>> charlie: welcome to our program. tonight we begin a disaryz of conversations about the the war in afghanistan tonight with general jack keane and david ignatius and dave shin. >> i'm not optistic but we're not going to transform to something that will be accepteddable to us by the time he exits the stage in 2014. i don't think that's happening. we have to be realistic about that in our own judgments and put together a political process that helps him exit and hopefully brings in people who truly want to reform. >> i see less evidence that the pakistanis are prepared to depart from their hedging strategy today than i did the six or eight months ago.

i go off to pakistan and i talk to the pakistanis all the time. i think their alliance with the united states is becoming more problematic not less. >> if we can construct through an economic strategy and military strategy with an equilibrium with a condition that they serve their relations with al-qaeda, then we will have, we will prove the fact you can have a political solution that leaves terrorism and al-qaeda out in the cold. >> charlie: we conclude this evening with jeff greenfield, his new book is called and then everything changed. >> my feeling without sounding like a former president is bring it on because you can have your own alternate history. i mean i would be insane if i said this is what had to happen. the whole point of this book is that fate plays this role. >> charlie: the war in afghanistan, jeff greenfield and an appreciation of david broder when we continue.

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captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> charlie: we begin tonight a series of conversations about the war in afghanistan. it is now in its 10th year. general david petraeus travels to washington next week to testify before congress. it will be his first testimony since he took over command from general stanley mcchrystal eight months ago. he's dramatically increased the number of special operations raids and an interview with the associated press general petraeus touched on the upcoming truth brought down as well as

civilian casualties. >> as we get closer to the july time frame which as you'll recall in the policy is the time president obama has said we will initiate the responsible draw down of the surge forces. i will provide options to him, various packages and the recommendation with obviously analysis of all of that. we absolutely have to take measures to reduce to the absolute minimum of civilian casualties in the course of our operations. our forces understand that. we know that we're here to protect the afghan people. and by the way, to protect them from the taliban too. >> charlie: joining me now is james shin of princeton universities serve as the assistant secretary of defense for asia from the bush administration. general jack keane is the former vice chief of staff. and david ignatius columnist from "the washington post" travels to the middle east and was in december in afghanistan.

i am pleased to have them here. i go first to general kean. how do you see what's happening on the ground. >> from a security perspective, what i observed there in february doing an assessment for them is a dramatic turn around in the momentum in security, particularly in problems where operations started over a year ago and problems where our operations really get under way with the surge forces this summer and send them into the fall. it's pretty dramatic because the territory that is the safe havens and support zones that the taliban used to control there, we control. and secondly, we've taken out their logistical infrastructure which is pretty significant and impacts on dramatically in terms of the capacity of the sustained future campaigns. and the third thing that's happened is the that people are aligned with us. and the evidence of that is also dramatic because they've given us close to, you know, 50 ieb

factories and hundreds of casuals that contain ammunition supplies and weapons. they're going to come back here. they'll begin coming back this month and in the spring and summer. my view is they're not going to make it. they're going to try hard but they're not going to take that territory away from us and they don't have the logistics infrastructure to sustain themselves. and the people are helping us quite dramatically. so this is, this is a major momentum shift to our favor. the command in afghanistan with general petraeus certainly is not going to make the statement i just said that it's not reversible. he's going to wait for that to happen as you would expect. and then declare the results of that sometime probably in the summer. >> charlie: we'll come back to some of the things you said. david how do you see it when you were last there and how do you see it from your sources there now. >> i think what general keane

said in the two provinces we think is critical, i hear from the people we talk to and i've seen some on the ground. my question is there's never been any doubt that the u.s. military under general petraeus or under his predecessor that can do the kinetic side of this war, can clear counter insurgency jargon. the question remains whether we can hold, build and transfer to the afghans. i think the evidence is still very much out on that. we'll start about the spring offensive beginning. the question is what's different this spring compared to other springs. as general keane said the intensity of operations, there will be 18 capture kill raids a night on average, so general pa trace has stepped up but in terms of the ability to transfer to the afghans with confidence and be able to get our troops

