for these folks to light candles and let you walk around the battlefield carrying candles. i would be glad to take a question or two if that would help, or whatever you would like to do, david. what's that? >> [indiscernible] be next?to ok, i guess i have done my job then. thank you very much. i appreciate it. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] heree civil war errors every saturday at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. eastern time. american history tv, all weekend, every weekend on c-span3. next, author john ross oakes about his book "enduring courage." 1890, eddie rickenbacker

was a well-known racecar driver before he earned a medal of honor as an ace in world war i. after the war, he was ceo of eastern airlines, owned indianapolis motor speedway for nearly 15 years, and was a motor car manufacturer. he also barely survived two airplane crashes. the national archives in kansas city hosted this hour-long event on the life of eddie rickenbacker. >> tonight it is my pleasure to introduce john ross, the author of the epic story of the conquest of america's first frontier. winner of the prize for contributions to american history, he served as executive editor of the american heritage and on the board of editors at smithsonian magazine. his articles have been published in reader's digest, parade, the new york times, newsweek, and washington post. he has appeared on more than 50 radio and television programs. he has worked with many pulitzer prize winning writers.

tonight it is my pleasure to introduce john ross. [applause] >> thanks, kimberly. thank you all for coming tonight. it is a real treat for me. i spent a lot of time with this past book at the national archives, not here but in college park doing work. it is a real treat to be asked to come here and talk to about this research on this remarkable figure. before i start -- before a friend dragged you here tonight, be honest, who has heard of eddie rickenbacker? raise your hand. two generations ago, everybody would've known this guy's name. not only his name, but they

would've told you stories about him. his facial recognition -- he was more familiar than the president. he was a hero. anyway, so researching your book, i spend a lot of time sitting down behind a machine. occasionally, some of my research trips takes interesting turns. i was bringing my 20-year-old back home from upstate new york from college. we stopped off in connecticut. i had been corresponding with the big expert on the earliest for motor cars in the world, and the country certainly. i had some technical issues i wanted to get right. how did an early car start?

we all know you have to crank them, but how do you do the other things? we roll in suburban connecticut to say hello. he has a garage full of model-c's. these are from the 1900s, mr. ford's earliest cars. carlton took a shine to forrester. before we know it, he is letting him drive the model-c. i get in the back wondering why this was a good idea. [laughter] we have a nickname in the family for forrester -- speedy gonzalez. he has never seen a car he has not wanted to pass. he is behind the wheel. and these things were not called cars yet.

they were horseless carriages. you are sitting as high as an suv but it looks as though somebody has cut the reins of horses. there is no dashboard, there is a windshield. so, carlton cranks it, moves the clutch, gets the fuel flow in. we start zipping down this back road. we pass lawns and trees. it is a quiet suburban. it is burping, chugging. one of the really unusual things is it is swaying. the shocks are more of the wagon era, more springs. you have this swaying thing and the wind is starting to blow. i remember carlton said mr. ford and his engineers do not really

out theot really worked braking system very well. we are beginning to pick up some speed. how do you stop, i said. it is kind of hard, said carlton. what, i shout. the big thing is to avoid obstacles. i go, that's great. forrester does not seem to mind. he is like toad in the "wind and the willows." i hang onto a little strap on the side. if we hit anything, i am airborne. carlson starts yelling at forrester. there is this mailbox and he starts yelling. i am flashing back and teaching forrester how to drive. i start yelling at forrester. forrester starts yelling. we are all yelling.

we missed the mailbox by about this much. the thing is we are all , laughing. it is exhilarating. it is incredible. this feeling -- i feel like i have never felt speed before and here i was. intoxicated by that. we all wear. were.all it got me back to thinking to this book, what was it like, what was it like for the first people to feel this for the first time in history this kind of speed? people have ridden horses fast, they have sledded, been atop of steam engines but a car was a whole different kind of thing. it had control. you weren't -- you can go faster than a horse. you can maintain that for a long time. you can turn. you felt the g forces. acceleration. slowing down. you can stop at will most of the time.

