gives a speech on the economics in his country. and then the trade toward nativism and politics. announcer: this week on "q&a" author and hoover institution niall ferguson. he discusses his book "the square and the tower: networks in power from the free masons to facebook." >> niall ferguson, in your new book you open up with this sentence, the suspicion grows that the world is controlled by powerful and exclusive networks, the bankers, the establishment, the system, the jews, the free -- ns, the ill loom

illuminati. and nearly all that is written in this vein is rubbish. niall: some of it is in the book shops, more of it is online. you'll find it if you type in he illumi incomes a -- illuminati. if you type that, you'll see that a conspiracy theory suggests that they droll world. there are all kinds of variations on this theme. i've been writing about this much of my career. i wrote a book about the roth child banks, there are conspiracy theories about the

roth childs that matchup with the illuminat icon spirsi theory. t is very popular to which a great very many americans subscribe to one form or another. it's a kind of genre that looks like history and usually involves some historic narrative. but it's nearly always detached from any scholarship. this makes it difficult for the historian to write about these subjects. o wants to right about the illuminatey? who wants to talk about the free masons and the american revolution. if you write about that wouldn't you find yourself on the same shelf in the book shop as the

crazy books? so i've notice over my career that these actually quite interesting and important subjects have been abandoned by historians and left by the cranks and the conspiracy theorists. there are stories to be told about all of them about the illuminati, about the rothchilds. there is some history but it's very different from the conspiracy theories and part of the point is that we should be able to talk about these subjects without being classified with the cranks and the conspiracy theorists. >> let's catch up about you. you are well known in some circles in this country for things like, the assent of money, pbs series documentary series. when was that? >> 10 years ago, i published a book and produced "the assent of

money" the financial history of the world. it was designed to give people the historical context for what i saw coming. in 2007 i was writing quite a lot about the financial crisis. what struck me is that the people who were running the investment banks knew no financial history beyond their own careers. they weren't prepared for the crisis from 1929 which is what lehman from the brothers. historians can help with us the present and even the future that we contemplate. what i tried to say is, look here, wall street the chances are high that a major financial crisis will happen. that's what history leads us to expect. what can we learn about the financial system from history. i don't really understand anything until i know history. i wanted to understand where do

banks come from. what's the bond market. -- market? what's the stock market? so i wrote a book that essentially gave the reader a sense of where the financial system came from and why it was very likely to suffer a major crisis. the crisis happened just after the book came out. i think lehman went bust just a few weeks after the publication of the book which was interesting. i meant that i had something to say about what was happening in the -- in realtime as financial history was being made. 10 years later this book was trying to do something similar for silicon valley. i'm saying to silicon valley, history applies to you. history didn't begin with the google i.p.o. or the founding of facebook. history goes a long way back. and it's relevant to you. but i'm also saying to readers interested in history, you know, network finds is pretty important and historians need to understand it if you don't really under how networks work,

you will not only fail how to understand the present but you'll have some trouble understanding the past. it's a bit like "the assent of money goes to silicon valley." that's a rough characterization of this group. >> where did you grow up? -- l: in glasgow in scott scotland. i come from scotland which is one of those countries with a superiority complex rather than inferiority complex. but the scotts have long thought that they invented the modern world that they run the united kingdom and that wherever they go, they will find traces of their forefathers endeavors including the united states with its many traces of scottish influence. that's where i grew up and i was encouraged to think that scotland had a special mission to transform the world.

>> what were your parents doing? niall: my father was a doctor. my mother is a physicists who taught physics. so come from a relatively scientific family. my sister is a professor of physics at yale. i was the black sheep of the family in that i drifted into what some people think of as a social science and others think of one of the humanities history. i studied the strange particles called human beings and the way in which they behave. but i think my family gave me a couple of advantages at least two. one was that the tendency to think about the world can with he framework of the scottish enlightenment. through my grandfather i was the heir of the great thinkers of