out within a reasonable time frame, we said 2014. i have to say for me that that's still an open question. >> charlie: where is the political piece you expect to match with the military campaign in afghanistan. >> in the end of the day we're not going to kill or capture the al ban. where is the our goals. >> charlie: how would you assess that. >> i'm not sure. we may hear about that next week when general petraeus gives his testimony or we may hear it from the man probably sitting next to him which is mark grossman which has replaced richard holbrook as the senior envoy. again, i would did he ever to general keane, but hopefully mark grossman and general petraeus are as synced up with the political strategy and the military strategy as general petraeus was with ryan crocker

in iraqi. >> i spent a lot of time with him and our commands that it's so crucial to our exit strategy is a capable force. we cannot look at it through the prism of the west or the prism of the iraqi security forces who had launched many arm eyes in the history for years. we he look at it through the prison of an afghan army fighting principally afghans. that is an acceptable force with credibility now. our commands have can dense in it. that force is operating at th level side by side with us. and as a result of that, they're going exponentially. i looked at them again in february very closely. i'm confident that we're going to be able to start spring and summer of this year in those two provinces with transitioning to them in the security area. and that's where we will be more in a support role and less in the lead role.

and that's obviously the transition we're going to make. i think the command will be pretty conservative about this. because they don't want to move down that road and then have to reverse it so i think we'll move slowly initially. and then we'll find ourselves gaining a little momentum as we gain some confidence over the analysis and the judgment that we're making. the afghan uniform police know where to go, still need more training and there's corruption there to be sure. overall, the afghan security forces have made dramatic changes in quantity. they're heading towards about 350,000, and they've grown 79 the, the -- 79 the,000 in the last year. we put additional surge forces there from the u.s. and i recollect in iraq when we put 30,000 surge forces, we had an additional 125,000 iraq security

forces that were put on the street during that same year of 2007. it was somewhat under reported and even more under appreciated. so the key thing here is this 79,000 additional forces this year and with the president's decision to add the 30,000, it's pretty decisive. and understand, they're not just clearing. when i said that in health -- we physically occupied the ground we cleared and we're not moving, we're not going any place. the taliban have to come back and fight us for the it. another data point on governance and this surprised me. as we secured and stabilized some of those areas in those two provinces, better district governors have come over to take over from what we've had in the past. when you look at it, it's understandable because once you have some security and stability, better people come forward because they want to get something done. they don't want to line their pockets with money or have a

sweetheart relationship with the taliban. people who have been suffering for a long time, and this kind of leadership is starting to step forward. i don't want to be polyannaish about it, we've got a long way to go here but it is significant. >> charlie: there are a number of pieces in today's the "new york times," cj had a piece putting afghan through a plan said the following. afghan units are supposed to be prepared to take over security. they're often unwilling to set out in independent patrols beyond trips back and fort between their own positions and to the bizarre. they remain largely a tag along force. that having to do with the training of the afghans. there's also this from the same report. talking about the taliban and david, i'm coming to you on this. the taliban and the grams that collaborate remain deeply rooted. the afghan military police remain lackluster given to drug use. the borders remain poor. those that process the government salary is fraud and

karzai's government is week, corrupt and erratically led. and it remains the taliban safe haven. >> whenever i go to afghanistan, i try to ask u.s. enlisted men, i know general keane is doing. you look at the numbers and think holy smoke, they're able to take over. i'm still not confident about that. the taliban is as you said a moment ago, deeply rooted. one thing that is in our favor is that the taliban really has been rocked. good independent reporting by the the "new york times" in particular with taliban commands who she is able to contact that they are shaken. we've been taking the fight to time. it's hard to move around, their

safe havens are getting found and they have no place. that's having an effect. in the end i think we do need to focus on the reality. this in the end is going to be a political settlement and the question is, is the taliban been hit hard enough that sometime over the course of this year, the next couple years, they will be ready to come to the table and make a deal we will find acceptable. that's something we need to keep our eyes focused on. general petraeus' metrics are metrics really for military success but he knows better than anyone that this is in the end a political military campaign. >> so this is the good news, right. you hope you pound these guys hard enough that david said that you'll have some of them or at least enough of them to count, to come down and negotiate with us, negotiate with the afghan government. the question is how far. how much do you have to pound

