marvin kalb and his daughte borah kalb have co-authored a bookn the war. it is called "haunting legacy." i am pleased to have them at this table. welcome. marvin kalb is an old friend and colleague at cbs and i am pleased to meet deborah. thank you for coming. what's the origin of the book? >> the origin of the book probab goes way back to m covering the war, debbie's interest in the war when she was a student. but the book itself was formed in the aftermath of the 2004 election. in that election, we had a swift boat veterans for truth and they were set up in their minds as a way of destroying john kerry. not only destroying him as a presidential candidate but just destroying him. and i got fascinated... >> rose: motivated by politics? >> motivated by a belief that he was phony, that he was treasonous, that the kind of criticism that he made of the vietnam war was something that only a person sympathetic to north vietnawod ever do. and and i began and then with debbie's help began to interview the people who ran the swift boat veterans and admiral hoffman

. >>> with us now the former chief of nbc news and former moderator of "meet the press" marvin kalb andave you here. what a fascinating book. >> thank you. >> it seems if there's a water balloon fight somewhere, people say it's the next vietnam. this war cast a shadow on every president from '75 forward. >> people told me researching the book there are two large themes. one is watergate in a political sense and one is vietnam in a national security sense. what we tried to do in researching and writing the book is what does one president after another from ford to obama do when the issue comes us about whether to send troops abroad. what does vietnam factor into their minds? how do they think of an exit strategy? every way vietnam sits theren guest but it's there. >> have we paid less attention to it? you go back to lebanon, 1983, ronald reagan put together a document. some people are saying obama is ignoring that in afghanistan. >> no, i think quite the opposite. i think vietnam has haunted obama more than any other president because obama was 13 years of age when the war ended. he had