scene of khristine eroshevich's birthday party last spring. he seemed to have the world the communists fear at his feet and his power over 220 million soviet citizens seemed impregnable. now for better or worse the khrushchev era has come to a close. >> c-span's 2015 student cam competition is under way. this nationwide competition for middle and high school students will award 150 prizes totaling $100,000. create a five-to- seven-minute documentary on the topic "the three branches and you. videos need to include c-span programming, show varying points of view, and must be submitted by january 20, 2015. go to student cam.org for more information. grab a camera and get started today. >> american history tv traveled to the library of congress's

kluge center in washington, d.c. which was established in the year 2000 and endowed by john w. kluge. the center welcomes over 100 scholars every year to pursue research interests at one of the world's largest libraries. up next we speak with one of their 2014 fellows. >> joining us on american history tv is kevin kim, a senior lecturer in history at vanderbilt university. what can you tell us about the book you're writing? >> it is mainly a political history of the cold war from the perspective of hemy wallace and herbert hoover. the full working title now is "worlds unseen, henry wallace, herbert hoover, and the rise of cold war america." it really uses these two figures as vehicles for exploring what the cold war, how it felt, how it was experienced, how it was thought about as a very contested, vibrant, phenomenon. and it starts, you know,

focuses on these two figures with their biographies, what made them tick, their upbringing, their early political careers, but the heart really focuses on their experiences first in world war ii because it is a pivotal event as i hope to explain in the book for how both men saw the cold war coming. and the cold war from its inception up to vietnam which is when both men are in their later years and sadly pass away. >> what does "worlds unseen" mean in the context of the cold war? >> it has a couple different meanings. i think the broadest meaning is that both men did stand for things for worlds that literally didn't come to pass, so that aspect is very much true. they both envisioned and fought for, to their last dying breaths, like many of us do,

for visions they hoped would come to pass when it came to america's role in the world and what the world was like. in that sense, that is sort of the biggest sense. but there are other means for it. one i think is that people even today are not fully aware of the extent to which these men fought for these visions. i think they are of course very well covered in the literature. there's a lot of influential interpretations which we'll get into later. but really the full extent of activities, how long and how oad it is extended spatially and politically isn't fully known. as they always say if you only knew more about what i'm studying. even at the time i think it wasn't fully known because as with u.s. governments, foreign governments, what people did especially with foreign policy was something they did privately. a lot of it was controversial.

a lot of it involved interaction with other people both in the u.s. and outside the u.s. that couldn't see the light of day at the time though you always saw glimpses. so my product tries to marry what happened behind the scenes with what we know more visibly they tried to do. >> tell us about herbert hoover and henry wallace. who are they? why did you choose them? >> so i don't know if i chose them or if they chose me. the project started really out of the same concerns i had about the cold war, both intellectually and personally. i started graduate school in 2004 and the cold war was a very important topic but i was drawn to it because it was such a huge event. it lasted so long with so much consequences for many nations, not just the united states, and as the more and more i studied it the more i felt it was something that was not just as was often talked about an inevitable, huge phenomena that had to happen but something that people thought about and

tried to influence from a variety of positions not just henry wallace and herbert hoover. the project started by looking at a whole cast of characters from left to right if you can say it that way. it is a bit simplistic but i think useful. as i was doing the research, the story and the activities did stand out as the most original, neglected, not surprisingly, because they were probably the left most and right most of the centers that i was looking at. and so they kind of spoke to me and told me, hey. you know, there's enough here for you to talk about when it comes to my story. but it very much put them in context of the entire conversation. >> well, now herbert hoover of course we know from his presidency and he is much associated with the great depression but how does he connect with the story of the cold war? >> a great question. he very much was as many people i think will remember, disgraced in the great depression. a lot of historians are appreciating more and still

realize he was given a raw deal with how he handled the depression, the political fallout. his connection to the cold war really emerged because by the time he was president and even afterwards he was very much a self-made, very wealthy man. and he had a lot of means. i don't mean to say he was a businessman so was interested in the cold war for those reasons but he cared a lot about public affairs and remained active as a behind-the-scenes figure in the republican party. but what really thrust him into the lime light, again, after many years of trying to emerge more on his own was when harry truman became president as a result of f.d.r.'s death in april, and truman being the very generous person he really was, reached out to hoover for advice about how to handle the tremendous responsibilities suddenly on truman's shoulders. asked him for advice not just about food aid which was of

course hoover's famous claim to fame that he had saved europe from starvation after world war i. you know, there is a lot of credit there. and that really is what put him again into the cold war lime light. henry wallace, of course, many might remember was vice president under f.d.r. in late world war ii, had he been vice president instead of truman, things might have been very different. instead, he was the vice president and became secretary of commerce later. and he really was famous for being the most prominent u.s. politician in those early years of the cold war, for standing up against what he saw and many saw as a wrong headed, overly confrontational policy with the soviet union. >> so has your research complicated your understanding of the views of those two men and how they relate to one another? >> absolutely. and not just those two men but many others. i would say, you know, it made

me realize, first, that their ideas were very much as we saw them, you know, for henry wallace, he was a man who was legatee mself as the of f.d.r. and the new deal and the desire to extend those kinds of very democratic policies to the world. i think that is what people recognized at the time. that's what scared a lot of people and made a lot of people including hoover very skeptical as they were of the larger new deal and f.d.r. but i think by doing the research, you get to see these -- both figures as beyond the logans and actually when you see them behind the scenes marrying those slogans with concrete intervention that they so you come te and out with a much more nuanced appreciation for these two figures, both their contradictions, their flaws and limits, but also their real

