margaret warner recently sat down with "wall street journal" reporter jay solomon to discuss his book "the iran wars: spy games, bank battles, and the secret deals that reshaped the middle east," the latest addition to the newshour bookshelf. >> reporter: jay solomon, welcome. >> good to be here. >> reporter: what struck me about the book was your trail of president obama obsessed with iran and getting a nuclear deal from the beginning. where did that come from? >> i think when he came in, he saw the need to stop, diffuse the iran weapons program, and the need to kind of avert another u.s. war as converging. we didn't know at the time that he was sending secret letters to the supreme leader, that he was really kind of setting up a diplomatic track and was just hoping the iranians would bite. so it really was a campaign issue that became a driving vision for him in his first year. >> reporter: so president obama got his nuclear deal but he did pay a really big diplomatic price, didn't he, on many fronts? >> when i was doing the research, it did dominate so many different factions of hi