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tv   [untitled]    March 10, 2012 2:30pm-3:00pm EST

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college education for free. he was determined to follow the path. the great intelligence he had and artfully concealed, he sat for the competitive exam and got an exceedingly good place in it. so high up that he would have gone to annapolis and become a naval cadet except the kid ahead of him got sick at the last moment and there was a vacancy at west point and ike chose without giving it much thought to go to the army instead of the navy, otherwise he might have turned up whost admiral. to trace the backgr o this background without ever, like, grant turning his back on this fact, he alwaed modest, devoted to duty. very conscious of the need for discipline, self-discipline.
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and driven by the small town, midwestern hometown america. i think it's part of ike's charm that he brought that with him, even though at the peak of his power as a general, he not only commanded millions of men in battle, but dealt as an equal with churchill, with stalin, with de gaulle. but there was something about ike, a kind of friendly, honest, decent sense of respect for people that made people, however different they were and however high up they were, to instantly like ike. i found that he was a fascinating man to read about and write about. i would like to have known him. >> you say jimmy carter and ronald reagan and richard nixon, what would happen if you put those three men and eisenhower,
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general eisenhower, at a table, those four men, and you're at the table, how would they interact with one another, based on what you know? >> well, of course, richard nixon had ample opportunity to react to eisenhower because for eight years he was eisenhower's vice president. >> but, i mean from what you personally know, how two these men interact, would they get along, would they like each other? they almost all came from a small town. >> well, i don't know whether they'd like each other. i'm skeptical of the notion that richard nixon liked jimmy carter or that jimmy carter liked richard nixon. nixon and reagan always got along quite well together, although they didn't see that much of each other. all of them would get along with ike. ike could sit down at a table with people who had daggers drawn with each other and get them at ease and cooperating.
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>> who is the smartest of those people? >> oh, ike. i mean, nixon was very smart, very, very smart guy. possibly too smart. but ike was not only a brilliant general, but a very astute politician. always conscious of how to make politics work for him, how to get what he wanted out of congress and how to always make it seem as if it was easy and as if he hadn't done it. the trademark, the grin of ike concealed an icy intelligence. a streak of ruthlessness certainly and a wild temper. ike had a temper just hair trigger temper held back by
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great, great effort. i mean, ike chain smoking didn't help, but one large part in old age and the heart disease, he spent a lifetime holding back the temper, he would turn red in the face and his forehead would pulse, and even at west point when he was challenged and i have many instances in my book, when he thought somebody was being treated unfairly. ike's temper was horrendous to behold. the only two people so far as i know in the whole world of whom george patton was afraid was mrs. patton and ike. >> go back to that table. who would have had the best personality at the table? >> ike. although ronald reagan was -- but i don't think he was any more a charmer or a good
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storyteller than ike was. ike was a natural. i would say it would be a cot n that respect and i'm not sure who would win, because that's a contest of the giants. >> who was the best leader? >> ike. ike. also you have to bear in mind that ike was not only the best leader, he was a man who led a most difficult and precarious coalition for almost four years from very shaky beginnings to a complete victory in europe. that takes a degree of leadership of a very special nature. i mean, serving under him prima do pre preprima donnas like patton and
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bradley, although ike is fond of bradley there are plenty of instances in the book where ike as we say in england tears the strip off bradley to the point that he's wiped in the battle of the bulge. ike gave bradley a bawling out such as no mad has ever heard. and henry kissinger told me when he came to the white house that nixon's national security adviser that he met at nixon's request with eisenhower to get eisenhower's point of view about various foreign and domestic problems, and the next day that story ran in "the washington post." and he had not leaked it. but somebody did. and he picked up his phone and it was ike from his hospital bed and kissinger said to me, i have never been cursed out that way
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in my whole life before or since. i have never, ever been cursed out that way. he cursed kissinger up and down as only an army man can. turned out that it wasn't kissinger who had leaked it. butk kissinger said having ike vent his anger on you was -- and when ike was an >> i and he thought somebody hadn't done their best or tried their best or was not obeying an order of his, his temper could be ferocious, and yet completely concealed. you can read biographies of ike and supposedly he's a smiling and genial fellow, he was. but behind that was something else a much tougher guy. >> 1999 when you were last here, if i'd asked you the same question and you knew president nixon and president reagan and