this was a whole new order of things for americans at the turn-of-the-century. i came across people describing -- you know when you are driving down the road and the scenery blurs? people were writing about this almost like a religious revelation. oh, my gosh. you don't believe what happens. the whole idea of people trusting themselves to get on something that was not an animal or was not powered by your own muscles was something that was so new at the turn-of-the-century. these were crazy fire wagons. going too fast, too dangerous. this was a culture that was dominated by a horse. the reassuring rhythms of core strong traffic -- horse-drawn traffic and the car would change everything. as a result of that, this incredible moment in american

history. they needed brave men and women to climb aboard these newfangled machines and show people how it was done. push the cars as fast as they can go. tinker with them. make changes. explain it to them. that is where the subject of eddie rickenbacker comes in. he was born to impoverished swiss german immigrants in columbus, ohio. so poor they couldn't afford coats to go to school so they didn't go to school a lot during the winter. in 1890 when he was born, five years later, people generally think that was on the first practical car came about. gasoline, internal combustion car. they averaged seven miles per hour. not too dangerous yet, but that

was changing. for a kid like eddie rickenbacker who was four and poor and had few opportunities, driving and racing cars provided a way he can get ahead, become known. he could break speed records by winning records. nobody could tell him he was a nobody. this was a motivating factor in his life, but it was very dangerous. this was the dawn of the modern age. america needed new icons of manhood. the lumberjack, the cowboy, the civil war era calvary leader, these would not do anymore. eddie became to personify and -- eddie, he came right at the time and began to personify and really give definition to the new icons of this modern age, the racecar driver and later the fighter ace.

he would be the real first right stuff. of course americans being who , they are with cars, the first thing they wanted to do was see how fast they can go and that led to racing. like in europe, the first car races took place on roads. a very famous road race took place in long island. very famous. it drew a lot of international attention and people from all over came and they had picnics all along the side of the road and waited for these cars to come speeding by. a course marshall would shout "car coming!" and a crowd would come pushing into the road oblivious of police as to the danger. they went right onto the road and these cars were racing. people still were not used to terrestrial things going so fast.

they were used to things going so fast. were not used to things going so fast. so, the cars would go by and then they would close up right after right on the road in the middle. this one guy describes it a black spot in the distance grew larger as the roar deepened. suddenly took shape. the glaring radiator numeral smashed you in the eye. blue flames came out of the exhaust. gay streamers flipped backwards from the helmeted heads of driver and mechanic. here was speed that you can feel as well as see. speed that burned your cheeks, filled your eyes with oil, and your nostrils with the stench of gas. people loved it, but they also in this particular race, and this was in october. october 1, 1910. they died. four people died and 42

spectators were grievously wounded. people were hit and thrown into the crowds. it was a nightmare. so much so the governor of new york canceled the race permanently. no more road racing. you begin to see now the evolution of the indianapolis 500 getting on track and moving away from road races. in these early races, too, i didn't know much about this until i started looking at it, it wasn't just the driver in the car. they drove with what was called a mechanition. his job, it was so loud and they couldn't talk even though they were sitting as tight. -- as tight as you are. they had not invented rearview mirrors yet. his job was to look back and see who was coming behind if somebody was passing. they had a code. they would tap you on the need.

the other thing he did was to pump an oil pump. they didn't have a oil pump that mechanized. just like a little bicycle pump and he would keep the oil pressure up at speed. they also had not really figured out the roads. the indianapolis 500, they called the brickyard, they put bricks in, but that was pretty expensive. most of the races took place on horse tracks. they would pour hot oil over gravel and dirt until he got nice and hard. the problem with this is that it would start breaking up. somebody compared this to driving on corrugated iron. eddie would talk about how we feared for his kidneys. he was shaking so much. he would take burlap and get it wrapped around his waist up to his arms and hold tight when he

