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It's our pleasure to have you. Fred is the author of 10 books. He's the author and editor of 10 books on American politics and foreign policy. Among my favorites and those which I know everyone has read, uh, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam, which really transformed our understanding of Lyndon Johnson's choices for war in 1964-1965. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity, which Fred co-wrote with Campbell Craig, another historian, which looks at the influence of domestic politics on American Cold War foreign policy. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire in the Making of America's Vietnam, which is really about early French and American activities in Vietnam before we would, we traditionally called the Vietnam War in the United States. Embers of War won the Pulitzer Prize as well as many other rewards and then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well. And then his most recent book, which I hope all of our listeners will read and I know you'll be reading a lot about soon as well, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century.

One is that Kennedy respected LBJ's unsurpassed skill at maneuvering in Washington, his ability to buttonhole lawmakers and to get them to do what he needed them to do. This is evident even when he's obviously the chieftain in the Senate. And I think Kennedy rightly marvels at this ability and respects Johnson for it. One of the things that one of the appealing aspects of John F. Kennedy is I think he respects people who are really good at what they do, regardless of field and he could see this in Johnson.

On the other hand, you know, it's clear that when he becomes vice president, and arguably has an important role to play in securing this razor thin victory against Nixon in the election in 1960, you know, he and his team, they don't treat Lyndon Johnson very well in terms of his role as vice president, the kinds of duties that they give him, the degree to which they include him on important policy decisions, especially in foreign affairs.

You can see, one can see why LBJ becomes resentful. There's, of course, a special friction with Robert Kennedy, which, of course, I also need to delve into as I get into this research, but I think Kennedy understands Johnson's importance to him. I think he does credit him with helping him win. Arguably, this was one instance in recent U.S. history in which the vice presidential choice actually did matter in the outcome, but then a problematic relationship thereafter.

In Ellsberg's case, he was lucky in that his case ended in a mistrial, but you quickly focus on the whistleblower themselves in this divisive hero-traitor binary. And the substance of the disclosure is often marginalized.

Particularly following Daniel Ellsberg, who you mentioned before in his release of the Pentagon Papers, the internal history of the Vietnam War, which was very critical and exposed the lying of American political leaders about the war. Following that, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, there was a very strong effort within Congress to create legislation to protect whistleblowers and dissenters, and to manage this process and deal with many of the difficulties and paradoxes that Kaetan and you have pointed to.

So the impact of whistleblowing may begin with the individual, you'll have new rules or laws that are brought in to prevent whistleblowing. But these have ripple effects which go out across institutions and affect different groups, so it's not just that the state is suspicious of a Daniel Ellsberg.

But there is suspicion and surveillance that's extended to collaborators. So Daniel Ellsberg's lawyer, Leonard Bodine, was also under surveillance. Famously, Ellsberg's psychologist's office was broken into, which of course begins the long road to Watergate.

And at the time, I wasn't even thinking very far back about our history. I was thinking we don't talk about the Vietnam War anymore. We've never really talked about Hiroshima.

And of course, every family is personal. Look, I think the biggest problem in the United States is this hundred year old hole in our memory, as I talk about in the book, between the end of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I was fortunate, I grew up in the South, although I know you don't hear it. My parents were from the North, but my mother was very active in the civil rights movement in Atlanta. So I'm kind of a civil rights kid. That was the you know, that was the atmosphere that I grew up in. But nobody talked about history. Everybody was much too focused on the present, you know, focused on getting rid of segregation.

And, you know, it was a time, Zachary, you're fortunate to have had your young political consciousness formed by, you know, an African-American president of great integrity and intelligence. When I was young, we couldn't imagine it. We couldn't even imagine a black cabinet member at that point.

So the focus was on the present and the future. People were not talking about the history. At least white people certainly weren't. And I rather think black people weren't either. They knew more of it, of course, than white people did, but it wasn't a focus of attention.

So we tended to think, OK, there was slavery. Slavery was terrible, but then we fought a war in order to end it. That was still the line, you know, that I learned mostly. And then there was Jim Crow, I think Jim Crow is a terrible expression.

I'm on a minor campaign to snap it out because it's a euphemism. It prettifies what Bryan Stevenson calls the age of racial terror, which I think is a much more accurate expression.

Yeah. And the words Jim Crow allow us to think, OK, there were racial stereotypes, there was racist prejudice. But, you know, We we don't know about the web of legal continuation of various things that have been called neo-slavery.

The way in which ordinary behavior, if carried out by African-Americans, was criminalized, the way in which there was actually a deliberate turn from, you know, thinking of African-Americans as stupid and lazy, which was the stereotype during slavery days, to thinking of them as criminals. All the way through, you know, redlining and the ways in which people of color were barred from getting mortgages, were barred from getting Social Security.

So and and, of course, in the background, lynching as a real instrument of terror to intimidate people of color. So, you know, we we tended to think that all of that was more or less so. We think, OK, it was, you know, it was too bad that there was segregation, but then we had the civil rights movement and it wiped it out.

There's a second issue that I'm only going to mention because I know we don't have time to go into it. I think we are still living in a time where the Cold War has cast its shadow over American history, which is why great, you know, civil rights activists like Paul Robeson [are] almost forgotten, which is why we don't talk about Hiroshima and we don't talk about Vietnam. But that's a question for a podcast in itself.