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president carter then, would you have said the same thing about eisenhower, or is this something you've learned since then. >> it's something i learned it's something i suspected because i read all of ike's books. and also because being a churchill scholar, one of the things that interested me most is that within weeks of ike's arrival in 1942 in england, though he was only an unknown major general at that time, he had won the confidence of churchill completely. and that argued for a very high level of ability and also for being able to hold your own against an overwhelming personality. because ike and churchill did not agree. and their views of strategy and how to win the war were radically different. and ike fought for his views
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against churchill. that's fighting against one of the giants. and he very often won. so, you captain n't ignore even the very beginning of ike the meteoric rise to fame and power as a general that he was capable of holding his own with anyone. >> would general eisen ever have gone into iraq like president bush did? >> no, he said very clearly in unmistakable terms that -- i think i'm quoting him accurately, that if america ever becomes an occupying power in a seething arab world, i am sure we would regret that decision. and ike knew of whereof he spoke. he had conquered algeria and morocco, he knew what the
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seething arab world was like and when he said we should not become an occupying power in it, he meant exactly what he said. and he was right i think. >> another book that you wrote some years ago i think 1991 was "man to man." >> yes. >> about? >> it was about -- that would have been in 1994, i think. >> i may have the wrong date. >> and it was a memorable experience, which i felt that i should share with other people. partly because i wanted to draw men's attention to the fact that this is a serious a problem as breast cancer is for women. and, therefore, not something to be taken lightly. and partly because i wanted to make patients question doctors about their treatment.
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i think had i known then what i know now, i would probably have thought twice about undergoing a radical prostatectomy and the heavy surgery that was in my case involved and might have opted for a different kind of treatment. so, i part ly wanted to empower and challenge the doctors because i think all too often particularly with surgeons who have a lot of personality and very forceful in their manner that patients are swept into surgery when later on they might go back to that moment and say i wish i'd asked "x," "y," and "z," i wish i had taken a second opinion and so forth. and i partly wanted to make men more aware of the fact that prostate cancer is very
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dangerous. take care to be tested for it at regular intervals and you've got to pay attention to it if those psa numbers begin to rise. so, it's a book i'm very proud of having written. i found it more difficult to write than most books because it's not pleasant to deal with subjects like prostate cancer or urinary incontinence, rising psas, surgery, but i am very happy that i did it. and i get still many letters today, even though the book is somewhat out of date now, because in some respects the treatment for prostate cancer has advanced beyond what it was in 1994. and i get many, many letters from men who have read the book and say that they've been helped enormously by it. that their wives have been helped enormously by what's
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involved. perhaps that's one of the greatest pleasures in writing a book to know that you have not only written something that you wanted to do but that people are helped by it. >> you were born in 1933. what year did you have a heart attack? >> i had a cardiac arrest and possibly a heart attack in august of 1999. and was in a coma for a period of time. i am very fortunate that it happened in central park, opposite some park rangers whom i would like to thank here and now on television because they were standing outside the tavern on the green when i collapsed, rushed across and gave me mouth to mouth resuscitation and cpr all of which they'd been trained in, and had that not had happened, i would have been dead. so, i owe my life to the
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knowledge of cpr and to the swift action of those park rangers who called for an ambulance and undertook to keep me going. again, i am always happy to share that, and i do my best to talk to recovery groups and to patients groups because i think, again, it's important to people to understand that this is not an abstract problem. that cpr and knowing how to resuscitate somebody are things that should be available and things that people should know how to do and use. >> i want to know what impact it had on your ability to concentrate, your ability to read. you call yourself a great reader. obviously you've edited a lot of books and written a lot of them and your ability to write. as you get older and health concerns come along, what's it do to the way you look at the world and your ability to do what you do?