was driving. at the end of the race, it would be loose. that was the shaking they were doing. one journalist who had been in the mechanic seat wrote -- my insides were up against the back seat and the next they were flat against the seat of that speed engine. there was always a vacancy in between. the only connection was my backbone and that came near snapping several times. no time in car racing -- car racing today is still a very difficult sport, but at no time has it been as hard as it was then. the cars were very heavy. they did not have any power steering, power geared steering at all. they did not have windshields. the wind was bad. eddie said you have no idea how a breeze forces a fellows cheeks back and distorts his face when he is going fast. you should see these pictures of them. they look like they had really

facelifts. drivers had to squeeze their steering wheels from keep their cars from leaping off course when they hit a bad bump. tight springs on the clutch and accelerator exhausted your calf muscles. the shock absorbers were pretty worthless. these guys were driving for hours and hours. the first indianapolis 500, the first guy won in 6.5 hours and today it is 2.5 hours. the first car races -- this is when the whole culture started happening. the first people in it were rich amateurs. --tlemen the's sons gentlemen's sons. it is a expensive to have a couple of cars. eddie was one of the first to really was a professional. he started to look at sports and risk and the whole thing differently than these amateur millionaires who often were in

it for the glory. eddie was in it for a different kind of thing, he wanted to win. there was an interesting case of a 1914 300-mile race in sioux falls. bit ofves you a little character of what these races were like. one of the favorites was this guy named spencer, he could've been right out of -- he could've been in hollywood. his father had given him a whole bunch of cars and he married a debutante from indianapolis. a big powerful car. eddie drove a much less powerful duesenberg. eddie knew you could not compete with them at all on the flats. he was not fast enough. but if he drove fast on the curves.

he was really psyching things out. if he took the corners very fast in a way he couldn't get too big, he had a chance to win. he had to be daring. 17 cars started up and they lined up in three lanes. the track looked good. they had just, as i mentioned earlier, put hot oil over and steamrolled it. the temperature is about 91 degrees. it is far hotter down there with the revving engines on the track. eddie, in addition to the burlap, probably wore his favorite headgear which was a woman's sock underneath his helmet to keep everything together. his mechanition was wedged against them and they blasted off and a thick cloud of dust. there was a blistering pace in nearly 80 miles per hour. 10 foot banked corners. dust, the dust on the track was

more a hail of pebbles which started to build up. it battered faces and goggles. the wind started picking up. the motion cool bear sweat sodden gear. they didn't have any outfits that were cool. it was hot. these vibrations were so bad, i was reading over and over again, it would raise blisters on their palms and black and blue on their back from getting bumped around. these big heavy cars, big heavy tires, they started to tear up the track. pieces of it started flying. rat screw on the corners. it was almost like skiing. grew on the corners. they would take corners and piles of dirt which was accumulating. it got really bad.

the drivers called this, when pieces of the track deteriorated, they called it gumbo. some got as big as baseballs. kicked up by the tires. if you can imagine this oil held together by gravel and dirt, pretty lethal stuff. eddie, who found himself right under fire, said it would hit us like a stream of water, but it was gumbo. he bloodied his elbow. a piece of gumbo shattered the theles of another guy, but guy kept driving with blood running down his cheek. another guy waited for it to cool down and jumped in and got back into the race. as the race wore on, the strain began to tell on drivers and machines and all precautions for safety were forgotten by the men

crouched behind the steering wheels of their cars urging them to limit of their capacity. the ruts finally broke. a very famous guy. the steering mechanism, so he, too is out. nothing mattered for him other than the yellow mercer. each corner became a painful repetition of the last. he faced the same difficult choice. take a curve too fast and you are likely to crash or take it too slow and lose. he says now he can make his move suddenly his oil pressure started plummeting. he elbowed his partner, he could not take his eyes off the track, what was he doing? the pressure continued to drop. eddie wrested his eyes away from

the steering wheel looks over, a , piece of gumbo hit his partner right in the head and knocked him out cold. the blood was going down his face. he was trying to decide whether to pull over. we have been in this too long. so he reaches over and starts pumping while he is driving like this even though his arms were like jelly. his elbow is pounding. his is still bloody. it was superhuman strength. he gets low so he can avoid this gumbo that is shooting right off the tires. after nearly 15 minutes, o'donnell, his mechanic, wakes up and grabs on and they are off to the races again. at mile 260, he overtakes wishhart. after three hours and 49 minutes, eddie goes past the checkered flag nearly two minutes ahead of spencer.