Well, in 1962, I think there were some valid concerns about the state of democracy and threats to democracy, having just gone through the McCarthy era and the undermining of civil liberties and attacks on civil liberties that became very serious in the 1950s. So many of those students grew up recognizing that threat.

Also concerns about ongoing war. The Cold War was becoming more tense between the Soviet Union and the US. And they talked about that in the document and identified that as a problem.

Nuclear warfare, the threat of nuclear warfare and annihilation in that way, hung over them. And I think you can see that fear on almost every page of the Port Huron statement. And just a concern that there was a lot of apathy about the way that the government was running things in the United States, about the United States' role in the world, and the lack of democracy extended to groups like African-Americans in the South.

Members of SDS criticized the Southern Democrats, the so-called Dixiecrats, for resisting civil rights actions and resisting a response to the large numbers of citizens who felt disempowered within the political structure. And then also the concerns about inequality, economic inequality, both of which you mentioned so well.

But obviously there are different types. Democratic socialism is alive and well in most of the advanced countries and the United States, and that began in the early to mid-20th century. But socialism in the terms that SDS understood it, they did avoid the term, especially in the Port Huron statement, because it was such a weighted concept and that it had such negative connotations, particularly in the Cold War context when everyone was being accused of communism, if they stood up for anything that seemed radical.

And do you think that this argument and the case that was made so eloquently in the Port Huron statement, did it contribute to the civil rights movement?

I think that went hand in hand. I think the civil rights movement was part of the new left umbrella term or new left umbrella movement, that social movement. And the students for democratic society, mostly white students from the North at first, but they became more aware of what was going on in the South with the Jim Crow laws and threats to voting rights there and denials of voting rights and human rights in the South.

And so when they started to see some of this coverage on the news in the late 50s or read about it in newspapers, hear it word of mouth, this was shocking to them that in this country where they grew up and they actually used this language in the opening of the Port Huron statement, we heard that we're a land of liberty and freedom and justice for all.

And yet we grew up and we noticed these contradictions, these glaring problems that didn't live up to those values. And so they saw this as an inspirational moment, the civil rights movement making momentum in the South and gaining traction there.

So how did this relate to the anti-war movement of the movement against the Vietnam War in the United States? Was it a precursor or does the Port Huron statement sort of reflect an early anti-war sentiment?

There's a lot of talk about the military-industrial complex, among other sort of terms about the war machine in the United States. Yeah, I think the Port Huron statement did recognize some troubling trends that even though the Vietnam War wasn't exactly on their radar as much in 1962 as it would be two or three years later even, I think they did see that the United States government was making some decisions that, you know, were concerning to them.

And then the Cold War tensions heating up did rationalize the continuation of the military-industrial complex and that tight relationship between the government, big business for, you know, military industry and the military itself. And they saw this as, you know, perhaps a worst, a military state and a endless war type of society that they thought was a threat to democracy.

I think Reagan's election was very significant, but not quite for the reason that people think. There's this kind of assumption that you even hear political historians make, which is that the Republican Party became conservative when Barry Goldwater got that presidential nomination in 1964, and it's remained conservative ever after. And to quote George Will's witticism, Barry Goldwater did win the presidential election in 1964. It's just that they didn't get around to counting the votes until 16 years later. But in fact, the Republican Party did not become conservative after Goldwater's victory. In fact, the conservatives had a real demotion within the party because not only did Goldwater lose in a landslide, but he really took down so many Republicans on the ballot below him, not just in Congress, but also at the levels of state legislatures and governors and even local authorities because his conservatism was simply that unpopular. And that is what gave Lyndon Johnson the ability to pass what amounted to a second New Deal.

Well, if you want to follow the split back beyond this mid-20th century period we're talking about, it was a fairly significant thing that Theodore Roosevelt led his followers to bolt from the Republican Party in 1912 and to form the Progressive Party. That was really a gateway for a lot of them to leave the Republican Party altogether and to bring their kind of urban middle-class progressivism into the Democratic Party. But I think another significant development was when Franklin Roosevelt came to power, representing those old progressives and his uncle, to some extent, and also then enticing away a large percentage of the African-American electorate into the Democratic Party again, because the African-American voters mostly had stayed with the party of Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves. But the Democratic Party spoke more to their material interests and concerns and gradually over time became the more pro-civil rights party, though the Republican Party, like I said, still retained a lot of that civil rights awareness and heritage.

But one of the major turning points in the evolution of conservatism was the formation of the sort of new conservative movement under William F. Buckley, Jr., with the foundation of National Review Magazine in 1955. That really became the intellectual flagship and the organizing principle for the conservative movement to come. And that also led to Barry Goldwater's receiving the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Barry Goldwater, the senator from Arizona, who was a deep libertarian conservative, and that libertarianism led him to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, bucking the considerable majority of the rest of his party. And that led Barry Goldwater to win votes really only in the Deep South, where people had voted Dixie Crap in 1948 for Strom Thurmond's breakaway party. And that gradually over time led to the incorporation of these Southern, at least somewhat reformed, segregationists into the Republican Party, particularly with Richard Nixon's Southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign.