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>> a great actor who was a friend of my father's who whom i adored and was an honorary uncle to me and i'm quoting here, he said when i was young i thought it would be a very jolly thing to become old because people would come to me for advice and i'd give them the benefit of my wisdom and knowledge, and now i am old. nobody ever comes to see me at all and i don't know a bloody thing. and there's some aspect of that which is true, all of it. i'm astonished at the whole areas that have gone awol since 1994 and 1999. and also i believe that just as exercise is good for the body, certainly good for anybody who has had any kind of heart
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problem, that exercising the mind is absolutely vital. and that if you allow the age process and the various calamities that ensue for most of us along the form of aging and operations and whatever, if you allow that to numb your mind then it will, in fact, become number and you will, in fact, end up knowing nothing. and so i regard my plunging into let us say the eisenhower marshall wartime correspondent one of the pivotal and most central and most fascinating correspondences of the second world war. it's right there as important as the correspondence of churchill and fdr, which consisted almost 1,700 long, long letters. ike and marshall wrote each other almost on a daily basis
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long, long, long letters. wonderful stuff to read. but i felt in reading it and digesting it, in coming to grips about what it meant and what it was about, that i was not only enjoying myself because i like that kind of thing, and not reading backgrounds for the book that is necessary if you are going to write one, but exercising my mind in a way that was good for my mind and i think that's the most important thing that people can do as they get older to isolate as it were the things that they're interested in and really work on those things. i think the mind needs to be exercised just as much as the body does. >> where do you read where you're the most comfortable? >> sitting at my desk at home in dutchess county. i have a very comfortable chair and a big desk and an office which my wife margaret says is absolutely littered with books and papers. every once in a while we make an
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effort to get it all tidied up but that's not an easy thing to do. i'm very happy reading there. i love reading. i'm a book publisher, so, of course, to some degree i'm paid to read. but i am somebody who is never totally happy without a book at hand or several books at hand that i can read through and interest myself in. so, for me, writing a biography of somebody like eisenhower is to begin with an immense pleasure. there are those letters to read. there are those other books about him to read. there is the german war stuff to read. there's the french war stuff. there's de gaulle's memoirs, book after book after book, and after you read them, you say, yes, but i haven't read that and this points to that and i need to read that as well or this particular set of correspondence makes me want to read some of
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patton's ledders or bradley's letters. each thing leads to another thing to read and i find that a wonderful, wonderful process. very exciting process. at some point in time, of course, you have to put all that away. even a moment of sadness where you brush all that to one side and sit down in front of a piece of paper or a computer and write page one, chapter one and have to really start using that stuff and writing the book. but the researching of it is a pure joy. >> who is the person difficult person you've ever edited? >> the pause is to try and think. because most have not been. i must tell you that i'm not an intrusive editor. i try to phrase everything in a positive way.
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there are some people, of course, that are very difficult to say in a positive way, but i've always done my best. i would say that probably the person with whom i had the most difficulty in terms of editing was faye dunaway when i edited her autobiography, because we absolutely didn't agree on what should be in the book. a person of whom i'm very fond, but never managed to quite to come to grips was editing was cher because it was very hard to get her to see that a book should proceed chronologically rather than back and forth in a zigzag way. though we remained very good friends. i've never had a big fight about editing that i can remember with any author except possibly fay doubfaye dunaway. most of the time i've had or
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simply rejected the entire notion of being edited and have said, i'm not going to do any of that, and my way -- >> who was the easiest? or maybe a better question, who is the single best practitioner of writing that you can remember editing? >> well, i would say that graham greene and david mcmullah a mccollough are ideal writers. they don't need editing in a blue pencil way at all. of course, both of them in different ways. wonderful writers. civilized, worldly, and charming men. but very receptive to an int intelligent and helpful
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suggestion, which by the way they do not necessarily accept, but they certainly i've edited larry mcmurtry for more than three decades and we're very close friends. and we've only -- i only made two suggestions to larry mcmurtry in the course of more books than i can count. one of which he rejected and one of which he accepted and we both now agree was a mistake which was to change the title of his big novel, his moby dick of rodeo which was called "country of the horn." and when our sales department said they didn't think they could sell that title, i persuaded larry to change it to "moving on" which he was reluctant to accept, but eventual i had dly did. and i was quite enthusiastic about. and the book was not as big a
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success as "lonesome dove". and in retrospect both of us now wished we continued to call the book "country of the horn" which is actually a great title. i have no idea how we managed to sit down and decided it wasn't but we did. there's a relationship that has gone three decades. i've only made two suggestions and wish i hadn't had one of them accepted. >> did you find a character in your research for eisenhower or writing your book of general eisenhower that you want to write a book about? is there a next book for michael korda? >> not only is there a next book for michael korda, but i've already partially completed a next book which is about the battle of britain from june of 1940 through october of 1940.