speed demons annihilate space, announced the los angeles times. eddie and his mechanic could hardly stand after climbing out of that car. by 1916, he was the number three driver in america and making good money. by world war i which broke out in 1914 in europe, it had become increasingly harder for the united states to ignore. france was on the ropes. germany looked like it was on the verge of rolling into paris. things were dire. both england and france begged america to come in and save the day. when it became apparent that the u.s. would go to war, eddie got an idea. he would put together a volunteer squadron of racecar drivers to fly planes, these early biplanes for america. who could handle danger and engines the way his fellow racers did? he recruited stars on the circuit.

he went to washington to propose this idea. they asked him where was his college degree. he said, i have an engineering correspondence course. that did not fly too well. in seventh-grade when his father died to earn a living. people who were getting into the flying program had college degrees, but also ivy league degrees. the military brass took one look at this man -- rough around the edges, his grammar was anything but perfect. they laughed right in his face. when he pointed out his unmatched mechanical engineering experience, they countered that a flyer who knew too much about technology would not risk his life by getting airborne.

and that is the whole point, said eddie. but he had come up as he did many times in his life against class hostility. eddie was a survivor. he didn't grow angry. he just offered courteous thanks, silently took his leave, vowing to find another way. when he would meet those men a couple of years later, they would not have laughed in his face. they would call him sir. it would be a whole different ballgame. eddie got an invite to join an pershing's american expeditionary force which was heading over to france to begin to organize. he was called as a driver and chauffeur. he had no intention of staying a driver. he set his sights on flying. that was where was. one on excursion, he was driving billy mitchell. billy was going around northeastern france to look for

a place where we can have our airbase and the training facilities. billy mitchell likes to go fast and they were going around when the engine started banging and started like a hammer. -- and sounded like a trip hammer, said eddie. it turned out to be a burned-out connecting rod bearing. they continued and they couldn't go anywhere. they turned into this little town, little french town. eddie dropped mitchell off by the hotel and found a tiny garage whose mechanic had no idea what he was talking about when he was talking about a bearing. it was not going to be had. eddie found some metal, soft alloy. he melted it with a blowtorch. then he poured it into a mold he had improvised with astounding exactness.

it is amazing. out of sand and water. he made the bearing any scrape -- and he scraped that thing down, put it back in and it worked like a charm. a couple of those things, billy mitchell was really impressed with this incredibly innovative, take charge kind of guy eddie rickenbacker. finally, with a little pressure and conniving, he was appointed chief engineer that the field -- of the field that mitchell identified which was going to be america's biggest airfield in france. eddie through in the quid pro quo. he said he wants to be the chief engineer but he wanted to learn how to fly. he rubbed noses with a lot of the ivy league young flyers who came over. he got a lot of -- they got a lot of stateside practice, and then they came over here. he had been clearing rocks out of the airfield next the german prisoners.

they didn't like that. eddie, this tough guy. but eddie would sneak out. he would listen to a little bit of the lectures the other fly boys were getting. you listen to that. and then he would get a plane out and he would take it up by low -- solo. there were no manuals. there was nothing about what the tolerance of the airplanes were. he would practice on his own. i guess he didn't think twice about it in terms of how dangerous it was to really learn on the fly and by the seat of his pants. those clichés come to mind. these airplanes, they are pretty much really box kites with an engine on it still.