But that kind of progressive overreach that you saw in the Great Society was part of what led to a rapprochement between conservatives and moderates, and gradually building strength in both factions. Now, it happened that Ronald Reagan was the most talented political performer of his era, and he came pretty close to toppling Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976. Ford, of course, was the incumbent after Nixon had resigned in the wake of Watergate. And then Reagan won outright in 1980. But Ronald Reagan, in 1980, was not campaigning as Barry Goldwater reborn. Barry Goldwater's political platform was much further to the right than Reagan's was. Barry Goldwater wanted to abolish the social safety net that had come into being with the New Deal, and wanted to get rid of Social Security, for example. Wanted to give battlefield commanders access to nuclear weapons. Derided Americans' craven fear of death, it being unwilling to go to nuclear war against the Soviet Union. Reagan was none of those things. And in fact, he was a big tent Republican. He had a lot of support from moderates, and he made it very clear to his conservative allies that they were not to purge these moderate Republicans whom the party needed. They were not to deride them as RINOs, "Republicans In Name Only." And there, in fact, was a great deal of cooperation between the moderate faction and the conservative factions on issues like supply-side economics, which at that time were thought to be the remedy to economic dislocation under Jimmy Carter. So when people talk about Reagan, they're really remembering an idea that they have about Reagan as the pure culture warrior that actually wasn't the case.

You know, it's an interesting question as to how Reagan thought of himself in racial terms. I think he felt that he believed in equal opportunity for all, but at the same time, I don't think he much concerned himself with the situation and the plight of minorities in this country, and particularly with African Americans. To some extent, there was a kind of indifference toward racial issues that came to displace the older Lincolnian sense of the importance of civil rights, and particularly equal opportunities for African Americans. But as I said, that was not really a conscious attitude on the part of Reagan. It was just a kind of approach that came to permeate the larger party. But on the other hand, yeah, go ahead.

You know, this relates very closely to the discussions of how people feel about the Tea Party and the Trump movement. Is it simply racial resentment that was being catered to on the part of white voters in both of these movements, or was it, to some extent, rooted in economic and other kinds of cultural grievance? And I've always come down with the answer being that it was some of both. If times are not hard, I do believe that the racism which is in place in people is simply less manifest. They're more willing to see others prosper, thinking that their gains are not coming at their own expense. But when demagogues such as Trump and others can really play on these racial grievances, then obviously they do come to the fore, particularly in harder times.

You know, I persist in what seems an old-fashioned belief. That Americans still agree on more than what they disagree on. And to some extent, I think those kind of underlying beliefs are shared by most members of both parties in Congress, but the reality is that the kind of cooperation that was once routine under presidents as dissimilar as Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan has now really broken down, and this is largely motivated on the Republican side by fear of the base. If the only thing you have to worry about in terms of retaining your power in the Senate is being outflanked from your right in a primary election, then that motivates you to hew to a conservative or Trumpist line, whatever you perceive the base as wanting, and it's been a long time since I can really think of a lot of Republicans standing up for what they believed in, even if the base did not, and even in some cases fighting with the base. I mean, the last prominent Republican of that sort was John McCain, which is why I think so many Americans miss John McCain right now.

And if we go back in time right, we can go back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965. If we're only talking about the number of yeses being more than the number of noes, then you don't have to have particularly broad conversations among senators to figure out what wording actually works for enough of them to pass the thing.

It's a great point. And you can see that certainly, with the civil rights legislation that you mentioned going back to the ‘57 [Civil Rights] Act, that Lyndon Johnson, as Senate majority leader, muscles his way through. And then, of course, the ‘64 Civil Rights Act and the ‘65 Voting Rights Act. What's striking about those examples, Sean, which are terrific examples, is that, you're right, the legislation gains more permanence from having to go through the filibuster threshold.

But historians, I think, would argue, [it] took much longer to get that legislation. And Jim Crow, and of course, before that, slavery, last a lot longer than they might have otherwise because of the filibuster, so you can see both sides. Would you agree with that?

Oh, absolutely, right. So in part of the arguments that we're hearing today is that the filibuster should ultimately be revoked from the rules of the Senate, for perhaps most importantly, because of its racist past. Right?

So we don't get legislation on civil rights until the late 1950s and 1960s, in part because of the filibuster and in the power of the super majoritarian requirement in the Senate. That there was no way that you could [a] get sufficient number of senators to pass something, even though there might have been fifty-one votes much earlier.

I want us to come back to the Obama package soon. But I think it's good to start with the New Deal, which you mentioned. What have we learned about the positive effects that came out of the New Deal? And maybe you want to take us also into the Great Society as well. What have we learned historically that we should know today when we discuss these issues?

The Great Society is different in that economic times are pretty good. And the whole premise of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s was that when the economy was growing, and when income was rising, there was no reason not to use a moment like that to address many problems which had been ignored, whether you're talking about entrenched poverty in this country, or the struggles of elderly Americans, who had no health insurance, and often were living in an incredibly vulnerable state, based on the health that they had or didn't have. And so that was less of a stimulus. But again, a very important economic intervention that stabilized key parts of American society, like the health insurance that older Americans now have.

And so what, what were the elements of FDR and Lyndon Johnson's efforts that allowed them to succeed against the opposition that you described so well before? This is one of the things you've written about in such detail, Julian, how did these two men get through what you defined as the traditional opposition to these kinds of programs?

Lyndon Johnson faced a different situation. And I'd say what was most important for him were two factors. One was the civil rights movement, which before he came into office, it just created an atmosphere where a status quo that did nothing on race and on other issues was no longer acceptable. And they put pressure from the bottom up in ways that made the conservatives feel as if they were on the defensive. And after 1964, LBJ is reelected against Barry Goldwater in a landslide election.

