the presidential seal which he could have done. >> actually what that gesture did, and it was early in in fact, his request to be registered to rank puzzled president kennedy. but if you think about it and we thought about it when we were putting the book together. dwight ieisenhower is making a statement here. you have a generational shift. there is no doubt about it in 1961. richard nixon who was the old man in the 1960 race was younger than obama was in 2008. this was a generational shift. and the war-time generation is making way for the -- for a new group in america. so, what eisenhower is saying by restoration of rank is that to understand his presidency and why he was there and what he accomplished between 1953 and '61 is a period of reconstruction. like the reconstruction of the

that followed the civil war. in a 20th century frame, he is a very underestimated 19 century. grant who carried forward the reconstruction after the american civil war. this is what the eisenhower presidency is in many ways. in january of '61, he was going to be succeeded either by a republican or a democrat, both under 50. both restless in looking for a way to sort of branch out and this becomes a theme in going home to glory because what happens in going home to glory is the wisdom of the war generation. what they took for granted is constantly challenged and what eisenhower has to understand in dealing with lyndon johnson and richard nixon and john kennedy is that he can off aer support, he can offer advice, so forth. but in the final analysis, the generation and power is charter

the course for the nation and he doesn't understand completely. and i think we make that very clear towards late '67 and early '68 the world begins to confuse dwight eisenhower a little bit but then he understands that this will work out. america is the land of ingenuity. we require people to really work hard to get there and, so, we are led by very exceptional people and we have been able to rely on presidents to find solutions to great dilemmas that americans faced. >> you write about conversations that you had with your grandma about your grandfather and you asked if she ever really knew him. she replied, i'm not sure anyone did. what is at the root of that comment, david? >> my father noted this about

franklin roosevelt, sort of an a admiring comment. here we are at the lyndon johnson library, this is, by the way, julie is here, a former student. i send students to the johnson library every semester. i know this institution and i know what a great one it is and the great story told here. presidents are sort of mysterious in a lot of ways and i think that this is more obvious in certain libraries than it might be in others. what my father said with admiration is that franklin roosevelt was unscrutable. franklin roosevelt was a mystery in his own papers. i would say that that is true of a number of presidents. they are people who -- >> they're complex. >> go ahead, julie. >> i agree with you, i think they're very complex and they're driven and they're extraordinary. they -- >> would your mother have said

the same thing about your father? >> no, i think he, i think he was more -- >> your father? no way. >> no? i thought, well, he was such a great family man. i mean, the way i knew him. i don't know. you mean like politically he wasn't as noble. he never spanked. >> people with that kind of drive develop a sense of what they're going to be rather early in life. the thing that makes me smile a little bit listening to julie is julie wrote this wonderful book and one of the collections that she breaks in that book is an amazing cache of letters that richard nixon wrote pat nixon from the south pacific in '43, '44 and '45.

he's not telling her in these letters that he's going to go out and become president, i don't know what he's telling her. it's there to see. as the story goes, bill clinton's classmates were saving his letters and little things that he wrote and at the age of 15 and 16, he wasn't captain of the football team, he wasn't this, but he exuded an extraordinary sense of himself. i'm sure linden, lucy have stori stories. a man of extraordinary drive. my grandfather, my father told a story in 1938 or '39 they were living in manila -- >> he was working for mcarthur. >> douglas mcarthur and my dad confronted my grandfather with the idea and suggestion that the idea that my grandfather was wasting his time. why are you wasting your time working for douglas mcarthur as

an assistant leazing with president's government and so forth and you have one offer after another from large shipping and why are you wasting your time. ? his reply was, i believe the war is going to break out in 24 to 36 months and when it does, i will lead. he's a colonel. these are, i don't want to be mystical about this, i'm just saying they're unusual people and i think there is, therefore, an element of them, which is noble. >> history is full of tensions between richard nixon. how would you characterize the relationship between the two men? >> i think the answer is that it's amazing they got along as well as they did.