the early they were called ones, chicken coops because there were so many wires you could put a chicken in and a chicken could not find its way out. it was canvas over a wood frame. then doped with a kind of shellacking to stiffen it up. they were flying fires. i got a lovely letter from teddy roosevelt's youngest son. a young kid in his early 20's. tragically, he would die later. everybody loved him. he wrote about how he hit taken a plane up to practice and how mud had kicked up. busted his propeller. he just got off the ground, right? it pierced his petrol, started to catch fire. and took him 30 seconds to go down. he just went up like this, went

down like this. he jumped out of the airplane and his pants and sheepskin lined boots were already on fire. boom. that wasn't at altitude. going up on one of these planes delivered a disorienting cocktail of dizziness, vertigo, nausea pounding noise, extreme , cold, and always fear. they were open cockpits. there were no radios. it was difficult to take maps up so you had to memorize things. people were constantly getting lost. they didn't have gauges on their fuel so they had to estimate their fuel consumption. today the federal aviation administration today wisely prohibits flying without supplemental oxygen over 10,000 feet. these guys -- the air would get pretty thin. you get hypoxia. tunnel vision. your judgment gets impaired. these guys were -- altitude is what gave you an advantage.

so, they would be at 17,000, 19,000, 22,000 feet. judgment started to suffer a little bit up there. it was also cold. cold. it dropped below zero very quickly. they wore these fur-lined teddy bear suits. pilots would talk about having to peel their fingers individually off their joysticks because it was so cold against it. the early engines were rotary engines. they spun and were lubricated by castor oil. i don't know if you know what castor oil does to your insides but it was a lubricant for these rotary motors. they exuded about a gallon of the stuff an hour back into the face of the pilots. it really does bad things.

you get nauseous. bad things happen. it wasn't only for their fashion statement that they wore silk scarves. it was to wipe off the oil from their goggles among other things. to make matters worse, the pilots knew that they might have to make a very terrible decision. this is the first time in warfare anybody had to think about this in a matter of seconds. the prospect of catching fire terrified everybody. i found all kinds of mentions in their writings and letters. they didn't carry parachutes. why, you ask? because parachutes -- serviceable or shoes that were working. well headquarters had decided , that, not a very smart

decision in retrospect, that you didn't want to give a pilot a parachute because in the first sign of trouble, what would they do? they would jump out of the airplane. [laughter] basically, they were defeatists. you should've heard eddie rickenbacker, who saw a couple of his friends died who should've had parachutes. it would make him froth at the mouth. without parachutes, they are up. engine, theytheir catch fire three miles above the earth. the plane, if they caught fire from somebody shooting at you, from a malfunction, would burn up in a matter of minutes right there and you are miles above the earth. so these kids, they were young , men, had this decision. what would they do? some said i would try to ride it down. if i can angle the airplane, maybe i can put the airplane out.

that was risking a terrible bout of burning. some people decided they would jump. that was the last initiative they would take. they would jump. other people brought up their service revolvers. all too often that happened and not a very glorious part of the war at all. the early planes -- we entered the war fairly late and had all these great ideas that we would make a lot of airplanes really soon because we were this powerhouse and that didn't really happen. it was harder to do. designs were changing so quickly. the french and the british were designing things so quickly. there were no blueprints. we never made airplanes in the last year of the war that we were involved. the upshot is we just never made airplanes in the last year of the war in which we were involved. we bought them from the french and the french gave us some that were serviceable, but were not the best. they wanted to give the best for themselves.

flewarly newport that we had a pretty bad design flaw that didn't typically show itself until you were in the middle of a dogfight. a dogfight was a newly minted term for how ferocious it was when biplanes got in the air and all hell broke loose. in may 1918, eddie rickenbacker found himself in enemy occupied territory in france near the medieval city. he had -- altitude was everything he wanted. the engines were not very powerful. he wanted to get up as high as you could. he spotted three german altra far below him. the pilots had clearly not seen him. kind of know if he was dopey from oxygen starvation up there, but he went for it. he threw himself down. they call it a zoom a screaming