Democrats have huge majorities on Capitol Hill with the balance of the Democratic Party shifting from conservatives to liberals. And in 1965, it was just very hard for Republicans to say no anymore and very hard for Southern Democrats to stand in the way of these liberal majorities. So the window opens for Johnson for about a year, year and a half, where he can push through lots of programs.

Well, I think it was two histories that were influencing Obama in 2009. One was he is someone and was someone who was very cognizant of the importance of those interventions. He was not hesitant or torn up about the idea that government was essential as the economy was plummeting when he took office. Even before he was president, he had been very important to helping President Bush push through his stimulus package in 2008, which many Republicans opposed. But the candidate Obama giving support to that already indicated he understood that government mattered. He understood his New Deal history. He understood his Great Society history. And he very much came from that tradition.

That's exactly where my mind was going, my hopes were going, Julian. And I think that's an appropriate place for us to ask our closing question. Roosevelt, in particular, and to some extent Lyndon Johnson, if we take the Vietnam War out of things, which of course we really can't do, but certainly Franklin Roosevelt establishes a new consensus in American politics, to the point where Republicans have to start supporting New Deal policies because they're so popular. Is that a possibility?

So it's tough. I think the way that it can happen isn't through persuasion. It isn't through President Biden being able, through fireside chats or televised addresses, to convince Republicans to think in a different way. It's only if the case is made by government policy itself. It's kind of like Medicare, which was controversial when it started. It was hated by a lot of people in the Republican Party and the medical community but ultimately within a decade of its creation in 1965, lots of Americans, red and blue, love the program and had no interest in ever letting it go because they saw what it could do. And they saw how it could heal some of the problems American families faced.

You know, another thing to be careful about, and Jeremi, I know I'm talking to the expert here, is, look, when we do reach back for that analogy of the Cold War, which both does not work at all and also works in some ways, is during the Cold War, we have to be careful about areas of competition that are unhelpful for the United States, chasing our tail into some areas, right? So yeah, you know, it is both a driver, it's one that will focus the mind, but it's also one that we are in and we have to be very careful about as well.

Charlie, you've put so many interesting issues on the table in a historical perspective, allowing us to see that the competition is real, but it's more complex than just saying we're competitors, and we're going to mobilize all the resources we have. It's a much more delicate game of balancing different interests and different communities abroad and at home. For our listeners who are concerned about this conflict, either leading us to chase our tail, as you put it, in places where we don't want to expend our resources, that's one of the lessons of the Cold War, that competing against a legitimate adversary can lead us to do things that we regret, in retrospect, and get into conflicts we regret. But also, what are the things we can do to avoid the conflict getting out of control? What are the positive steps that we can take and that our listeners can think about encouraging in their political leaders?

It makes a lot of sense. Zachary, as a young person who follows these issues pretty closely and is concerned, do you see a pathway forward that Charlie's outlined here with his insightful comments about how the United States can compete without recreating perhaps some of the excesses of the Cold War or without going too far in certain areas in dangerous ways?

I definitely think so. And I think the Cold War analogy works to some extent, but it also doesn't because China and the United States, our societies and our populace are in many ways very connected, not just through trade, but through immigration and travel and other forms of business. So I think that the connection between our societies, people in the United States interacting with Chinese immigrants and people in China interacting with Americans, I think that in many ways, I think, allows for a framework where we can think about competition and challenging Chinese aggression without going too far.

It's interesting, Charlie. Zachary brought up a point that reminds me of one of, I think, the great insights that our mutual advisor, John Lewis made years ago, that one of the striking things about the US-Soviet relationship was how distant these societies were, how little the United States needed the Soviet Union, in fact. And it's the opposite with China. And Zachary's commenting, I think, on how that could be a positive element. That could be something that prevents some of the, let's say, mistakes and excesses of the past. Sort of as a final thought, do you agree with that? Is proximity and closeness a strength here?

And Josh, on this point of the strategic purpose, which I think Jim is obviously correct about, was at the core of NATO, would you say, before we talk about the end of the Cold War, during the Cold War, did NATO succeed in containing Soviet aggression and did it succeed in, as you discussed before, bringing Germany into the Western alliance in a way that was comfortable and effective for the countries of Europe and for the United States and Canada?

The plan was for eventually Western Europe to stand on its own two legs against the Soviets and the Americans could move more offshore. Judged against that very high standard, NATO during the Cold War didn't quite meet its goal as Mark Trachtenberg has written quite elegantly on how this problem came about, how these tensions lingered. But in terms of making Germany acceptable to other countries and making France and Britain, Belgium, Holland, so on and so forth, comfortable with Germany, NATO managed to succeed in that mission. And American influence was critical to that project.

So I often hear NATO spoken of sort of as almost analogous to the Warsaw Pact, but obviously there was much more of a back and forth between the countries. How much did internal relations between NATO members shape NATO policy during the Cold War?

Right. And yet they managed to stay together. That's a that's a perfect segue to to to Josh and your work on NATO expansion. And of course, Jim's written about this as well. So we'll get both of you in on this. What happened at the end of the Cold War, if ostensibly the most obvious reason for NATO to exist was the Soviet threat when the Soviet Union no longer existed after December 25th, 1991. Why did NATO not only continue to exist, but actually expand into places like Poland and the Czech Republic, places that had been part of the Warsaw Pact that Jim just just discussed? Josh, give us give us your understanding of expansion.

