was the big mission man and they gave truman a detailed document which explains i don't like reading long documents like this and he says we can't say it any more briefly if it is a complicated project and he knew that he had

mastered all of it. >> another remarkable fact 125,000 people working on this project and not a word gets out. >> you are exactly right it's one of the things that astonisheastonishme. people say what was it you covered the ins and outs of washington today and what was it like writing this book. one of the things that i enjoyed the most about writing, researching and talking about this book is that it has absolutely nothing to do with donald trump. it took me away from all the stuff we are in and it goes precisely to your .125000 people

at oak ridge, tennessee and richmond, los alamos and washington flight crews in utah and not one word leaks about the project. i thought to myself if you had 125,000 people today working on a secret project to bake apple pie that by day number two somebody would say this is outrageous, let's blow the whistle on this thing. it was a simpler time when the country was more unified and everybody could hold together a common cause against the nazis and the japanese and we could use that now. >> another thing i found fascinating about the way you wrote the book is of course he covered major news involved in

the project but then also, tell the listeners about those two things. i thought that it was a great juxtaposition. >> one of the things we wanted to do, it isn't just to be on the top level because of course the war wasn't just on the top level. it would invade all of america and one of the stories i wanted to tell was the home front. we found websites and where there's commentary about various people. and amazingly, we found two people that are still alive obviously the players are long gone, but this was a 19-year-old

girl that had volunteered to work at oak ridge, the uranium enrichment facility. she didn't know what it was, just was a big factory and there were giant machines. they had a bunch of knobs they needed to keep the meter at the right place they had the right idea. they had no idea what they were doing. to fuel the atom bomb what made her story wasn't just that she was in the home front, but she had a boyfriend will in the war in europe, the nazis surrendered

and she is delighted because her boyfriend has gotten through this but she's terrified because the expectation is he will now be shipped to an even bloodier complex in japan. she didn't realize this kind of irony that she's helping to create the weapons used that could save her boyfriend's life and that is exactly what happened. there were plot lines. she came from a wealthy family and hiroshima and like a lot of the families throughout the country, they didn't have any expectation but they would send

their children out to the countryside so that they would be safe. they sent her parents to what they thought was a school but it ended up being a war camp. she couldn't send a letter home because the school's inserted. a lot of them were telling them get me out of here so she's snuck into the town and mailed a letter in the post office saying get me out of here. her mother shows up on august 4th to rescue her and she was thrilled. the mother says look there's a lot of fear let's stay out here in the countryside and they said absolutely not. i want to go home so they spend the night and go home and on august 5th of course that means

that they are in hiroshima when the bomb is dropped on august 6th. >> i had a great chance to see a clip of you going into the smithsonian to see that. what a moment that must have been. >> this is the kind of thing you never would have imagined. so we did a documentary for fox news and i assume a lot of you do subscribe to fox nation. you can find it there. i said to her would you consider coming to washington for an interview. she said i will under one condition. i want to go see. i would never have tramped of

asking her to do something like that. so, we drove out one day and we got permission to go there before the museum opened and we went we walked up to it let's go

back to truman. summarize for me the dilemma with the dropping of the bomb and his rationale because as you described so well in the book it was going to save a lot of lives and take a lot of lives as well. >> i think that there's a couple of points i would make. obviously this has been one of the questions of the last 75 years. of course the 75th anniversary of all of these events. i guess i hadn't really studied and thought about it. it wasn't a choice between dropping the bomb or doing nothing. it was the choice between dropping the bomb and invading

and if we invaded, the top experts, all of the top people at the pentagon said you can expect the war to go on to the end of 1946 and you can expect a million japanese casualties because the homeland instead of the japanese soldiers beginning to lose spirit they thought they were going to take it over in two days the 20,000 that were left none of them surrendered. but they didn't surrender and

they knew that they were going to have a terrible battle on their hands. some people say they would have surrendered anyway. they dropped the bomb august 6th and the japanese military government does not surrender for three days. the japanese government still does not surrender and it is only then they decide to go over and directly to the people and get on the radio is literally the first time the vast majority of japanese had ever heard it took them going over the heads of the government to get them to