them. is there going to be a month from now we start negotiating or is it, you know, six months from now. how do you shape the military, how do you shape, how do you use your force political military that shapes an outcome that satisfies originally why we got in there which started with al-qaeda and counterterrorism and we all now have gradually expanded over time. where are we going to draw that loin and when are we going to engage this process. hopefully we'll hear a bit of this, if not from general petraeus then perhaps from mark grossman. >> charlie: some say that general petraeus' strategy is to hurt them enough they want to come to the table because in the end it is a political arrangement that will be the ultimate agreement. >> i absolutely agree with that. it's the same thing we did in iraq. i remember talking to the shake of shakes who brought in 10,000s

of people. i said what was your motivation. well bush's troops were occupying baghdad and we knew we weren't going to win and i wanted to get the best deal while the u.s. still had significant influence over this government. makes sense. you had motivations over those lines in afghanistan today. here's what i think is in front of us. the taliban will try to reassert themselves in the south which is key, understand, because it's their birth place and their strong hold from which they have gained all their strength. that in my judgment will fail. as a result of that, their eyes are going to be open pretty wide in terms of what their alternatives are. that will open up the opportunity from some negotiations and discussion. what remains in front of us, though, is also the network east of kabal. we need to reinvest some of the forces from the south up into the that network.

that will not take place until the end of this year and 2012. in 2012 it will bring most of that network quite down still remain in our plate from a security aspect are those pakistani orders. i believe what the command is hoping for and what our government is hoping for is that we turned the tables in afghanistan rather significantly. and we start, it starts to challenge the mac -- pakistanis in terms of their objective which has been a hedging strategy supporting the taliban with the thought that the united states would probably at some point pull out and the taliban will regain power. and the result of that, they have been supporting both of those sanctuaries. >> as general keane says, the safe havens, the ability of our adversary to withdraw into this

area, regroup, laid us out in effect because they know the political pressures at home are a key factor is a continuing problem. i have to be honest. i see less evidence that the pakistanis are prepared to depart from their hedging strategy today than i did the six or eight months ago. i go off into pakistan and i talk to the pakistanis all the time. i think their alliance with the united states is becoming more problematic, not less. that's the first thing that just gives me fundamental worries here. the second is, our client, the person with whom we're nighting this war, whose government we saw were there to assist, i mean karzai is fundamentally corrupt. that's just been no change in that. the institutions and governance he's associated with generally don't work. are seen as corrupt and inefficient. until those two things change, those two basic parameters, the safe havens where the enemy can retreat and our client, i think

we all agree it's not somebody we feel comfortable playing for. those change. i think the fundamentals really are still murky, despite all the thing that general keane said. >> this is one of the most troubling parts of this strategy. when you travel in pakistan as i did last year as you did recently, we hear two completely different narratives, don't you? on the one hand, you'll hear people tell you that hey it's all about india, that's the real threat for us, that's why we're working with the taliban. secondly, we want the taliban to dominate the successor government in afghanistan and want the americans out. that's one consistent narrative you hear. >> charlie: from the pakistanis. >> from the pakistanis. you can go down the street and talk to another pakistani and that narrative is opposite. the narrative is have the real threat's not india, it's our domestic taliban. we're in the bull's eye. it's not india, it's really

about our taliban problem. you hear the narrative that what we really want in afghanistan is a stable afghanistan, not dominated by the taliban but which they participate. so we can take our eyes off that and focus on our domestic problem. then third, we want the americans to stick around. we may not want to have them, have their agents in our streets or their predators flying on our skies, but we want them behind us, we want their support and their assistance. so here you have two diametrically opposed interpretations of this war from the same set of senior pakistanis and it's very hard to figure out which one they believe. >> charlie: you saw general petraeus and he is your friend and i assume he's candid with you. what's his assessment of karzai? >> well i'm not here to speak for petraeus, you know that charlie, and i can't do that. but here's what my observation. my observation is he's got a