18th century scotland. and i think the other advantage that they gave me was to think of history as a branch of literature. so there were history books in the house, but side by side with the great works of fiction. and so i was introduced as an early stage to the idea that above all history must be literature. it must be readable. a.g.p. taylor occupied some pace on my parent's book shelf and that inspired me to find history attractive as an intellectual endeavor but also as a literary endeavor. >> your college education, how extensive was it and where was it? niall: well, extensive was a funny word to use. because an oxford education is intensive. one reads history. i spent three years as an undergarage walt reading history

undergraduate reading history. to me oxford was a nirvana, a kind of promised land to not only in the stunning architecture but also brilliant minds. i couldn't believe that it was possible to be employed to is it divide k line study and one's time between reading books, writing books, and talking about books with -- with students. these oxford dons, we would call them professors in the united states, seems to me the luckiest human beings alive. and all i wanted to do once i saw their lifestyle was to have it myself, to have a lifetime spent in this realm of books. it was very inspiring to be at oxford in the early 1980's for another reason.

but i became one of this group. we were a feisty minority that enjoyed making the case for the thatcher government. so i had a certain political ucation at oxford as well as an american education. everything hinges on finals. i didn't go see many lectures. in fact, i went to hard any lectures. i did learn to play the double bass. i found that i couldn't act. i tried pretty much everything except sport and found that i wasn't really good of any of the things other than writing history essays. so in the final phase and in the final year, i reverted back to

being a historian just in time. >> when you're talk about networks in your book, oxford is was a rk, modlin college network. throor 35 colleges or more at oxford. what does it mean for you that you were at modlin college as far as networking? niall: to go to oxford and to go o the most prestigious college modlin is to be admit into the british elite right there. the contemporarys that you meet will include future leaders who will include future editors. there's a sense in which britain has still been for centuries run by people who went to oxford and cambridge. you go to the oxford union which is the debating society. what you're really seeing is

students preparing for the house of commons. practicing, getting the hang of the dispatch box and some of my near contemporaries have gone on to great things. reather to my own incred duty, secretary. n is the it's something that he would have predicted. so i think oxford admits you to network that is sometimes called the establishment but still to a surprising extent runs britain. i didn't really appreciate that at the time, i think. only retrospectively appreciated the extent as to which that was admissioned into a very important network that extends into politics, that extends into the media and that extends into business. and from that point on wards in your life without even

necessarily being aware of this, when you meet somebody to a cocktail party in london, a transaction occurs which goes like this. oh, did you go to oxford? oh, which college? when were you there? do you know x? oh, i know why. now, people who haven't been admitted to that network can't play that game. it's the central activity of -- of social met works. exchanging information and building a connection that then has utility in the present because of course, if you and i went to modlin, we have a set of common experiences. and that builds a kind of trust. so the chances are that any future transaction that we embark on or project that we decide to do together will -- will be based on that underlying mutual understanding. that's how social networks

works. and oxford introduces me to that world. >> in your book, you talked about oxford and how it relates to cambridge. i want to get back to this in a second. i want you to tell us about the apostles. that after you graduated and dime this country, how many different places have you taught in the united states? >> i first taught at new york university for a couple of years. and then went to harvard. and i was a professor at harvard for 12 years. and only recently moved to stanford. so three i've given multiple guest lectures here, there, everywhere. but those three institutions is where i've spent time. >> so who are or were or can be an apostle? . >> cambridge has a remarkable institution that doesn't have anywhere. the cambridge apostles were -- are because it still exists a

ociety of extreme intellectual exclusivity. it dates back to the 19th century. it was an intellectual discussion society. members would meet. give papers, be brilliant. eat sardines on toast. that's about it. doesn't sound like much, does it? but it was really and remains one of the most prestigious societys that one could be elected to. and the process of the election was an arduous one. only rarely were elections made. so the apostles remained relatively few in number. it was probably the height of its intellectual influence in the 1910's and 1920's when john en nard's was a member along with his friend one of the great iconic classic writers about generation. and they looked a former great

height on everybody else. they regard themselves not without some cause as very clever, indeed. >> you're right. they were in a word insufferable. >> they were pretty insufferable. reading system of their corns in subject makes you realize that a very exclusive network, it was quite ma sodge nistic. the apostles of the 19th century tended gay. nothing wrong with that. accompanied y that that particular chapter in cambridge history doesn't look well today. but they were primarily an intellectual group. one interest consequence of their elitism and that's the only word for it was a disdain for all the conventional wisdom that britain had inherited from the victorians. so if you are a creme de la