Well, so first of all, we have to remember that at the end of the Cold War, there were any number of plans and a number of calls to wrap up both of the Cold War alliances. The Warsaw Pact obviously fell apart and there were calls in some quarters for NATO to close up shop and to be replaced with either a new European security organization to anchor European security on the European Union, then the European community, but slowly coming together. The Conference on Security Cooperation in Europe. So there were all these calls to abandon ship or change course.

But when the Cold War ended and the Cold War ended, above all, with Germany's unification with East Germany melding into West Germany, the Lord Ismay statement of keeping the Germans and the Soviets out, you know, the Soviets were gone, but keeping the Germans in check remained a real concern, number one. And German leader Helmut Kohl at the time was very much aware of European concerns with newfound German power. And so there was a lingering desire to keep the Americans engaged in Europe, keep NATO alive.

So, you know, but there we are. And I think that it's just, what's so fascinating, we started with the focal point of Europe and the Soviet Union, how NATO was formed, what the thinking was at the end of the Cold War. In that period, as Josh said, Europe and Russia were the focal point of US foreign policy. That's what we thought about the most. And that's no longer true.

Thanks for having me.

It's always downhill after Zachary's poem, Mark. But Mark, you have, especially in this recent book, you've really delved into the ways in which the effort to build utopia, or a Great Society as Lyndon Johnson called it abroad in Vietnam, really distorted American thinking and American society. First of all, why was the United States trying to do this in Vietnam? Why were we looking to build this utopia, as Zachary put it, in a place so far away that so few Americans could even identify?

Well, I think the United States was in many places around the world in the 1960s, trying to demonstrate the applicability of its own economic and political and social systems as a way of waging the Cold War and sort of demonstrating to people all over the world that the United States had the answers when it came to human progress and development and effective governance.

This was a period of intense competition, as you well know, Jeremi, between the East and West for the loyalty and sympathy of societies all around the world. So it really mattered, I think, to Americans that they had the keys to unlocking development and democratization and progress in a broad way. Vietnam was just one of many places where Americans tried to achieve those objectives.

And why were our failures there? And of course, you and others have written in depth on the sources of our shortcomings in these activities. But why was it so disruptive? Why did it have such a deep effect at home, as Zachary refers to in his poem? And also,as your new book really narrates in such depth and in such compelling detail, why did it have such an effect on American foreign policy in so many other areas?

Well, I think that the American experience in Vietnam helped to tear down this set of ambitions that ran so high in the early 1960s. Americans in the late 1960s, perhaps in the early 1970s, by and large, believed that they had the ability because of their vast know-how, their technological capabilities, their resources. The world's most productive economy believed that they could bring real change to many countries around the world, and frankly, to their own society as well. I think there's a lot of continuity that has sometimes eluded historians between the domestic arena in which JFK and LBJ and other liberals were so determined to bring reform to all facets of American life, on the one hand, and the way that they approached the international scene as well, both in the international and domestic realms. Liberals believed that by marshaling the resources of the United States, the vast expertise that the United States had at its disposal, they could achieve great things.

And I think what happens across the 1960s, and this is really what I try to get at in the book, is that Americans lose that sense of ambition. And the Vietnam War is a crucial reason, well, only one of the reasons, but a crucial reason why Americans lose that sense of ambition and American foreign policy undergoes a transformation to something quite different by the late 1960s.

Well, I think one of the things that makes American foreign policy so difficult to understand sometimes is the ways in which self-interest and altruism blend in the way Americans think about the world. The old adage was, what's good for General Motors is good for the world. And I think that there's something really important in that kind of comment. Right? So many American policymakers believe that the United States was on the side of righteousness and had the keys to assuring progress and uplift for the whole world. But they had no doubt at the same time that the same policies would also serve the United States. So I think this distinction between self-interest and the larger global interest is clearer in retrospect than it was in the minds of the people who tended to make policy in the United States. And that was certainly true, I would say, during the 1960s.

And Mark, I think your book is really brilliant on that point because it shows, especially in your country-specific chapters, and I hope all of our listeners will go ahead and buy and read the book. Mark has chapters on Brazil, India, Iran, Indonesia, and Southern Africa. In each of these chapters, there's kind of a similar narrative arc, it seems to me, where the United States is initially pursuing self-interested goals, but also goals that are merged to some sense of democratic hope, some sense of positive change. And then in almost every one of these chapters, Mark, to my reading, the effects of the Vietnam War to push the United States toward more support for authoritarianism and often more militaristic behavior or supportive militaristic behavior on the ground. Is that a fair reading? And if so, why does that happen?

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that it's important to recognize that the American attitude toward the wider world in the early 1960s depended on a certain degree of confidence, right? That Americans could have their way in the wider world. It depended as well on the idea that the United States had the resources to pump into these areas to achieve the results that it wanted. And it relied as well, I think, on the idea that it was okay to take some risks, right? It might not ultimately pan out in every place, but it was worth the effort. And I think what you see across the 1960s, particularly as the Vietnam War heats up and really consumes debate in the United States, is that Americans question all of those ways of thinking that were easy to see at the beginning of the decade.

Resources are pumped into Southeast Asia in a way that makes them much less likely to want to expend resources elsewhere. LBJ becomes quite risk-averse, losing much of that tolerance for taking chances that I think had been part of the American approach in the early part of the decade, because he understood that the war was deeply controversial. And the last thing that he wanted was another controversy or another problem, another headache in the world.