, dive. right on the tail of one of the adversaries. he squeezed the trigger of his machine gun and could see the guy slump over and the guy went into a tailspin and died. the exhilaration only lasted a second because the other two enemy airplanes were swooping on him. they had the height advantage. in trouble, eddie, the dogfight was breaking out, he jerked back onto his joystick and went like this to try to get up and throw them off his tail. with a loud crack, the fabric on the top of his right hand, the top wing fell off. this turns out they found -- this was a design flaw on how they attached this to the fabric of the plane. it was flapping like a wing. it took him into a spin.

it you guys have ever been in a spin, it is one of the most terrifying things you can ever imagine. you are upside down, plummeting down, you are revolving like this and you were spinning inside all of the same time. eddie found himself -- one wing had lift and the other didn't. it is hard to even describe. his engine cut out. most people at that moment would have kind of given up. it is so disorienting. but eddie, something settled into him. what was it about this guy? he kicked into action. he wrenched the stick from side to side, you try to kind of get out of it. you have to remember nobody had

really done the physics of a spin. nobody had written about it. it was a very scary thing. today, the faa used to say 20 or 30 years ago, you had to practice spins, but so many people were dying. this is modern-day. from a thing that they knew how to get out of, what you had to do, so many people were dying, that they said no. , somebody people, you don't have to know how to that get out of a spin. here is eddie. he was -- he wrote later that his whole life went through his mind. he saw german soldiers on the ground. imagine in slow motion how he would pick over his body. he envisioned his mother opening

the door to their little house in columbus to receive the cable gram announcing his death. something kicked in. he only had a few seconds left. there were no emergency procedures. none had yet been devised. addie, -- forfor eddie, there only remained a crippling reality of a wobbling, disorienting spin into the earth. he then threw all his weight to the left-hand side over to the cockpit and jammed with the controls and jammmed the engine wide-open. an explosion lifted it with blue flame. the whole thing vibrated violently. it went off on one wing heading towards france. he probably did not want to turn on the engine because it would spin you more quickly to your death. it was just enough lift to free him from the spin. he had really just -- he just limped home. just finessing and -- he got

home. he landed and he went up immediately and threw up. there is this picture of him. the only time i have really seen him shaken. right after that. you can see his face and it is something. it is in my book. the following day, he got aboard a different newport, and did it all over again. not the wing flapping thing, you knew that -- he knew to be careful. it would go on to shoot down more enemy aircraft than any other pilot. in september 1918, right towards the end of the war, he was appointed to the head of the 94th squadron. whicht in ring squadron, would become famous. he beat out many others who had college degrees, who served longer than he did. everybody seemed to know he was the guy we wanted.

the germans were massing their final all out effort against the allies. it was all or nothing now. the role of the airplane along the static line between had become very important. particularly, to mask -- each side set up these great hydrogen balloons behind the line and these were where these observers got up. they had parachutes. they could look and they radioed or dropped messages down indicating troop movement. if you could paralyze the enemy's -- and the germans were called drop is -- drachens, then you could then move with impunity around the battlefield on the ground. this is what happened finally in the campaign which is what the culminating campaign of world

war i. eddie turned that squadron around. most of his friends had died. the morale was terrible. he trained it in a manner of six weeks to become the most effective american fighter squadron of the war and they flew more sorties than anyone else. they made more kills. he built morale. he changed tactics and he worked with the pilots really on establishing the real early risk tenants as it related. it is incredible. i don't have too much time to get into detail about that, but it was very dangerous to shoot down these balloons that looked pretty easy to shoot down. they were only at 2000 feet, and all the antiaircraft guns had dialed into that range so when they came in, it was a very dangerous thing. very effective

squadron formations, eddie , so theyd it contributed i submit fairly , significantly to the end of the war. these were up against the red barons at that point. all the people he trained. the flying circus, the blood red, the green and yellow biplanes of the german air force who were quite formidable. so, eddie returns from the war a bona fide hero. he would go on. he did not want to raise any more. he went and designed a car. it was the rickenbacker. very unusual for the time -- it had brakes on all four tires. that allowed it to do amazing things. he bought the indianapolis speedway. he helped get it through the depression. he would go on to build eastern air lines into a powerhouse in the 1930's and 1940's and 1950's and finally run it.

