my father is the historian david mccullough. and i thought that it was a good book for him to do because i wanted to read it. and he loved the idea. but i realized after a while -- he thought it was a terrific idea, but he wasn't going to do it. so i went to work on it myself. c-span: how did you do it? guest: i first began by compiling a big list of great americans, hundreds of people. and it's amazing that -- then i started to look to see who had children and who didn't. and it's amazing to see how many great americans didn't have children, and that cut the list down very quickly. then i began looking at those who did have children, whether there were collections of letters that were available, and just kind of cut the list down and down and down until i had approximately 3,000 letters that i read. and then i chose my favorites. c-span: how long did it take you to do that? guest: it took me three-and-a-half years. c-span: how did you go about fining the letters? guest: well, there is something -- a reference book -- a series o

and i was looking for a story and then i realized reading tony jud's book, david mccullough's, that int-war history histories of europe, the berlin airlift had been almost written out of the history. even where i teach at the university of southern california my colleagues tended to think it happened in the '60s. it's very confused with the berlin wall. and my students had never heard of this great american adventure. i mean, it broughtous-- as lincoln said-- the better angels of our nature and i'm not sure any other people in the world could have or would have done what those young... the daring young men, those young americans did when they got phone calls in the middle of the night says that they had to report within 48 hours to save the people who had been trying to kill them. >> rose: and the man responsible most of all is harry truman? >> truman became such a hero in my mind. i think the minds of the american people and going over that history i am now relatively convinced that that was the reason he was reelected in 1948. that he saw america as its saw itself, trying to do good,

and david mccullough's book on truman, which obviously is a wonderful book on truman. but in both those books, berlin airlift gets about two paragraphs. and it was then i realized that people don't know this enabler. they knew in germany, but not in america and america is worried that we needed to know why. >> to base anything publicly? >> no, they never said anything palpably about being against it. the president is commander-in-chief. >> thank you both for your comments. i wondered if you might comment what was happening at the united nations at the time of the decision to the airlift to berlin, which seems in my opinion, the united nations like so many times from security council members that are at odds debate and there's no in action. >> well, the picture that we saw here for a moment of people talking at a table with the soviet ambassador, jacob miao, and the american representative announced in the end of it. this is how the airlift ended with a blockade ended, the airlift continued for a while. stalin took neither advice or questions as far as anyone could tell

some of you have read david mccullough's book, 1776."hange, they would land in an hour or two. and then they will make an attack on a spread it took a nation to attack a nation then. the delivery time for lethality was rather slow. it was as if they'd said to run down to starbucks and have a cup of coffee before the attack. you can put the podium in a room like this with full of the most dangerous explosivesçó and you could set off and you would kill some people in the room. yes, the rest might be injured. today, the lethality of modernity has imposed upon us the necessity of safeguarding against an infringement of our freedoms that could include a destructive capacity of a bomb to be detonated, placed in a container this big that would not just destroy the lives of a few people in the room. it could vaporize an entire city. the requirement for us to be careful about freedom and to be circumspect in how we treated and to safeguard, is elevated significantly. at one time, we could only threaten another nation but now we know that a very f

some of you have read david mccullough's book, 1776."would land in an hour or two. and then they will make an attack on a spread it took a nation to attack a nation then. the delivery time for lethality was rather slow. it was as if they'd said to run down to starbucks and have a cup of coffee before the attack. you can put the podium in a room like this with full of the most dangerous explosivesçó and you could set off and you would kill some people in the room. yes, the rest might be injured. today, the lethality of modernity has imposed upon us the necessity of safeguarding against an infringement of our freedoms that could include a destructive capacity of a bomb to be detonated, placed in a container this big that would not just destroy the lives of a few people in the room. it could vaporize an entire city. the requirement for us to be careful about freedom and to be circumspect in how we treated and to safeguard, is elevated significantly. at one time, we could only threaten another nation but now we know that a very few people, r