So if there were reliable alternatives to be had out there in the Third World, LBJ was increasingly likely to seize on those and privilege stability above change across the board, I think you could say, by the end of the decade.

And just to build on that, Mark, another thing that struck me in your book was how often LBJ, the President of the United States, was willing to work with people he wouldn't work with otherwise if they were willing to support him in Vietnam. So in a strange way, the Vietnam War became a driver of American policy rather than American interests and ideals. Again, is that fair? And what are your thoughts on that?

I do think that's true. I think by certainly, LBJ is so focused on Vietnam that he sees every other policy challenge globally through that prism. And so even in relatively distant and perhaps somewhat unlikely places where you wouldn't think Vietnam was a major issue, LBJ is talking about Vietnam. So when he meets the generals in Brazil, when they come to visit him, I suppose I should say, or when he's talking to the Shah, Vietnam is very much on the agenda and he's looking for support. He's looking for indications that these regimes will support him, even if it's in a relatively symbolic way. That mattered a lot to LBJ as time passed.

So Mark, could you just say a little more about why that happens though? I mean, your book narrates that so well. And I was particularly struck by the Brazilian generals as well, because to me, you couldn't get farther from Vietnam than Brazil, right? But why is, I mean, this is the most powerful person in the world, President Lyndon Johnson. He's got so much experience also dealing with political failure as well as political success. Why does this small, as he says, this small country far away, why does it come to dominate everything this way?

Well, because I think that it came to dominate so thoroughly the American home fronts by 1967-1968. LBJ was nothing if not a political creature who was deeply sensitive to what was going on politically across American society, deeply sensitive to what was being said about him and his leadership. And so over time, I think he came to see Vietnam as the single major issue that confronted his administration.

And for this reason was prone to seeing every other issue through that prism. And I think you see it not only in connection with foreign policy issues, where you might be more likely to see connections among different foreign policy questions. You also see it in the domestic arena, where LBJ's attitudes toward his advisors, toward members of Congress, were deeply informed by his perception of where they stood on Vietnam and how they were likely to support him or not. It's, I think, one of the tragedies of the Johnson presidency that Vietnam becomes so all-consuming for him that every other issue becomes in some ways subordinate to it.

Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And, you know, Jeremi is one of the great authorities on this issue. But the way I would answer this question is as follows. I think that LBJ, as time passed and as Vietnam consumed his agenda, became increasingly concerned with exerting control, exerting control over an increasingly chaotic situation. And that chaos was apparent not only in Southeast Asia, but also in the streets of the United States and in the streets, frankly, of other cities around the world, particularly in the all important year of 1968.

He was aware that activism and unrest was increasingly a global phenomenon. And I think for this reason, was drawn to the idea that where stability seemed to be possible, where he could find partners who would cooperate with him and clamp down on at least some of this unrest, he was ready to seize those opportunities. So, you know, I bite off a piece of that larger story by looking at American relationships with countries in the third world.

Yeah, I thought, Mark, your book did really a wonderful job of taking that story that some of us have focused on and really connecting it to the story of what was called the third world and how this impacted not simply detente policy, a search for stability between the US and the Soviet Union and a search for law and order at home. Lyndon Johnson's the first to really use that phrase, law and order. But as you show in this book, as I think no one has before, how this really comes to define, again, American policy in Brazil and Indonesia, which to me was, again, startling. I had seen hints of this, but my gosh, the depth of it, I think we have not appreciated until reading your book.

I think that the result of the trends that I write about in the book is that the United States by the early 1970s is drawn very strongly to the notion of stability in the third world. As I've said, most of that ambition that was so characteristic of the early 60s has disappeared. I think it really was Richard Nixon and someone you know, Jeremi, better than anyone, Henry Kissinger, who fully articulated the logic that had become clear to the Johnson administration as the 1960s passed.

What jumps out at me in connection with the history of the 1970s is how unstable some of those, many of those relationships that the United States had formed in the interest of assuring stability turned out to be. So the relationship with the Shah of Iran, very appealing, right? Under the chaotic circumstances of the 1960s gives way to massive instability in the 1970s. The quest for stability in Latin America gives rise to a new period of instability and chaos in some places, at least, as the 1970s advances. And on and on, we could go looking really around the world.

You are not kidding. I mean, the similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, on the one hand, and Vietnam on the other, have been a subject of a vast amount of writing. I'm certainly persuaded that the similarities are eerie in many, many ways. And we could certainly spend some time, if you like, talking about some of the ways in which those wars were similar. The way I would tell the story of the way in which Americans have thought about and tried to draw lessons from the history of the Vietnam War would go something like this. In the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War, Vietnam lost some of its power in American politics and society.

But I think it was really the Iraq War, and particularly the difficulties that the United States ran into there between, say, 2004 and 2007 or so, that brought Vietnam very much back to the forefront, at least in connection with debates over foreign policy. And I think around the same time as political polarization really became that much more extremein the United States, you could also see that Vietnam continued to operate at a very deep level in American society as a touchstone for deep-seated social and cultural debates over some pretty profound issues that tend to divide Americans over questions like their Americans' relationship to their government, the reasonable obligations that government can impose on citizens, the duties of citizens to protest and object to the behavior of theirgovernment, and so forth. A lot of those questions, I think, that Vietnam really put on the table remain very much part of American political life and unfortunately tend to divide Americans very deeply to this day.