i want to tell you one last story. i think this is one of the greatest adventure stories in american history. we flash forward from this world war i hero. he is the head of eastern air lines. it is world war ii in his early 50's. is traveling. they want to make him a general and they give them that. he says, no, i want to travel around. i will take a dollar year. -- a year. he does war bond efforts. he goes around the world. he gets people focused on fast he gets people focused on winning this war and goes out there as a hero. the president, fdr at that point, had a problem -- general douglas macarthur. douglas macarthur had some ideas about -- he didn't like fdr that much and had some problems with authority.

quite a general of course. caused some problems. so, they decided they needed to send somebody down to talk to macarthur and tell him to cool it. he was in pop-up -- papa new guinea. the only person they could think of who could stand up to macarthur was a fellow medal of honor winner, eddie rickenbacker. he got some oral instructions. nothing was written down. he flew on a b-17 from pearl harbor down to new guinea. he was with seven other guys in uniform who were going to take him down. for a variety of reasons they , missed their refueling stop which was canton island, at very small point of land. they put down in the middle of the central pacific, not too far from where amelia earhart was lost. the only food they had was the

pilot was savvy enough to put four oranges in his flight suit. they landed and these eight guys ended up on three rafts. no food, no water. they had not been able to figure out the radio to tell anybody where they are. they were 2000 miles in any direction from land. no food, no water. most of the guys had taken off their pants and shoes and socks because they thought they might be swimming. that turned out to be a bad idea. when sun came out, they got sunburn. their skin broke out into open sores. the salt water came over on them. they got saltwater on their back sides. it was pretty awful stuff. huge sharks were always swimming around. the sharks like to rub their

backs underneath the very thin opening. the largest one was the size of a bathtub. these guys were jammed together. the sharks would slap their tails. they saw fish, but they could not catch them. they toyed openly with doing things like cutting off the pinky or an earlobe for fishing. they didn't really quite know what to do. on the eighth day, a miracle happened. eddie was wearing a gray fedora. they called it a tern. a bird landed on his head and he knew something had landed on his head. they are pretty out of it at this point. all the eyes of the boat were looking at him.

he reached up and grabbed that bird and they ate it. it was like eating iron strings raw. the key thing that saved them them was the intestines. they caught a mackerel and a sea bass. that kept them going. then they got some rain squalls. they spit water that they collected in their buckets into their may wests. they used to their may west's, which were there flotation devices. they got knocked over from waves and nearly drowned. two weeks in, it is still bad and getting worse. one of the men cannot take it anymore and slides into the water. his arm likebs this. he gets another guy to pull him back into the boat.

the next morning, a guy says, eddie, shake my hand -- they cannot talk too well. he says, i'm sorry, i'm sorry, man. eddie says, i am not shaking your hand, you coward. he starts wearing this loose streak. he castigates the guy for being a coward because he had threatened their survival by jumping over the side. from that moment on, he took control. there were senior officers, all sorts of people. the pilot was a very capable guy. eddie jumped down the throat of anybody who started talking about committing suicide. they were praying for death coming quickly. they were in such pain. eddie jumped down their throats. pretty soon all of these guys were plotting on how to throw him over the side. [laughter]

you know what? they were not thinking about death anymore. eddie had come up with an unorthodox thing. years later, everybody survived except for one guy who drank too much salt water and his kidneys failed. they still didn't really like him that much, but they all said that without that they would not have survived. it is kind of a love story, too. his wife, two weeks after they have been lost or two weeks, she gets the notification from the secretary of the navy that they are going to call off the search. they don't say that exactly, but that is the thinking. it is in the middle of the war in 1943. the pacific ocean is a very big thing. she goes down to washington and reads the riot act to be secretary of the navy. he extends the search to one more week. on the last day of that last