creme intellectual you're far too clever to believe in free trade or the gold standard or anything that the victorians believed in. the interesting things about the apostles is by the 1920's they were questioning most of the conventional wisdom of the previous generation. but what then happen and this is really why i write about the apostles in the book was something surprising. they go hacks by the russians. sounds like a contemporary problem. nothing new -- the soviet intelligence community, the k.g.b. had a very ingenious strategy in the 1930's. and that strategy was to try to recruit agents from within the commanding heights of the englishment. and they hit on the idea defensive was the agent who did this of recruiting at cambridge

and tried to get members of the apostles. and three of the members were apostles. and this was probably the most successful intelligence operation in the 19th century, in the sense that by getting these recruits from the exclusive intellectual elite, they got access to key institutions in the british establishment including intelligent services and the foreign office. and they had really high caliber people on the payroll supplying intelligence are the british government to moscow in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's. and the quality and quantity of the intelligence were astonishing. so what does this illustrate? well, it illustrates one important feature of networks. they're not very good at

defending themselves. the apostles never considered the possibility that the k.g.b. would recruit members of the society to work the soviet intelligence but it happened. and it proved an enormous vulnerability for western intelligence in the early phase of the cold war as well as in world war ii. it took a great deal of effort them. al they made lots of mistakes that should have given them away. but because they were who they were because they had the seal of approval of not just cambridge university, not just trinity college but the apostles -- people found it impossible to believe that they would be spies. and that credibility that they had from their network -- and the protection that they enjoyed from other members of the network explained why they were able to operate for so long and took so long to be detected and

so long to be exposed. >> you also talk about the bloomsbury group. and i want to talk about this long couple of sentences because you talk about networking. you have to describe some of these people later. apostles, it was sexual relationships that define the network. grant slept not only with keynes, lytton strachey, adrian stephen and vanessa bell but also with david garnett, vanessa bell slept not only with grant but roger frye and sometimes even her own husband clive. cain sleft with grant. -- the russian bell rinna ballerina, lidia lopokova.

what in the world is that about? give us the background. >> they were very fenced in their sexuality. >> who were they? >> they were connected with the apolls. keynes were members of the group. and they were writers who once they had left cambridge and moved to london initially lived in housing in the bloomsbury district of london. it was a social group. its impact on bond, the history of english modernism was enormous. but i think what's fascinating about the group as a social network is their complex relationships. keynes had sex with men and women. you could probably do a network graph of hollywood in the recent

path that might look a little bit like this. but the reason for analyzing the network is it was so influential. and people still think of virginia wolf as one of the most important figures of british literature in the 20th century. she was very much part of bloomsbury. just as keynes was a tiring figure in economics. these people shaped modernism in british and their influence was certainly felt across the atlantic and the united states. i think what made them impactful was not just that they as individuals were very talented, though, they definitely were, it was the fact that the network bloomsbury network, projected the talent and promoted the talent through publishing, hrough the media, and with keynes ultimately in government. because he became a very

important civil servant in the first and second world wars. some net works matter because they can take an important individual and -- and force multiply as we might say today. their influence as individuals was significantly enhanced by their membership of the network. no man is an island. "the square and the tower" describe how important this is that even the most towering genius and this -- there's no question that keynes is a genius. some networks are more effective than others. bloombury connected to the great to victorian ideas important to the 20th century.

>> let me put a picture of the tower and the square. tell us why you named your book is at. and where they are on your screen. >> the tight of the book is an important thing because without the right title your book may fail. if i called the book networks and hierarchies, we probably wouldn't be sitting here because that's kind of a turn-off title. i was racking my brain about hierarchies and titles. and sendenly remember siena. so. of you viewers would have walked around in the piazza del campo and they would have stood in the ower of la mancha. sienese are, the

exchanged, trade and even engaged in horseraces. it is the realm of social met works. there's -- networks. nd the tower and the plaza publica that's where statues of governors existed. that's where power resides. heir -- tends to be hire arc cal structure. as you go down the chart, you'll find yourself and that's how most organizations and certainly most governments are constructed. they don't necessarily have somebody at the top. you can think of someone

horizontal at the top. square and the tower eside in the tower where hierachical towers are. >> where do you live now? >> i live now in northern california not far from the stanford campus. >> what do you do? >> i'm a fellow at the hoover institution which is part of stanford university. nd so i spend my days apart of the stanford campus, though i mostly engage in research now, i'm not teaching. >> i want to show you a video of an individual you know very well. and tell us how this person fits into your life. >> there is something within inherent in islam that inspires, incites, and mobilizes