decent relationship with karzai. he knows he's dealing with a very formidable general. we have a sense of what karzai says to other people about petraeus. and petraeus has made some real progress with them. but look it, i agree with david and jim are saying about this governor. this is a power brokerage patronage system that's got more crine syndicates to it than it has governance to be sure. we've cleaned up our own act a little bit in term of following our own money. we've got a general in charge of a task force to do that. most of the money in their country comes from us. we've been helping a little bit with the predatory nature of the corruption down at the village level and along the roads. why? because we have so much more forces out there along with ourselves and the afghans. and we can just stop that as we stop the taliban in that area. so we can clean some of that up. but the serious egregious corruption that exists inside

that governance, i doubt if we're going to make much progress. now what the political strategy is, is certainly to move towards a new election in 2014 which is not a replication of 2009, as we all know which is a fraudulent political disaster for afghanistan, and for us in terms of our ally there. put together a political process that makes sense, karzai exits stage one and bring in political leaders, not just leaders but also parties that are organized around them, helping develop that process. i've spoken to two of those candidates who ran against them in the most. i assume they'll run against them again. and both of those men are clearly want to have a reform agenda and move away from what's -- >> charlie: you're talking about 2014. now most the nato, from nato to

the whitehouse, they're saying we want to be out of there for the most part by 2014 and they're also saying, i think have confirmed it this week, that they want to start some kind of departure by next, by july of this year. of next year. >> i think the forces, i'll leave that up to general petraeus that would leave at the end of the summer, would probably be negligible and not have much much consequence when they leave -- from the south into the east as i mentioned. but look it, i do believe in 2012, we'd start to probably make some more reductions here and continue those to 2014. at the same time attempting to make some political progress in improving government capacity to connect with local governors. we're working pretty hard on the local governance piece. we've got people from the state

department out there at the disk level and the provincial level. i'm not optimistic in any way, shape or form we're going to transform the existing karzai government to something that would be very acceptable to us by the time he exits the stage in 2014. i don't think that's happening. we have to be realistic about that in our own judgments. and put together a political process that helps him exit and hopefully brings in people who truly want to reform. >> one thing i learned watching general petraeus in iraq and the outcome there is that there is a big difference between a total flame out mess, which is what we're looking at in 2006 and just sort of mess which is where we ended up with. and if we could end up with just sort a mess in afghanistan, in other words we can stabilize things enough that we could meet our sort of glide path out of there.

and i think we'll be happy to have these time lines, although they've been criticized. we'll be happy to have a july 2011 date when the president says okay, we're going to begin reducing our forces there. i think that will end up being a good thing. i think having the 2014 date has basically an end date is a good thing. and if over that period between this coming july and 2014, we could get to, you know, as petraeus likes to say an afghan good enough settlement that was real messy, really corrupt, you know, not even, you know, name your country. that that might be okay just as it's turned out to be okay. iraq's making its way along. so that will be my hope. it's as close as i could get to optimism. >> as our friends in the military often say, the enemy gets a vote, and in this case the taliban and the cutting network and for that matter,

maybe even al-qaeda have some role to play in this and the big question mark is obviously what kind of a book they're going to cast and how much bloodshed is going to be involved in this. it will be an interesting question and again i will be curious, general keane, what your sense is having just been there, whether you see much signs of fracture inside the taliban and their sort of loose network which is what this thing really is. that is not viet kong, this is a network of subnetworks. >> charlie: general keane. >> the taliban sometimes reporting on truly make them out to be more than what they truly are. >> this is a mcure of bandits, jihadis. >> we gained that information

because we listen to their phone traffic and radio transmissions daily. we're capturing them and interrogating them and we have a sense that the impact taking place particularly in this last year has been rather significant. as i said, the story in kandahar have unfolded much more detail than i'm able to provide here. it's a significant defeat for them. and this they're very frustrated by those. of their leaders are gone. and their senior leaders, i'm absolutely convinced, and know this, that their senior leaders are in pakistan and they do not enter on to the field of battle. they are telling them to go back and do more and do it better. and there's huge frustration in the middle ranks about those kind of orders from them becaue they believe their senior leaders don't get it. they don't understand what's been happening to them. so yes, there is some fracture.