week, amphibious planes find eddie rickenbacker and his crew. they were a little far apart but they found them and they brought them in. he had started outweighing 180 pounds and he had dropped down to 120 pounds. this experience -- eddie rickenbacker on top of doing so much -- he landed on life magazine. for three issues. newspapers were full of this. people were sermonizing about this miracle, this bird that landed on his head. it was incredible stuff. eddie had never given up. right then, when america was in a moment when we were looking at going from island to island in the south pacific, literally digging out every japanese soldier who was going to fight to his life, eddie showed

america with his courage what we were all about. that you don't give up. that is why i named this book "enduring courage." he had it. lincoln had it. the wage george washington had itlincoln had it. , grant had it. the kind that built this country. they would not stay down when they were beaten. they found unorthodox solutions to challenges. it is what lifetime courage is all about. i hope you guys have a chance to read it. i have given you a little bit of a taste of it, but what a character. thank you for having me tonight. [applause] do we have time for questions? anybody game? please come up to this microphone here. is that ok? yeah. >> in addition to his courage,

was there something about his ethnic origin and socioeconomic origin that added to his popularity? >> yeah. matter of fact at the beginning, , it did not add to his popularity because it was a germanic name. i did not get into this, but in the book, it is very interesting. there were some very bad german saboteurs. there was a big thing we do not but it isabout today, called black explosion in new york city harbor that blew up 2 million pounds of gunpowder. tnt. german saboteurs. it was very bad. rickenbacker sounded pretty german. he took a boat over to england and two scotland yard guys were with him.

he didn't know it. when they got him over there, they took him to a room, they tackled him, they stripped off his clothes, put lemon juice on him to see if he had hidden messages on him. pried off his heels to see if there were any messages. this was a time when we were so paranoid. for some good reason. i found records that people haven't really come up with about how well into the war, right up until when he was an ace, there were americans spying on him trying to see if he was really -- so, this was another thing he had to overcome which was a terrible thing. he had to show his patriotism. but the kind of nationalism that he as an immigrant felt in the 1890's, this was a time when the pledge of allegiance came out, memorial day -- not memorial day, but the pledge of allegiance became something that was done in schools. eddie took his patriotism very seriously.

and people did. yeah. yes, sir. >> thank you. i heard your program a few weeks ago so that is how i heard about this event tonight. the one question that comes to mind -- and i like history, too -- is in the 1920's, the most famous pilot was charles lindbergh. but to me, the feats that this guy did, why is his name not mentioned either above or in the same sentence as charles lindbergh, considering that he was a hero in a world war. -- war? >> that is a good question. it is an interesting time. when lindbergh did it, the -- there was a whole different culture of personality and talkies, the movies and everything. he did one incredible event. he was a very talented guy.

let's make no mistake about that. a very talented guy. he had that quiet handsomeness. this wasn't a clot -- like eddie rickenbacker clawed up from abject poverty. lindbergh went to college and his mother went with him. this is a very different social scene. i think part of that had to do with it. partly because america was ready for that kind of hero. in a way they were ready for the hero that eddie was in world war i. i don't have all the answers for that because the more i look into this guy, the more i am astounded by it. astounded by it. that is why i wanted to bring him back up and say, take a look at the sky. >> i have two questions.

did he have any relationship with billy mitchell after world war i and was are any effort to draw him into politics? >>] he came back, people were talking about him running for president. then he got up in front of a microphone. that about five minutes, wasn't going to happen. he also really wasn't that interested. he did not have the elephant. did not have the eloquence, seventh-grade education. was, yes, hestion did. they remained friends and he was an outspoken billy mitchell as some of you might know, got a court-martial, kind of summarily taken out for his outspokenness. andy went to that formerly quite hard. but did not turn the tides.

they could remain friends. remember, one of them come i think eddie might have been at his funeral. well, thank you very much for this opportunity to talk to you all. i really enjoyed it. >> you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend. to join the conversation, like us on facebook. >>te