surrender. i don't know if any president would have made any decision. if you had invaded and have lost hundreds of thousands of americans to the death or grievous injury and later it were to come out of that as a president you had access to a weapon that could have ended the war in a flash and you had to sd i'm not going to use it, i don't know that any president could have faced that or would have wanted to the material you've

got is just excellent and i wonder what were your core sources? >> after i read the histories, and there's a lot out there, you want more, so where did i go, to the truman library and i spent a few days there with an archivist as i'm sure so many scholars have with reagan going through these and the treasure trove was the diaries because i often think to myself as i covered reagan in the 80s and as i cover not to directly but because i spent six years in the white house press corps, but as i cover from now what are they thinking at that moment, what is

going on, now we have access to the diaries in a much better sense of that. truman's were terrific. he was first of all a very good dietary keeper and a very good writer as was reagan. he said a lot of things that give you the inner conversation. one of the things i found interesting and it's different than i think most people's perception of truman because he's famously thought of as this the buck stops here, he made a decision and never looked back on it. he never looked back on this. he defended and said i would keep doing it again and again. but as he is doing this with stalin in july of 45, he was really struggling with the decision. he was having trouble sleeping

at night. he complained of headaches that he had whenever he was under stress in his career. and in his diary he keeps talking about a terrible weapon. and he describes it in an apocalyptic term. he describes a it as the fire destruction prophecies in the bible so you know, he made the decision and never looked back. he gave it the inner turmoil and struggling that i think he should have. he wrestled with it. >> tough job to be a president. >> oppenheimer, robert oppenheimer. talk to us about him. i'm sure there's been extensive books written about him. what a man. described as a renaissance figure and a genius really. >> i think he spoke a half a dozen languages and learned

sanskrit to read the buddhist writings. people had no question if he would have executive skills at all. he was a scientific director at los alamos and one of the things he had to juggle is he had the general i mentioned before they had to keep those things going. we talk about second thoughts. another one of my great moments in the book is after the bombing and after the war ends, truman never looks back on it. he's asked about it for the rest of his life and he keeps saying i had to make the decision that ended the war and if i had to

make the call i would do it again. they all said the same thing. it ended the war where the military men this was the way to defeat the enemy. it started the project in 1939 when he writes a letter to roosevelt and what his concern is and the concern of a lot of the german refugees that are now in the west, they were concerned that the nazis were going to get the atomic weapon for the u.s. dead and god forbid that adolf hitler had a monopoly on the most. in any case about a month after the explosion, oppenheimer comes to the white house and he sits down with he's just wracked with

second thoughts and says mr. president, i have these terrible regrets. i feel that i have blood on my hands. truman says don't worry about it. i gave the order. i've got the blood on my hands, and they finish the conversation. oppenheimer leaves and truman says to the staff i never want to see that son of a bench in this office ever again. >> let's talk about the opportunity that he had in this project and how all of that turned out. >> you talk about good days and bad days writing. william leonard lorenz was a

science reporter and a very distinguished science reporter for "the new york times." he had won a pulitzer prize with a group of other people for writing an article on a scientific project and this military man but also who thinks to himself this is going to be, if it all works out, and imminent story and i want the story told right. and this is another example of the difference between the unity of that time and what we have today. so this military general walks into "the new york times" and goes to see the editor and he says i would like -- because he knows about lawrence -- i would like to get william lorenz and i would like him to basically disappeared off the face of the earth and i want him to go inside. he's going to get the greatest story of all time.