millions of people to engage in -- president calls nonviolent -- no, he calls it violent extremism. >> that was 2015 during the obama administration. who is that? >> that is my wife who has spent most of the last, let's see, 17 years thinking, writing and talking about the problem of islamic extremism and the difficulty that we have and have had since 9/11 in dealing with networks of terrorism of violence but also networks. she used the phrase of "nonviolent extremism." the networks that preach radical

ideas without necessarily putting them into practice, extremists are a precursor to extremists. my wife works on this incredibly important subject, these terrorist networks kill a lot of people, tens of thousands around the world. and she's a very courageous woman. he's my heroine. i'm the luckiest man you ever interviewed because i'm married to her. >> how many children do you have in >> she and i have two children. i have three older children by my first marriage. i have a grand total of five. >> you say maybe by the time the book was published you would have another campbell in the family. >> do you have any campbell in the family? >> i believe that came true. our youngest son was born last october.

>> why a campbell? >> my father's name was campbell. my father died a couple of years ago when we heard the wonderful ws that she was pregnant, it seemed self-evident when we knew it was a boy. but of course, we could have called her a girl if she had been a girl because campbell seems to be one of these names that works well for both sexes. but for me it will always be a male name because that was dad's name. it suddenly seemed obvious that we would call our son campbell. >> how long have you been married to her? and what did network have to do with marrying her? >> that's a good question. we'll be celebrating our seventh anniversary this year. we met in new york city. and i remember it as long as i live in the depth of the finaltial crisis. i -- financial crisis. the network in question was a hing called the montpelier

economists who originated in the post war period and was founded by the economist is invited to give a speech about the financial crisis. -- i was invited to give a speech about the financial crisis. it was a question you would be worried about in early 2009 if you were an economist of that persuasion. i agreed. i was in another low point in my life, going to -- going through a divorce, what did i have to lose? luck, --, who had left the netherlands and been up theer of parliament after security situation had become intolerable for her, she was living in the united states,

came to that same it meeting as a fellow of the american enterprise institute and there we met. we were introduced by an australian friend. eace"u have read "war and p you would remember when pierce sees natasha and everything stopped. i had a moment that night. very important in the history of networks. their real were area supposedly to talk about the financial crisis. the only thought i had in my mind was how on earth i could get her phone number. brian: she gave it to you that night? niall: it may have taken a little longer. still a --e is issued against her. niall: yes, and the death threats continue to be made. brian: she has to be physically

protected by security? niall: yes. brian: she lives at with you in northern california? niall: one of the things they tell you about security is not to discuss your security. suffice it to say, because she is a former muslim who speaks , shegainst the extremists has faced recurrent death threats. the most spectacular was when theo van got was murdered in amsterdam when they were working on a film together. there was a note saying she would be. these threats of violence have been a recurrent feature of her life since then and therefore, we cannot drop our guard. we have to assume there is a of theser the murders people. we had to redouble our vigilance

because her name is on the same list of 11 people. inwas published by al qaeda 2013 under the heading of a bullet for a lot. this -- allah. this is no laughing matter for us. the threat is a real one and we have to take all the cautions we can to keep ourselves safe. is -- university still something you are associated with? niall: yes. i have gone to china a couple of times a year to go to one of the big two universities in beijing. for me, there are two huge questions that historians will have to grapple with one they write about our time. islamichem is that extremism and the violence associated with it or it how does this -- with it.

how does this lamp a job or not? when she has devoted so much of her life to the islam problem i see myself as able to contribute more to the question of china's rise. one can only really understand this by going there. i wish i were better educated. i do not speak the language. but i have spent the last 10 years trying to understand modern china better. since i am an economic historian and it is a fundamentally economic question, it preoccupies me a good deal. brian: are you involved with the shorts and column? niall: yes. brian: the reason i bring it up is because it seemed to me to be one of the great networks they put together. i'm going to read down the list. sarkozy, tony blair, kevin rudd from australia, henry kissinger, levin, condi rick