I think that's super helpful, but then it opens up another question, right? If so many American leaders who were making policy and American voters who were voting for those leaders had the experience of Vietnam in mind in one way or another, and here I'm thinking about people like recently passed Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Richard Cheney, Obama himself, who was reading about Vietnam at the start of his presidency. How could they make mistakes of excessive ambition, if that's what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, if, as you point out, the lesson was so clearly to limit ambition?

Well, that lesson, I think one has to acknowledge cuts against some pretty deep-seated impulses that run through American history and American political culture, even in the post-Vietnam period. I think going a very long way back in American history, you can see a strong impulse to bring uplift and progress and reform to the wider world, to impose the American model on the rest of the world, to assume that the American model is applicable indeed to the rest of the world. So Vietnam, I would argue, and certainly many other Americans would argue, does teach the lesson of humility, of the fact that there are limits on what the United States can achieve in the world. But I think that one of the things that stands out pretty clearly in the history of American foreign relations in the last years, since the end of the Vietnam War, is that that lesson was only partially learned, only really learned by some Americans. And of course, there's a whole other set of lessons that were learned by people with a different set of preferences when it comes to American foreign policy.

Well, one of the lessons I think is the predictable one and the one that we've already spoken about, that there are clear limits on what the United States has historically been able to achieve and presumably can achieve going forward in the world. I think that lesson of Vietnam, as I mentioned just a moment ago, was imperfectly learned, was learned only by some Americans. And yet I think it's a lesson that we constantly need to be reminded of and to consider as the United States confronts inescapably more Vietnam-like, Afghanistan-like, Iraq-like problems in the years to come.

And the reason why I say I think there's something a little bit optimistic in that observation is that this is probably a lesson that many Americans, regardless of where they stand on the big questions of the legacy of the Vietnam War, could perhaps agree on. We recognize that there are risks in going too far in one place and sort of losing a sense of proportionality, losing an ability to prioritize. Um, so it may be that. When the problem is framed in that way, what are America's priorities? Where, where should it attach greater importance and devote more resources? We could find space for agreements or at least broad consents.

Sure. So, first of all, I just want to say I love listening to this podcast, mostly for Zachary's poems. And so he's given me a lot to think about there. And something he said in there made me think about this being the first "TikTok war" that we have going on today. So NATO, of course, was founded in 1949 with its 12 original members signing the Washington Treaty. And, of course, this is when much of Europe is in the ashes and just really beginning to recover from the devastation of World War II. And it's, you know, it's sort of the original charter of transatlanticism. You know, the United States and Canada from North America are two of the original members. And then 10 at the time, just Western European countries. And I think one way to think about why is NATO, you know, why are the particular 30 members today up from the original 12? Like, you know, why has this come to pass? I think to some degree, international relations theory shed some light on this. And I think NATO, when it was founded, really fell more into the realist kind of, you know, IR theory camp. And it was, you know, it was always for something, specifically the principles of democracy, individual liberty and rule of law. But it was really against something just as much, and it was against the Soviet Union and what it stood for.

And it was all about the collective defense of Western Europe at the time. And then, you know, in 1989 through 1991, when, you know, to the surprise of many, the Berlin Wall falls, the Warsaw Pact dissolves, the Soviet Union disintegrates. And NATO's really their reason for existing, i.e. the Soviet Union, you know, is no longer such a threat. And so, you know, the London summit in 1991 is really when NATO leaders ask one another, you know, what is our reason for existing now? And I think this is when we see a fundamental shift, really, from sort of the realist IR theory to really liberal internationalism. And more back to, as I mentioned at the beginning, in 1949, NATO was always for something, not just against the Soviet Union, right? And so really in 1991, this is when we start to see consideration of promotion of democracy, expanded cooperation and dialogue with former Warsaw Pact members and even former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe. And of course, over time, the two biggest tranches are in 1999 with Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary being offered admission. And then in 2004, when, you know, seven more allies are admitted in of particular note, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are the three former Soviet states. And so I think there's this tension inside of NATO where it kind of goes back and forth between realism and liberal institutionalism or liberal internationalism, I should say. And I wonder now if we might be at another inflection point, you know, where collective defense of Europe, it's an original reason for existing there with NATO, I wonder if that again becomes the central task of the alliance.

Sure. So one of the great, one of my central critiques in my dissertation is that NATO historians, scholars, and I would just say everyday pundits treat NATO from, you know, with the state as the central unit of analysis. And NATO is often considered just an aggregation of X number of members' state preferences. The United States, of course, has always had the largest economy and the largest military inside of NATO. And therefore, you know, its preferences are seen as counting, you know, the most relative to other allies. And I think that that's, you know, a fundamentally insufficient means of understanding the alliance and how it works. The institution of NATO matters and the institution of NATO, specifically its political headquarters in Brussels, and then its military headquarters at SHAPE in Mons. And I think too often we overlook the key role that institutional leaders represented by the secretary general, you know, at the political headquarters in Brussels and then the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, particularly during the Cold War, but even still today, really play a central role in what policies or adaptations NATO makes. And so I think NATO is, you know, we have to account for the institution as well in any kind of outcomes and not just treat it as an aggregation of states.