i'm trying to remember i don't think he told the editor with the story was. i'm sure he didn't, but basically the editor said imagine that today is a general went to the times and lorenz is basically told you will have the greatest story of all times but you will not be able to tell it until we tell you you can. any news man would rebel at that idea of this great story. he hung out in los alamos and was part of it all and he was there when they tested the bomb and he had a genius and we quote at great length from some of the dispatches that he wrote and truman announced the whole

project but his writing was fantastic and he came up with the phrase maybe you've heard it before. it was written by william lorenz. and so he's there for all of the testing. i wish my writing were as good as william lorenz, but you get to read some of it in the book and then he's brought to the island, so he's there with the crew. he's not allowed on the first flight because he doesn't have going on the second flight, the nagasaki flight, so he's there and described as a first-person witness the detonation of the second atomic bomb in warfare. he's a great character and it is a delight. how do you describe seeing an

atomic bomb take out the city. he does it masterfully. >> the surprising thing it's almost like a postscript that you wrote about chris i guess there was a movement several years later to hold the pulitzer prize from the air men and the arrangement that had been made at the time. it was an interesting story. >> what happened was doing that period of time that he was behind the scenes, he was on the government payroll and so again, you know, there was just a different sort of relationship in terms of people, the media, the country, it was much more the sense that we were all in this together that has ended. so i think in the 50s, maybe it was the 60s, they went to the times and said lock, he was basically writing government

press releases, he should get back to the pulitzer, the times, and william lorenz did not. >> rightly so i think. there is a big player that you mentioned i think maybe only once but it leapt off of the page because i didn't know this. he was a scientist on the manhattan project and turned out to be a russian spy. can you tell that story? >> one of the big issues for churchill and truman, because the british and u.s. had been involved in this all along together, roosevelt and churchill and now truman. so, when the bomb explodes, they get word almost at the same time, but one of the things they are discussing is when do we tell stalin because he doesn't

know anything about this. just before the conference ends, and the decision is we don't want to tell them to early and we don't want to tell them too much but then we are supposedly allies and he is going to resent it and it's going to create even more problems and let me tell you there already are major problems between russia on the one side and the u.s. altogether because russia has swept in from the east end has taken over most of europe and they are not going to give it up. so, late in the conference after one of the sessions, truman goes over to stalin to tell him about it. he's practiced what he's going to say. and basically he doesn't even bring his translator. he uses the russian translator, they are by themselves and he says i just want to let you know that we have an enormous indescribably powerful weapon that we have developed.

stalin says something basically like i hope you will put it to good use with the enemy and then that's it and he turns it away. truman is dumbfounded. he doesn't ask a question. churchill comes up to him and says what happened and he said i don't know, i told him and he didn't seem interested. and even as truman's russian translator is wondering why the translator had translated it properly. well, the story, the truth is that stalin was interested, he just wasn't surprised because exactly as you said, there was this german scientist who had become a refugee and had ended up in the united states. but he had been a member of the german communist party because he's all the communist party as being the only force inside of germany that was resistant to

hitler. now he leaves and he's in the united states and because he was a brilliant scientist, he's working the manhattan project but his loyalty is still to communism and so he gives the name raymond all kinds of information that goes back to the russians. so later that night, stalin and the foreign minister end up back in the russian compound together and somebody overhears them having a conversation and in which they are discussing the fact truman told them they've got the bomb and it works and stalin says i guess we need to get going. and the historian would later say that at 7:25 p.m. on that night is when the nuclear arms race between russia and the u.s. officially began. >> what a moment. well, chris do you have another

book in you because it seems you must. like you've really enjoyed this. one of the thoughts that i had is to not only do all of the things that i said to create a historical thriller, but to be able to replicate it and so when i came out with a countdown idea, telling of this history but we are going to countdown the days, i thought if we can do a countdown, 1945, we can do countdown whatever. i have a couple of ideas. i haven't settled on one yet, but i think as i said. there will be another countdown.

>> just wonderful to see the work you've done. thank you for joining us today. >> the virus is going to end and i will be at one of my favorite places in the world, the reagan library. as you know i've been there many times including with missus reagan when she was still alive and i look forward to coming and talking with all of you folks in person. >> you are welcome any time. >> thank you for joining for today's virtual program event. we hope that this has inspired you to share what you've learned and that you will join us again for an upcoming event. >> all great change begins at the dinner table. so tomorrow night in the kitchen i hope the talking begins. children if your parents haven't been teaching you