that's not leading yet to a defeat or to an abandonment to their goals or objectives, but i think as the spring and summer campaign unfolds and we're sitting on the grounding that they're trying to take back. remember what i said. and we've taken away a lot of their logistical infrastructure. they will kill some policemen successfully and some government officials and every once in a while they'll have an episodic catastrophic attack at the human dimension level, that will be horrific to be sure. being able to sustain a hard campaign to take back some of what they lost in those two provinces i don't believe they will be successful. that will be a considerably further fracture of them in terms of their will and their commitment. and those are the kinds of things that start pushing leaders towards, well maybe we got to talk to somebody. and hopefully that will start to take place in a meaningful way by the end of the summer or

fall. >> charlie: some look at the war and the things we've been talking about say the following. there are too many other things that have a higher priority for our national interest than to be spending these lives in this conflict, and the kind of cost it's doing to the united states when it needs to become more solid at home. >> that's the argument of a new book by ben west called the wrong war which says it in three words. i wouldn't make that judgment. my closing thought is i just come back from cairo and i've seen the movement for social change that is so powerful that it's just a message for democracy and anti-corruption that's swept across the arab and maybe even the muslim world. if we can align ourselves with

that movement and how we can do that in afghanistan in the time we have, i feel we can be building on solid ground. aligning ourself with a corrupt karzai for the indefinite future is just going in the wrong direction, sort of going against the way history for countries like this is going. >> i'd agree there's a lot at stake here. there are really two outcomes. i think if we end up retreating like the russians did, the forces of islamic extremism can point to yet another victory over the great satan. i think that could have really long term negative consequences. on the other hand, though, as david said if we can construct through a combination of a political strategy and military strategy an afghan state maybe incorporate the taliban in some kind of equilibrium with the condition that they serve their relations with al-qaeda, then we are will have, i think we'll have proven the fact that you

can have a political solution that leaves terrorism and al-qaeda out in the cold. >> charlie: i have to leave it there. thank you very much. thank you david, thank you general. pleasure to have a conversation, a number of series we will have including ben who is coming to the program soon and others as we try to understand what's at stake here, where it stands on the ground and what the choices are as we go into the future. back in a moment. stay with us. >> charlie: jeff green field is here he is the senior political correspondent for cbs news. in a new book greenfield imagines major historical events and speculates what could have been different. it is called everything changed alternative histories of american politics. jfk, rfk, carter forward,

reagan. i'm pleased to have jeff greenfield back on this program, welcome. >> thanks. >> charlie: what is the idea to look at this. it's not a new idea, it's applied to new events. >> plenty of writers who done this the plot against america -- the man in the high castle where the nazis win world world war ii. this is sort of not fiction in the sense it's real people and it stemmed from a particular incident at a panel where someone asked me what would have been happened if robert kennedy had lived and i've always said, you know, who knows. i just read a book about robert kennedy by thurston clerk who said mayor daly looks like, now appears to endoris robert kennedy. i said to this audience on the spur of the moment, think about that because then the demonstrators, most of them wouldn't have been there because mayor daly would have been back on an antiwar candidate, right. i went home and i know it's a cliche, i couldn't sleep because the chain reaction started

going. the second one was, if we think about robert kennedy surviving an assassination attempt then we have to think about what happened to ronald reagan in 1981 that rush of relieve and we didn't lose another great figure. so the whole dynamic of that 1968 campaign where robert kennedy was trailing humphrey. the obscure fact on december 11, 1960, a suicide bomber was seconds away blowing up with a seven sticks of dynamite. mrs. kennedy came to the door to see him off the church and the bomber said i don't want to do this in front of his wife i'll wait and then he was caught. that's how close we came.

this has gone about unnoticed as any major one i can think of. >> charlie: i think i heard something about that plot with you i hadn't heard about it. >> the third one is not life and death. he's with jimmy carter in 1976, a second debate and he announces there is no soviet domination and never will be. that's frankly when the "new york times" stops the debate. you realize he's incorrect lust. did you mean to say the so yents don't exercise influence. instead of saying as i have him do in my book, i'm the commander in chief, i know the soviets but i'm talking about the spirit of the issue. it says i don't think the pole is considering themselves dominated by the soviet union. for a week that campaign is stalled in its tracks trying to get the president hu offer is supposed to be superior to jimmy carter in his knowledge of