>> that's the point. >> because you're taking two presidential personalities bumping along together. in other words, we have dwight eisenhower who is president and then you have richard nixon who is going to be president and for these two people who both have, you know, ideas and agendas and for them to get along as well as they did, and i think it developed into a warm friendship, but i think that the, just the energy and the fact that my father represented something different from eisenhower, as well. he represented a newer generation. he represented a specific outlook and eisenhower -- >> eisenhower had his own clash with mcarthur. same thing. you can draw an analogy. when you see pictures of douglas mcarthur and dwight eisenhower bent over a desk going over some document relating to the filipino first division in 1938, you were looking at the man who

commanded u.s. forces in the pacific and the man who commanded u.s. forces in europe. right there. this is a colonel or a major and a general who is, in effect, retired. you had no idea that these people are the the figures that they are. and about then mcarthur began to get an idea working with eisenhower that he wasn't going to get along with him. my grandfather was sent on a trip to the united states in 1938 to try to equip the first division and returned to manila believing that he had served his boss well. i think this is, when we're talking eisenhower and nixon. people said, was nixon devoted to eisenhower as a subordinant and did nixon value as a subordinant. i ran off to the united states to do work, finally, you know, the general has come up with an

assignment, it has been a year, so forth. i have been bored to tears and when he returns to manila, literally, his key does not fit in the lock. his appointment, his successor has been appointed in his absence and eisenhower confides in his journal i will not give the satisfaction of knowing i was being fired. what action he is telling the war department is that this is the finest that i have encountered in the united states army and he should be detailed to high command immediately. mcarthur's firing him and recommending him for high command. and i think what that means is mcarthur understood he did not have a staff officer on his hands. eisenhower, as much as he wanted to serve mcarthur, he is never going to be a staff sergeant.

so, mcarthur is finally driven to call ieisenhower "the best clerk i ever had." but, you know, they went their separate ways. what we personally saw, what we narrate in "going home to glory" my grandfather was a dying man in '68, '69 and in that period he wanted to make it very clear that he always had a fondness for his vice president. there were always going to be stories about how he related and so on. but i think that is rooted in temperment aerament and the kin people they were. he wanted everyone to know there was genuine affection there, and i think there was. >> your father ran for the presidency and was defeated. he went through some wilderness years and then ran for the

presidency in 1968. jumped right back into the arena and, against all odds, got the nomination and ultimately the presidency. what drove him to seek office, again, after those two earlier defeats? which many thought was his ultimate demise in political life. >> well, really, it was his vision of how he needed to deal with the rest of the world. and he, in '67 he wrote in "foreign affairs" an article called asia after vietnam. he said china can't be left in angry isolation and we have to take steps to bring family, china into the family of nations and i think that, his passion for foreign affairs and the fact that all -- that this wilderness period you refer to was when i was in high school and my father was constantly traveling and sometimes we would go with him

meeting with as many world leaders who would see him and calling on all the relationships that he had developed when eisenhower sent him to 53 countries around the world as vice president on these good will trips. and that was his passion. he felt he could serve the country and that's why he wanted to run. but it's interesting to watch this primary because it was a very uncertain my father could win the nomination in '68, so he had to develop a strategy and his strategy was to enter every primary and win it and he did. but it was in '68, the first primary was new hampshire. he won 70%. so, i mean, these are huge numbers when you think of what romney and gingrich and others are pulling in and then he went on to nebraska and, i mean, we were there the whole step of the way. >> nebraska, wyoming -- >> california, no, oregon. anyway, so it was an uphill battle but the way he did it, just to go out and campaign and get the primaries and then he

got the nomination. if he hadn't won the primaries, he wouldn't have been nominated. >> this is the year before both republicans and democrats adopted the binding primaries or awarding delegates through the primaries. and primaries were primarily in that period for demonstration, to demonstrate popular following and to influence delegate selection in states, which is, that is a way we chose presidents and then we choose presidents differently today. we have a record of those presidents. we have a record of the presidents we had recently. i'm not sure it makes a whole lot of difference. i think that was a good method of choosing presidents. >> it's interesting to note that when he ran the favorite for the nomination was george romney. >> yes. >> at the very beginning. and then rockefeller and reagan came in, it was really, there were a lot of formidable people in the party who wanted that

nomination. >> what was the relationship between -- >> i love one of my favorite parts of going home to glory was one of my father's aides was a congressman named bob elsworth and he was sent out by my dad not to keep giving governor reagan good reports about the nixon campaign and it's going great, et cetera. he'd go out and call on reagan and, you know, it was just great because he kept, you know, trying to influence what was going on with eisenhower and reagan. >> always sending people in to see eisenhower to convince the general that eisenhower was not a right winger. >> it was a funny relationship. >> it was a funny relationship. in fact, many of dwight eisenhower's friends in palm springs, palm desert became