, yo-yo ma andhaas others. if i run outside and look in and a --- the alumina not illuminati. what does that mean? niall: it means schwarzman is the brains and the mind behind the rolodex. steve was able to bring this group together. as well as me to do the teaching. there are two points one can make. clearly there is an andmously important network you have just listed some of the key nodes in that network. you could find similar names and combinations of names if you want to the world economic

forum. or you just hung out in new york at the four seasons. real elite network and it is very important to recognize that it exists and is conspiracy up by theorists. point, this is an elite that seems in this case to be trying its best to do something i think is good, mainly to build a new kind of network that connects china to the west. the schwarzman scholarship program was a kind of version of whichads scholarship, used to bring people to study in oxford. schwarzman's vision was that we need to do something similar so there is no difference between

the leaders of china and the leaders of the western country. i think it is a terrific innovation. i see terrific students from all over the world getting to understand china better and studying alongside chinese students and what the equivalence of m.i.t. or harvard in china. brian: have you been to the meetings? niall: yes. brian: have you been a member of the trilateral commission? niall: no. brian: barney miller, the television show, this is a clip. this is just a television show. >> what is the trilateral commission? >> an organization founded in 1973 i david rockefeller to bring together business and political leaders of the united states, europe, japan so they can work together for better economic and political cooperation between the nations. >> that's what they would like

us to believe. what they are really up to is a scheme to plan their own loyal members in position of power in this country to work to erase national boundaries, to create an international community and in time, bring about a one world government with david rockefeller calling the shots. brian: what do you think? you have the conspiracy theory we were talking about earlier. they say they are meeting in order to improve the world and economic policy coordination but they are actually hatching a plan to raise -- erase national boundaries and establish or world government under david rockefeller. the notion that there is going to be a world government is a fantasy. i can't speak for the trilateral commission. i'm not involved with that. but i can assure you that although the meetings of the group are closed, nobody ever

mentions one government to me at these meetings. --the contrary, i'm always at the extent of at such gatherings, the reactions -- here is another fine mess the world is in, is there anything we can do about it? you don't have a strong sense of there being control. even the word power seems extremely -- seems strangely inappropriate. they are exchanging ideas. i'm sure there is an element of business involved, too. but we shouldn't exaggerate the power that even the most exclusive networks, what is striking to me when i interact with these groups is not their power, but often their sense of powerlessness. if you think about the events of 2016, just to take an example, not many members of the supposedly government planned

that britain would vote to leave the european union and that donald trump would become president of the united states. donald trump is not somebody who gets invited to these meetings. take the financial crisis. the events of 2008, 2009. nobody there was saying, what i think we need is a massive financial crisis. what is striking when he spent times in these were fight circles is the -- rarefied circles, is the lack of power. the people involved are very influential people, but i think their power tends to be exaggerated. if there is a world government being put together, it is not doing very well. it is not going very well. i don't think that has ever been the project. it is interesting to mention david rockefeller. i read the other day that his work predated the internet and

existed in a giant rolodex, one of the biggest networks of probably all time in the sense that with the limits of technology, there is only so many people to keep a caps on. the indexmes are on cards, henry kissinger was in that list. i'm in the midst of writing his biography. me, part of the way to understand his rise from being an epidemic and public intellectual -- academic and public intellectual to secretary of state is to understand that work and understand the ways it worked so his influence extended the on governments and across borders. this is historically very interesting. one has to write about it without exaggerating the power of the network. the influence, yes. but the power was more

circumscribed. in the bank in the 1990's. yes, they were the richest people in the world and the banks were tremendously influential in the ways the bond market involved in the way governments could borrow. but at the time, conspiracy theorists said they had total power over the world and they determined whether there was war or peace but they controlled the central banks, etc. i showed in my book that was mostly untrue. rothschild couldn't determine war and peace and very often would be frustrated and which struck -- would suffer losses one wars broke out. i think the challenge for the story is striking that balance between delineating the influence, trying to measure it and calibrate it, and identify the limits of the network's power. brian: 14 years ago, henry hertzberg was here.

he had a book. he had been a speechwriter in jimmy carter's administration, spent time at the new yorker magazine. this comment he made in the middle of the interview has always stayed with me. it is the reverse of what we are talking about when it comes to conspiracy. i asked him, when you are in the white house, what is the one thing you brought out you didn't expect? and here is his answer from 2004. >> we realized how there really isn't anybody in charge. that these are just human beings. that i believe before i went there, somebody was in charge. things were being taken care of. and i don't think this is just carter. i think this is true of every white house. you learned that it is just people and they are not that different from people you know. brian: what do you think?

