david halberstam called it "the machine."ing machiying packer made his career off of the cheerleading for the iraq war. dexter is in great reporting. i think it is easy to get sucked into this military reporting culture where you give up a lot of your punch in order to keep riding along with the boys. >> you talk about a lot of people including david silverman duncan. let me start down the characters. when did you start wanting to do the general mcchrystal article? what is the first time someone suggested to you or you went to them and asked for it? >> the first time i had the idea was a in 2005 in baghdad. i said "would be interesting to do it with general casey?" i thought would be interesting to get inside the command and to one in the same way that we are accustomed to doing with the troops and the grunts on the grounds. there has been the first hand of what will and joe are saying on the ground. captioning their idiosyncrasies and what they really fear and love, all this experience of war for these low level guys. that g

there was a young reporter working for the nashville tennesseean who covered the movement named david halberstam who later went on and became the reporter for the--for the new york times. there was john siegenthaler. there was just a cadre of unbelievable people that i got to know in nashville in the media. but, also, i met w.e.b. dubois one day on the campus of fisk university. he was walking across the campus, and i met him. and we passed by, and then i went back and i was introduced to him. c-span: you mentioned john siegenthaler. he pops up in all these books on the civil rights movement as a f--person that was in and out of the scene. and in one case in your book, he got clobbered on the head with a pipe. >> guest: he was beaten. c-span: what was his role? >> guest: well, h--i--in 1961, he was president kennedy's personal representative to try to negotiate a--a--a--a truce, an agreement, with the governor of alabama to get us out of birmingham to montgomery and to get assurance from the governor of alabama and the state official that they would protect the freedom riders. so john siegenthal