members of the so-called governor's cabinet in 19 -- reagan won in 1966 and served two terms as governor. and then these are prime movers behind the reagan campaigns of '76 and '80. >> right. julie mentioned your father's views on china and, of course, opening china to the west in 1972 with his visit to beijing was one of the triumphs of his administration. would he be surprised at china's rise in the world and would he be pleased with where they are in the world stage? >> i don't think he'd be surprised because the last book, it was actually published posthumously because he died a month before it came out. the title of the book is from his last conversation in 1976 when mu said, president nixon,

is peace the only goal that america wants? is that it? is that the goal? my father said, no, we have to go beyond peace. we have to build a more just world, et cetera. that was the title of the book and he predicted in that book that china would be a powerhouse and, of course, it is today. but i think the important thing is one bond i feel with the johnson family is that vietnam was such a torturous time for our country. i admired lyndon johnson and, you know, his courage and his leadership. he was trying to find a way to end that war and a way, you know, at the end, he was in negotiations, et cetera. i remember that i wrote in my diary the day before the election, i said, you know, if daddy's elected president, i just fear that the nightmare of

trying to resolve the war in vietnam is going to be almost -- that's what these two presidents have in common is to have -- >> this is across the partisan divide and that is a very interesting letter and harry is undoubtedly familiar with this. i spoke to walt rostow many times when i came here to research about this. he was lyndon johnson's adviser. very interesting letter from johnson to, i believe, walter wittman or one of the very famous journalists of the day, may have been drew pierson talking about his differences with fullbright and the senate foreign relations committee. what johnson explains in his letter is that he believed,

unlike many of his critics in the senate, that the american interest ran equally strong towards asia, as it did towards europe. the reason he was the vietnam war, it was that interest and commitment demonstrated by two presidents that opened china. there is no way in the world china facing 45 rocket divisions deployed in manchuria will take a chance on relations with a nation that does not value asia. and, so persisting. >> and keep its commitments. >> lyndon johnson refused to do as he said at johns hopkins, he would never withdraw with the cloak of a meaningless agreement and as difficult as those times were, he did bequeev a chance

for the united states to achieve larger ami aims in that conflicd one of them was persuading asia and asian governments that the united states truly cared about that region and that is a fundamental building block to our relationship with china. and what julie's dad made very clear at that time, i was very interested in this as a teenager and somebody just turning 20. the only thing i knew about china was these people waving red books and these mass demonstrations and swimming in record-breaking time and this zaniness coming out of china and he came back from several trips. this is very early in our courtship and he would regale us at night with his stories in hong kong as an attorney and his consultations with people in the far east about what an extraordinary area of the world

this is. and what he expected these nations to become. he made that very clear in this period. and i thought it was interesting because i never heard it before. and i think that that is his gift or that's his contribution. our presidents do contribute things. many encounter difficulties, but they contribute and nixon's great vision of asia, mattering to america. in the way europe mattered to us in 1941 and '45. seeing that arena as the center of development and so forth and the decades to come was a tremendous contribution, which is remembered and acknowledged throughout china today. >> right. julie mentioned vietnam and lyndon and lucy often talk about the pain of watching their father go through vietnam in the white house. you've written about the pain that you experienced watching

your father go through watergate and your father wrote in his memoir, julie and david lived on the frontlines of watergate and suffered its brutal assaults every bit as much as i did. what was that experience like for you during the latter years of your father's tenure in the white house? >> of course, it was difficult because it was terrible for the nation. and it just wasn't something terrible for the family. but the whole watergate saga. you know, it didn't, it wasn't good for the presidency and, so, that was very difficult. and i think that i wouldn't want to put words in lyndon and lucy's mouths, but i would think it would be difficult at the end of their dad's presidency but with the half a million young men fighting in vietnam and this

almost endless war and when your husband, like lucy's husband was overseas, the sacrifices that a lot of people are make aing and you just never want to let down. you never want to let people down. i think that's what makes it difficult when you go through something like watergate. >> for a president going through that period, not in some way to let the american people down. i won't say america was ungovernable. the interesting thing about veet the fall of saigon and we don't have another event involving the united states for the next ten years. what happens? soviet union collapses. not one intervening event. we did things right in that period. vietnam, what does vietnam mean? does it mean that america lost a