niall: i think that's about right. one of the great illusions of the american journalist, especially at the moment, is that it is all about the president, who has a cause i'm a powerlocal -- monarch of and every tweet determines the face of nations. one way of thinking about it, the presidency, is to think of it has a network. is ahite house itself collection of people working together the president is the most important mode in the network. he simply can't rule alone. he is not an absolute monarch. the recent article published in the atlantic, i and the co-author of this piece. he did some network analysis of three different administrations. we looked at nixon's, bill clinton's, and donald trumps. and we simply tried to map the

network of power. because the structure of politics is as important as the personality of the president, especially in a republic. what was striking is the similarities between trump's administration and bill clinton in the first year. and nixon's looked quite different. partly because he was a reclusive resident who liked to sit in his study with his yellow notepad and hated interacting with people. bill clinton and donald trump are outgoing is nowadays like to be in the room where happens. network analysis is an important tool for helping understand the structure of politics. clearly there is power in the white house, but it is not entirely vested in the president. the president cannot act without advisers, without his chief of staff, his gatekeeper, his

cabinet, people running the major departments. there is a tendency in american journalism to talk about the presidency as if it was a monarchy. this is a mistake because it doesn't work that way. anybody who enters the realm of power as hendrick kissinger did, discovers that it is different than they imagined it and this structure of this network around the president is really the key. it was something kissinger worked at quickly for himself. not everybody figures this out and i think part of what happens in the first year is a certain turn as most people who were prepped terrific on the campaign entered the realm in power and find they can't make it work. steve bannon comes to mind in the case of the trump white house. but there were similar figures who came in with clinton and have been part of the campaign and did not go the distance.

this is a fascinating way to think about politics and a viable corrective in an age where the personality is given far too much importance. brian: we picked this up from one of your footnotes. if somebody is born in sweden, he had a follow ship on youtube of 60 million people. pie.name ishootie anybody watching this things we have gone off our rails. let's give 23 seconds of what people are drawn to on youtube and you can explain how it fits. >> weeeeeeeeee. hey guys, what's up? welcome to another video. tap.tap, tap, tap i'm sick.

which is ok because i wanted to make this chill video for quite some time showing off my figuring collection. brian: there is a lot more where that came from. niall: far too much. brian: why is that important? niall: why did he make it into the footnotes? non of youtube stars is quite interesting. it is a young person's genre. and young people consume a lot of content via youtube, google, and online tv channels like that. what would seem to old guys like us like but now it's self-indulgence has tremendous -- banal self-indulgence has tremendous presence. a lot of people do it. what does this tell us? it tells us the structure of the public sphere, where ids are exchanged, has exchanged

radically in our time. we go from a world of tv networks, which are relatively controlled things. decisions are made on content up high and that's how it works. to a new kind of network, which is example five by youtube, but one could also say the same of facebook, in which there is a great deal less centralization of decision-making. hootie pie went viral, acquired number of followers by posting videos without plant or direction from on high. it went viral because the name captured a certain mood at the between the veering unity and the controversial has a great appeal it would seem. inexplicable though i would find it. understanding the public sphere of our time, all the people have

to make an effort to realize new things are happening that are qualitatively different than what we are accustomed to when it comes to content. content has been thrown out and in a strange evolutionary process, some of it goes viral. why did it go viral? why is he more followed than other teenagers posting their videos and going nowhere? it is impossible to say. it is not really about the contents. things often go viral just because they enter the network at the right point. remember, the network is a complex of notes, some better connected than others. it is a look and a good person who has a lot of followers and says i like this video, then suddenly that video and go viral. even if the content is he back qs. that is the world we live in. decentralized in the sense that

google didn't say we need somebody to do this video and he has to wear headphones and have a beard and let's make the background pink. nobody made that decision or gave that command at google. in that sense, the content is generated to the users. but then, google and youtube algorithms determine their readiness in which you will find that content through the search engine. the search engine ranks everything. and it tends to rank it not only by popularity, by the number of people who viewed it, but also by you as an individual. your preferences as a user. which google and youtube know from your past behavior. so we now are in a new world where algorithms responsive to each individual user's behavior decide what gets ranked in search.