foreign paul sea to fix himself. i went back and looked at the numbers. 10,000 roads in ohio and gerry ford wins and that's what counts. anybody can make up a story but i was playing with history to be as plausible as possible. i read through all the histories and goodwin's account of the demeans. i said okay, if fords wins a second term -- he says he's much more polite. he said jimmy carter had angst . we had to pay a price. in order didn't have that problem. they would not have let the shah fall. >> charlie: they would have had the ayatollah in control. >> he wouldn't have been, i

think. one of the things and i do this throughout the book. the hostages were seized and the government would have cleaned that out in five days which meant that ted koppel's late night program would have been canceled and he would never have had night line. >> charlie: speaking of different people, you take note of certain kinds of events but you do not follow them through if al gore had been elected president. >> i don't even get anywhere near that because that ends in 1980. i thought about doing the gore beats bush scenario and decided not to, and i might again, assuming that there's a demand for more of this. i have a way of the president that by the way has nothing to do with the pump -- palm beach ballot. >> charlie: you're best at writing the domestic political stuff. >> that's fair. >> charlie: you were a speech

writer for robert kennedy. >> yes. >> charlie: if he had gone to a meeting and not gone through the kitchen. >> then that was the last minute decision. what i found in doing my research, this was chilling, the john kennedy library, it was the history of steve smith his brother-in-law who says i always blame myself for what happens because i always made it a point not for security reasons, to always be in front and just to clear the way. because he came down in a different place so robert kennedy went in there unprotected. he saves his brother-in-law's life and it's the dynamic of the failed assassination attempt that has such potent politics and political impact. i don't know what had happened if he had never are seen them because the campaign at that time we have to go back to how we pick delegates. a lot of those big states were controlled by mayors and

political operatives who have no love lost for opportunity. >> charlie: this took place after the california primary. >> the night of the california primary. >> charlie: what was his famous last words. >> on to chicago. >> charlie: you're suggesting that if he won and he did win in california and had not been assassinated that night, that mayor daly who was close to the kennedy family, would have endorissed him perhaps. >> again, i think if you're going to do what i did, you got to do some research. thurston clerk wrote a wonderful book called the last campaign, and throughout the book he has one of kennedy's closest aides. in the last meeting he says if he wins california he will be all right. that's where again you can make stuff up out of whole cloth and it's fine if you're a novelist. but if you're trying to say to people this history is as plausible as i can make it, you need to find out what really happened so you can play with it. when i describe in this book how

lyndon johnson tries to get the nomination after all, that really happened. he was set to go to chicago, give a fire breathing speech, he had operatives there. >> charlie: he had john conley there. >> marvin watson, the post master general and his chief political henchman was there. i read the memoir that richard holbrook worked on. clifford is talking about his growing conviction that johnson would have preferred nixon to humphrey because he thought that nixon was closer to him on vietnam and humphrey would turn away from him. so all these things that i use -- >> charlie: we have at the same time all of these conversations now about lyndon johnson agonizing over vietnam not knowing his principal, talking to senator russell, his great friend and mentor, i can't

get out of this. >> this is the fascination about this man. you can look at those 1964 tapes or listen to them and read them and realize even as he was escalating, he knew. >> charlie: he knew all of the vulnerabilities. >> this is why you go back to his psycho drama is he had this inbread -- bred fear of seen as weak, so i think he was torn. by 1968, he was so angry that his dream of being the next fdr loved by all the people had been shattered. >> charlie: the great society would have given him that opportunity. >> that's where they thought he was going. i think that's why it's realistic. he made a last stab. the folks at the convention of chicago said to him, this isn't going to work. >> charlie: where are you in your most dangerous ground in speculation. >> i haven't had that

conversation yet because the book's been out a come days -- found that the weakest was my specialty. do you know what, that's fine. my feeling without sounding like the former president is bring it on because you can have your own alternate history. i mean, i would be insane if i said this is what had to happen. the whole point of this book is that fate plays this role. nobody has yet, and i think it's going to happen and honest to god looking forward to it to say greenfield, here's what you forgot. here's what you don't know. and i will say to them respectfully oh really. afterwards in this book which is in some ways is one of my favorite parts where i explain where i got all this stuff. so all i ask the critics is to look at that and understand that when i offer you an alternate history, and here's where it comes from. offer me a better one. i'm certainly prepared to see