war or does it mean that the united states is such a dynamic country that they sustained an effort on behalf of a minority in southeast asia, 8,000 miles away. mounting a logistical effort that no other country in the world could even conceive of. what lesson did countries around the world derive? observing the united states in this period? i think what they saw was an extraordinary effort. and i think that that is strangely, william westmoreland was interviewed about this. and he said, he was asked about 12 years ago, the commander of vietnam and we saw him at a funeral not long ago and i guess bob hope, 2003. and he was asked about, what do you make of the fact that you commanded american forces in vietnam and we had this terrible setback in southeast asia and

soviet union has collapsed around the globe and communism is in retreat everywhere and the west has won. what do you make of that? he said, well, i guess it's the luck of the yankees or something. i just don't know. but i think the answer is that this was a very difficult period. it was a transition period in america. i think that's palpable in the speeches of presidents in that period that we are really passing through a transition. americans assuming great responsibilities without clear cut enemies and challenges. they're ambiguous responsibilities that we're assuming. and, so, i think that we had difficulties. impossible from '61, i would say all the way through '80 for a presidency in some sense not to disappoint america. >> julie, anyone who lived through the nixon era had deep impressions of your father.

what do you think is the most popular misconception about your father? >> i haven't really thought about that. i tend to think about the positive. he's, i kind of retired from that whole thing. what i mean is, i'm so proud of his record. that's what has to be focused on. not just the foreign policy, but the environmental protection agency, the desegregation of the southern schools. tom wicker the "new york times" columnist said that is his greatest achievement. when he took office 68% of the children in the south were in all-black schools and when he left office, 8%. the way he did it, it showed his leadership. he quietly engaged southern officials. instead of saying, you know, the isis a shame and a scandal and the south is bad and we've got to change this, he got the southern officials to be on advisory committees.

they were doing all kind of things to make sure this happened and there was a partnership and i really think that this made the south, the great region of the country it is today because how could the south be a great region if they had parts of their population that were not treated equally? you have to get rid of that in order to move forward. so, now, today the south is probably the most dynamic section of our country. so, i think there are many things that we would talk about with the nixon presidency. you better not get me started. okay, so -- >> david, there's a memorial that's being planned now in washington to your grandfather. it's adjacent to the mall. there's a great deal of controversy around that. >> ajas tonight the johnson education -- >> the air and space museum in washington. but a great deal of controversy around that.

can you talk about the current plans for the memorial and why your family -- >> i just stepped down as a commissioner, stepped down, it's not because i had what transpired between me and the commission is between me and the commission. i stepped down because i have a conflict of interest. i have become chairman of the eisenhower presidential foundation and this memorial is going to raise funds nationally and we're trying to raise funds and there's a -- it's a general conflict, not -- >> for the presidential library. >> and also we've entered a phase where the eisenhower memorial is actually being designed and the fact that it is being designed has brought out all kinds of differences of opinion and that doesn't surprise me. if you think about how you would do a national memorial to dwight eisenhower, i would think that -- i could come up with 1,000 ideas, i think. and the way the commission did it is they, they retained

probably the most famous architects in the world and they solicited designs from his and that is a concept and the concept is out there and the re, the architectural unity in washington is responding to that and i'm not surprised at all that there are other designs out there and i do not doubt that there will be modifications in the existing design and that it will work out ultimately. >> right. >> we talked about misconceptions about your father. one, you alluded to one, julie, which was that he was a lot more modern than most people think he was. >> actually he's called the last liberal president. certainly, i don't know. he was in the mode of the progressive presidents. >> i think both president eisenhower and president nixon were moderate certainly by today's standards and the gop has evolved considerably since that time. i wonder, what do you think your

grandfather, david, and your father, julie, would think of the current crop of gop candidates for the presidency? that's what you call a loaded question, i guess. >> no, but aren't they amazing in the sense think of the pressure they're under with the debates. they're really, i mean, i think that it shows their quality. that these people can get out there. the ones that are still standing, get out there and answer complicated questions, week after week. we never put candidates through this before. >> it's grueling. >> we had a presidential -- >> i have to say even the people who dropped out of this race is impressive. >> right. >> i think they're -- >> no. yes. no, some of them, yes. i mean, not all of them. no, they are all well intentioned. no, seriously, i really believe .