that is a completely different model from the public sphere than anything we have seen in the past. most people older than 30 or 40 certainly. they struggle to understand this. brian: in your chapter on kissinger, you wrote a book already about him. niall: volume two is pending. brian: there was this quote and i want to show you video from 1975. the best illustration of kissinger's argument was the abject failure of u.s. strategy in vietnam. here is henry kissinger in 1975. >> i have always considered indochina a disaster. perhaps partly because we did not think through the implications of what we were doing at the beginning. >> you included? my being in office. brian: if he thought it was a

disaster, why didn't he get us out of there after the elections? niall: that's a question for volume two, so i should probably hold my fire. brian: you going to answer? niall: we are going to do our research. they are thinking before they come up with answers. i will give you a hypothetical. it is true kissinger thought of it as a disaster in the late 1960's. i show this in volume one. he went there on a series of trips and saw firsthand in 1965, 1966, saw firsthand what was going wrong. and what was going wrong was relevant to this book because here was a great hair racal entity -- hierarchal entity intervening between north and south vietnam. and failing to completely understand the networks like the viet cong, that were going to be so hard, ultimately impossible

to defeat. there was a collusion between a very hierarchal military that was operating on the same basis in the korean war and world war ii, with the command structure that was centralized. this hierarchal could not win the vietnam war. that is a key observation area kissinger understood that. his notes make it clear he identified the fundamental pathology of the american intervention. brian: second question is, was there some extremely easy wait for the united states to exit in january, 1969, when he was national security adviser? and i think, hypothesis to be decided as i write volume two, that nobody at the time seriously believed that you when thet up and leave scale of the american presence was at its peak.

it had been excavated by lyndon johnson. what did they do? they rapidly reduce the military presence. administration -- the conflict and it is dramatically reduced. at the time, kissinger had his doubts about it. it wasn't his policy. at the time, you believed you could do it and used air bombing to force the vietnamese to the negotiating table. at the time, that did not seem like such a crazy strategy. and it was only really a relatively radical campus leftists that made it seem simple, as in let's stop the war and come home. no decision-makers, including amongst democrats, and they had gotten the u.s. into the war, were arguing for cutting and running.

how can you downsize the involvement and arrive at peace? that's how kissinger thought. brian: when is that book going to be out? niall: within three years. brian: let me ask you one thing. you start off writing about this. the archives, the historical and the, and hierarchy way history is written that you don't like. goll: i think historians where the archives are and sources tended to be in archives produced by hierarchal organizations like government. that is just the way the world his ordered. since the beginning of written record, power is in written records. that is how you understand the business of government, refer back to the decisions of previous governments. so historians naturally go to archives. that's where the data and sources are. social network has played a strong part in history and they

don't have a department you can consult. brian: how do you avoid that with the kissinger biographies? niall: doing my best to not only --k at multiple governments i'm looking at as many governments as possible -- overwhelming myself with material, but also looking at the student movement, the most important variable. it was the opposition to the vietnam war and the note states. that was a network of campus radicals that were antiwar but anti-a bunch of other things. there was a range of issues they were mobilized about. i want to study that network. it circumscribed what kissinger and nixon were able to do in ways that in the beginning they underestimated. once the history of hierarchies and governments and corporations and networks of those in formally organizing might be

antiwar movements, didn't really have a leader. who do call if you spoke to the antiwar movement? nick's and tries to talk to protesters and he goes earnestly and meets in washington. and it is a meeting of minds. kissinger had been a professor and understood the futility of this endeavor. there is something poignant about the president of the united states, who stands at the top of the most hierarchal of the structures, trying out to with hippie antiwar protesters, trying to establish a connection, believing he could persuade them to see they were stranded and the war. brian: out of time. our guest has been neil ferguson. the book is called "the square and the tower" networks in power from the freemasons to facebook. we thank you very much for joining us. thankyou guest: --niall:

you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] announcer: for free transcripts or to give you -- give us your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. transcripts are also available at c-span podcasts. announcer: next sunday on q&a, political activist and former professional basketball player tom thomas. mr. thomas discusses his book, we matter. sunday night at 8:00 eastern here on c-span.

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