and someone said to me you ought to look up bernard shrever, so i asked about the file on bernard shrever and she handed it to me and i opened it up, and right there in the beginning of the file was a photograph of this general leaning up against a table with all of these missiles around him. it's in the book. that photograph. and i said, this guy looks interesting. so, when i got home, i asked some questions about him. he was well known -- famous within the air force but not outside, when i got home i looked him up in the phone book. he turned out to be living in retirement eight blocks from my house, so i called him and arranged to come over and talk to him and it began the first of 52 interviews with him. and then i realized that this man had stood at a pivotal point in the cold war. we look at the cold war as one long glacial period. it wasn't. it was a period, there were changes, and particularly at the beginning it was a very unstable business in which we could have gone into nuclear war with the soviets, and i realized after talking to this man that he had stood at the center of th