sincerity and their power and their desire to make things different. >> how long have you been at the kluge center? >> all too short. my time is coming to an end. unfortunately, though, i feel it's never quite over. i've been here since july so i've been researching for about a month and a half or two months. actually a little longer than that. but i've been to the library of congress before, so the kluge center work stems from my recognition pretty early on that many of the most -- many important papers are here for me to look at. so i'm still digging through them and i'm actually going back in a little bit to look some more. >> can you tell us a little bit about the collections you've been looking through? and how that differs from the ability to research in other archives? >> the library of congress is a really exceptional collection. many people who could have placed their papers in different places i think chose

to put their papers here because, you know, they had papers of national and international significance and so, you know, i've looked at about over a dozen papers of prominent people which doesn't sound like a lot but each person left hundreds, you know, sometimes a thousand boxes. and so i've learned over time how to navigate them. but some of the papers more recently i've been looking at this summer which i found very interesting are the papers of harley davidson ickes, who was secretary -- of herald ickes who was secretary under roosevelt. it is part of my quest to put hoover and wallace in more context. many people were with them and had a similar trajectory across the new deal, world war ii, and the cold war. the simple question i have is, well, what did they feel about wallace? you know, the literature has a lot of liberals very sympathetic following wallace, others are not, very critical, thought he was too pro communist. how did those who were closest

to him such as ickes really negotiate that? and i had some revealing, interesting insights on ickes. it is hard to place it all out but seeing the way that they reacted to the same events has helped. on hoover's side, most recently i've been looking at the papers after gentleman named john cowan laughlin who was the editor of "army & navy journal" in d.c. i first knew of him because of the work of a historian who has done a lot of work in this area. i've also seen his papers at the hoover institute in california. he was a crucial figure for giving hoover a lot of information, inside information into the military thinking of washington during world war ii and the early cold war. all i had were these letters and full of this information and amazing, you know, intel. i thought this man was -- i wasn't sure how influential or -- he seemed like maybe just one of these very obsessed editors. but by coming here and digging more into his papers, seeing he

was assistant secretary of state under theodore roosevelt, he had a very close counsel with george marshall, and many other important figures, i got to see how -- he was a very active hoover supporter for many years. i got to see a deeper connection there. >> so did you arrive with a set of questions you wanted to answer? >> yes. i did. i mean, like always you have a set of questions but you try to keep yourself open to what the evidence shows you. but i think, you know, the broad arguments relate to hoover and wallace. but very much what people want to know more about is how representative were they? how typical, how influential? and so those are the main questions i wanted to answer. and i'm getting that as well as what do the papers other people really reveal in terms of how other people saw them and how they did things in relation to them? so laughlin, for example, was relaying a lot of his conversations with u.s. military officials with hoover,

which you don't get by just looking at letters. in the case of ickes, he had a pretty -- a more contentious relationship. that shouldn't be too surprising because he was known to be a very outspoken person. but he had a certain fallout with wallace even before the progressive party run where he tried to run for president against the cold war. but all of those things have helped me sort of situate how to think about, critically about wallace and hoover. >> has any of the evidence led you in any unexpected directions? >> a lot of little moments and some big moments. one of the big moments being looking through the papers of clair booth luce who was the spouse of henry luce who was the owner and publisher of "time life." she was also, you know, a very influential play wright and writer for "vanity fair" a columnist in the 1930's i believe and became politicized. she is kind of known as a very

liberal republican trying to reform the republican party from its isolationist sort of old conservative, you know, hooverville depression image and politics toward something more progressive. indeed, she and henry turn out to be much closer to herbert hoover than i expected. and, you know, of course they are very apart on a lot of issues. but over the course of my study and in the papers you see i have a closer grasp of why she winds up like hoover supporting barry goldwater as a presidential candidate in the 1960's as this hope for american foreign policy being more assertive, being more independent and powerful than it was as they perceived under a slew of democrats. >> how influential were wallace and hoover in the debates during this cold war period that you're looking at? >> so i think it depends on the

you're talking about. their influence was never quite as large as they hoped. let's be honest. if you take the entirety of the world they were trying to create, they both failed. i think if you look at different phases of the cold war, the influence is very interesting and i think it is still something that needs to be studied more. mao u consider things like before he became leader of the chinese state being very encouraged and positive by wallace's ideas about china and activities on behalf of china, and telling, to the extent of telling u.s. representatives, we think his ideas are great and we should engage those and dialogue that goes along those lines. when you consider that someone like mao was noticing and saying that in 1945 and 1946, and that wallace's contacts with communist china were still quite strong to the late 1940's

where people he knows from the progressive party are still being introduced via wallace to different businessmen in shanghai and other places, and then the herbert hoover side when you realize he is still around and barry goldwater is incredibly close to him until hoover's death which is actually dramatically in early october of 1964, a month before barry goldwater, you know, goes up for election, to the extent that barry and herbert are very close, in close communication ver hoover's last death bed, there's a lot there. and so -- but i think the important story is not to try to raise up these two figures as heroes or like icons that had they just been listened to there would have been no cold war whatsoever. that is something i'm really resisting. i have no intention of going down. i think what's more interesting is seeing the different phases and kinds of influence they exerted over a perof