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a subject about which i've always wanted to write a book because i served in the royal air force, hence the little badge. and i have always wanted to tell the story of the battle of britain which i have never felt has been told correctly, completely, or the way that i wanted it to be told. so, that's -- i have already taken that step. as to a character about which i would like to write a whole book. i would love to write a book about winston churchill but i feel there are so many books by winston churchill many written by my good friend sir martin gilbert that i'm not sure i could squeeze one in by myself or it would make a difference from anybody else's. but reading ike and the relationship between ike and winston churchill one is constantly amazed and amused and
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awed by the breadth of churchill's mind and imagination and energy and his sense of humor and personality. he clearly captivated ike. ike captivated him. and there's a wonderful moment when churchill returns from the tehran meeting with a bad case of pneumonia which his doctor lord moran calls the old man's friend, why, because it carries them off without fuss or pain. ike is in algiers with pneumonia and has nothing to do but have his daughter sara read aloud to him from "pride and prejudice" which strangely enough churchill had never read before. and at the end having had "pride and prejudice" read to him
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churchill says with no regrets, what quiet lives these people led. with no desire for a quiet life at all. but it's wonderful. and ike -- my book on ike is full of these moments with churchill and ike together. and they're the moments i think that made me happiest among the few moments that made me laugh outright during writing "ike." i love d to see and communicate in a book what people are really like rather than the historical figures that are presented, to the extent they are presented at all. and indeed that's one of the reasons for writing "ike" because how much are people taught about eisenhower in
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school today? almost nothing. how much are they taught about the second world war? are they aware how near we came to losing it or what the world would be like had we lost it. are they aware what people risked and suffered and sacrificed or what the world would have been like today had we not. no, they are not. and so it's not just ike that i want to bring to life in this book, it's that whole period from the first world war to the second world war and the beginning of the cold war and how it was that we came to win it and the great -- that was played in that entire period of history by a poor boy from kansas who had a special kind of military horatio alger story in the person of eisenhower. >> michael korda, "ike" thank you for being here. >> thank you for having me.
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>> for a copy on dvd or vhs tape, all 1-877-662-7726. for free transscripts or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda.org. "q and a" programs are also available as c-span podcasts. i don't think the president could have gotten away with it. >> pulitzer prize winning reporter and author tim weinert reveals the fbi's 100-year hidden history and j. edgar hoover's war against spies and terrorists. >> he stands alone like a statue
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encased in grime. as one of the most powerful men who ever served in washington in the tw20th century. 11 presidents, 48 years. from woodrow wilson to richard nixon. there's no one like him. and a great deal of what we k w know, what we think we know is myth and legend. >> a history of the fbi sunday night at 8:00 on c-span's "q and a." ernest hemingway is considered one of the great american writers and his work still influence readers today, but not many people know of his work as a spy during world war ii. >> there were a couple of instances that he was aware of when german submarines approaching fishing boats and saying, hey, we'll take your catch and your fresh food. so, ernest says, well, i'll wait for them to come alongside and

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