the possibility that nixon could have beaten bobby in 6 8 that johnson would have been so strong, that carter would have won anyway. nixon took the vice president -- he figured it out. i said you guys would never have picked spiro agnew. >> charlie: who would he have picked. >> lindsey. >> charlie: you suggest that reagan might have picked sandra day o'connor. >> yes, somebody guessed that also. >> charlie: first of all he nominated her for the supreme court so he liked her. she's from the west. >> the dynamic of that is if ford beats carter and the calamity of the 70's which i believed were backed in the cake, then reagan comes to the nomination after 12 years of republican, he has no democratic unpopular carter to run against, he's got to change the dynamic.

now let's think all the way back to 2008 and see another republican candidate succeeding in unpopular republican coming who felt he had to change the dynamic with his running mate. for this hours, that looked like, sarah palin looked like a brilliant choice. sandra day o'connor had significant more experience chops than she did. so again you could argue no. but look at the dynamic that would have resulted and i would respectfully suggest -- >> charlie: what about this in terms of real history. so gerald ford loses to carter and reagan beats him. if gerald ford -- >> depending on the economy and the nominees.

i went to a highly favored established democrat. ted kennedy in 1980, hill tree clinton in 08 and i found a first term new idea democratic senator who takes an audacious gamble and runs against him in the 1980 primary. >> charlie: gary huff. >> that's correct. >> charlie: he was a quote from the geography to topography, natural resources, the search for wealth migrations all set the framework but the random roll of the dice is as potent a force as any he writes. a shift in the weather, a slightly different choice of words, open up a literally limitless series of possibilities. >> perhaps it's not limitless that's an exaggeration but it's certainly extensive. >> charlie: what's interesting here is the theory of history how it can change and how history can change on the other side and does change by the assassin. lincoln take ravine, take

kennedy. >> how about 1916 chen charles evans goes to california running against richard wilson. the pier is plight between conservatives and progressives. he meets with the conservatives and either through a miss happen or deliberate conspiracy he misses a meeting with a highly prickly man who sits on his hands, california lost by 5,000 votes, don't hold me to that and those electoral votes goes to the presidency. >> charlie: what was it that ray bradbury said. >> it was a short story i think of the sound of thunder. >> charlie: and he talked about on time. >> then he goes back in time to hunt dinosaurs. the time of travel agency builds him a platform so he doesn't touch anything. he kills a butterfly by accident and comes back to find it incredibly coarser and leaders leading the country because that butterfly over the course of millions of years lessened amount of grace and beauty in the world. that's the really butterfly effect as far as i'm concerned.

and that's a short story that i went back and read to kind of just primed the pump. >> charlie: what didn't you include if you had added one more story to the three. >> well, there are actually two, charlie. one is how gore beats bush. and the other one which i'm hoping to see publications sometimes and you understand my passion, it's what would have happened if the top of the 8th inning of game six in chicago, someone had tackled that chicago finance steve who interfered with the foul ball. the chicago cubs could have won the pennate. i had a lot of fun with that one. >> charlie: because you wanted to see that so badly. >> that's where i really broke. you'll see why i really favor history. a lot of stuff are the details that were fun but the book shouldn't have been longer. for instance we all remember how spiro agnew attacked the media. robert kennedy had many critical things to say about the media.

he thought it was failure in its promise. >> charlie: so does barack obama. >> he unleashed the vice president for his responsibilities and playing on the agnew thing. not politically, not that they were biased but that they were, you know, that they sold sugared cereals to children, that they didn't educate or inform. and the media would have been very angry at a president robert kennedy because he was taking them all. he was also a guy who fought really hard to get cigarette advertising off television and at the time ads were -- this was fun but my editor said don't do this. >> charlie: how did you do the research? you had the idea. then you realized after that night that this is something that i cannot stand in front of, i have to let it go. i have to let it go through.

>> i need a bit of candor. the fact that my publisher after ten years -- >> charlie: give me back the money. this is for another book that you didn't write? what was that book. >> it was a novel and i just, i kept saying to them you're going to have to pressure me because i'm not going to do this and they finally got the word and said you either come up with an idea or you owe us a fair amount on money and by god the creator -- >> charlie: it just flows. then everything changed, stunning alternative for american politics. and in this book, bob woodward ends up as a lawyer. >> yes. >> charlie: watergate doesn't happen. >> watergate -- >> charlie: a sad note one of the great giants of american political journalism on this day died in washington. remember him for what. >> i first saw him in 1968 when i was a this-year-old kid on the kennedy campaign. he was already an established figure. over the decades, he was a

presence that first of all sort of owe fucially told you okay, the festivities have gun. the second thing is that it was almost, it wasn't a joke but it was a certain humor about the fact that he was the unofficial dean of the political press corps. not just because he had been there so long but he exemfide a kind of modesty where he knew the story was the important part. he's now in the media who thinks put me in front and the action over there. he was an old fashion guy and yet adapted. one of the things he did was he took polling and then went out and with shoe leather tried to put flesh on those numbers called precision journalism. he had pollsters find certain trends. but then he wanted to go out and get the texture of it.

so the idea that you would sit in front of a computer and learn everything would have been total anathema. >> charlie: what struck me about him too was that he cared not only about the poetry of campaigning, but also the pros of governance. >> thank you. i would have been derelict not mentioning that. that's right. a lot of people can't wait until the next chain to -- chain to -- campaign to start, they're board. they wants to look at the latest poll. david broder was, you put it better than i did, the pros of government. he wanted to know not only to win but what's the impact of the legislation of the proposals. on top of which i don't know what his politics were. but i don't think there was a bone in his body that earned,

that yearned to tell people -- he had column but this is what i think really should happen. he was universally respected as a fair-minded journalist as you could imagine. there's somebody out there that doesn't feel that way but i don't think so. >> charlie: i'm not one of those people who look back and talk about the golden years and how great it was in previous times. but i do remember the certain nostalgia and the sense of at certain times in american life, it was the 70's in film making. and there were political journalists who were of david's time and it was johnny apple and it was all the boys in the back of the bus who in a sense brought politics to a place that it became so, they enhanced the drama by covering. >> i think it began with teddy's 1960 book. >> charlie: making of the

president. >> because there was a certain romance. not a certain, there was a romance about it but there was also among the people you're talking about, a determination i think to play it straight and tell people what's going on and do it in a way that let the reader and the viewer tells you make up his or her mind. i don't think that certainly with david broder, the motion of a spiro agnew, that that was some kind of biased coverage of politics. it's absurd when you're talking about a guy like david broder. >> charlie: thank you for coming. >> my pleasure. >> charlie: jeff greenfield. the book then everything changed. >> charlie: we conclude this ink with an appreciation of the great political reporter david broder who died today. he was 81 years old. david covered washington for four decades. he was often called the dean of

the washington press corps. president obama said in a statement he was a true giant in journalism who built a reputation as the most inspected and insightful political commentator of his generation. he appeared eight times over the years. his great love of politics and his knowledge and sense of history was always present. here's an excerpt of one of his many conversations. >> when we began this process the picture i had in my head of lobbying was of the guys in the gucchi loafers standing outside the room as they come in and give them the thumb's up and thumps down on whatever amendment's being voted on and those people at the same time are writing checks on their political action committees. that is stone age lobbying. >> charlie: it's much more sophisticated. >> it's much more outside of washington and much more visible to the press or the public. the organizations that we were

writing about that were at the heart of this healthcare fight on both sides i should say, operate now almost like little political parties, charlie. what i mean by that is they've gone into the marketplace. they've paid top dollar to hire the best pollsters, the best media advisors, the best field organizers and they use all of the modern electronic communications equipment to gin up their supporters of people that they have enlisted in the country side. and flood these congressional offices with what looks like authentic grassroots opinion. but is of course unlike, you know, the big political parties which represent a broad spectrum of whole broad said of interest, these folks have a very defined agenda. for the most part, their agenda is to protect what they already have in the status quo.

so this kind of interest group perfectly legitimate, nothing undemocratic or illegal about it. but they have become so powerful now that they become really barriers to making any major change that affects their status. >> charlie: david broder, dead at 81. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org