Sure. So, you know, Vladimir Putin has famously said, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. And so, more recently, I think, as recently as last week, we've seen in his speeches, where he also talks even beyond the, you know, the 50 or so year history of the Soviet Union, he talks about the Russian Empire. And he sees Russia as a great power, and Russia has a, you know, a right to a sphere of influence. Because of, again, because of, you know, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, by and large, have demonstrated a desire to be part to be free to be part of the West. And those countries reside, you know, their land is where Putin understands the Russian sphere of influence to reside. And so there's inevitable conflict there.

I think it's also worth noting that, you know, German Chancellor Merkel, for 16 years, she worked, you know, to bring peace and partnership through economic trade. And, you know, as a result, you know, today, we see that, you know, about 40% of Germany's energy needs comes from Russia. And unfortunately, that does not seem to have satiated Putin's desire to invade neighbors.

I think as we look at Russia, they have a long term economic decline projected, I think, as a larger portion, you know, because their economy is so reliant on oil and natural gases. You know, as many countries around the world pursue renewable energy. They also have long term demographic problems. They have poor public health. And I think for that reason, Putin may realize that Russia is probably as strong today as it will be for a really long time. Similarly, as he looks at Ukraine, and we've seen Ukraine aggressively move towards the West. And I think that at the end of the day, Putin's number one concern is staying in power and regime survival. And it really undercuts his autocratic model to see a successful democracy aligned with the West right next door in what he considers his ethnic kinmen.

I really love the process that NATO is using, though, to drive adaptation. So NATO has produced two reports over in the past few months. One of them is called the NATO 2030 report, written by a bunch of leading experts. And in that one, we see calls for increased national resiliency, among other things, you know, energy security as another initiative. And then we also see NATO produces a second report independently created. It's called the Young Leaders report. And I think that it's really important. I think NATO is really getting it right to get the perspectives of multiple generations of NATO scholars as it looks how to posture itself going forward. I certainly, you know, can't predict the outcome of the current conflict in Ukraine, but we absolutely are seeing NATO aggressively, you know, seek to create a deterrence effect along its eastern flank. Nobody knows at this point what Putin's endgame is. He hasn't said, you know, does it go beyond Ukraine? And so I think it's not coincidental that we see the former Warsaw Pact members and former Soviet states, particularly Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and I would put Romania in this category too, as the most vocal. Bilaterally, not through NATO, but bilaterally are transferring the largest number, for example, of anti-tank weapon systems to the Ukrainian people to defend themselves. And so we see that the NATO response force has been activated for the first time for collective defense purpose, you know, since it was created. We've seen increased deployments from the Germans, from the British, and from the Americans to further the deterrence effect, you know, for the forces that were already in place in the three Baltic countries in Poland and Romania.

That's absolutely right. A key point of the book is that double digit growth rates and a rapid rise is not the norm for any country and certainly not for China. In fact, most of Chinese history is very much the opposite. It's strife and poverty. I mean, really from the first Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, China's getting ripped apart by imperialist powers and internal conflicts that are among the worst civil wars in recorded history. Even after China unifies under communist rule in 1949, it almost immediately becomes the main enemy of the United States through the Korean War. And then when China's alliance with the Soviet Union falls apart in 1960, China is the main enemy of both Cold War superpowers. And so it's not until you get to the 1970s that China is not isolated, surrounded, and impoverished. And so in the book, we try to show that China's exceptional rise since the 1970s was the result of exceptional circumstances that we think are all starting to turn into liabilities that will drag China down.

I mean, since the 1970s, you've had US engagement and that was the start also of the period of hyper globalization. So China suddenly has these opportunities to really become the workshop of the world and export its goods all over the place. You have a Chinese government after the death of Mao in 1976 that says, we don't wanna do another cultural revolution, let's try reform and opening. And so they commit to a sort of smarter form of autocracy that's more technocratic and rewards good governance, especially economically. You have the greatest demographic dividend in history with something like 10 to 15 workers per retiree in China's population in the 90s and 2000s. Most countries don't get anywhere close to 5 to 1. And then you just had relative self-sufficiency in resources and easy access to those raw materials made growth very cheap.

But now all of those tailwinds that propelled China's rise are becoming headwinds. China's plowed through its resources. Half of its water and arable land, its oil are gone. It's the largest importer of food and energy. It's running out of people. That 10 to one ratio of workers to retirees is gonna collapse to two to one by the late 2030s. The government obviously is sliding back towards this sort of brutal dictatorship and a Maoist cult of personality that is gonna sacrifice future economic growth just to centralize power in Xi Jinping's hands. And then most importantly, the world is just starting to become belatedly a less welcoming environment. The United States used to engage China. Now I would argue it's essentially engaged in neo-containment of China. And many other major economies are following suit to varying degrees. China now faces thousands of new trade and investment barriers today that it didn't even as recently as 10 years ago. So from hyper-globalization to this sort of Cold War II scenario. These things are already dragging down China's growth and we think that they're actually gonna get worse in the years ahead.

And so you have governments that may be more autocratic, they may simply be more corrupt, but they're easier targets in some ways for the expansion of Chinese influence. But even where that's not the case, there is a real desire for relations with China because China has things that the developing world needs, whether that's trade or it could be surveillance technology, it could be a variety of things. And so one of the areas where we think you'll see a particular Chinese push in the coming years is to try essentially to create an economic and technological sphere of influence that encompasses much of the developing world.

And to give you one example of this, you only have to go back about three years, maybe even a little less than that, to remember that there was a time when it appeared that much of the advanced democratic world might actually fall into part of a Chinese technological sphere of influence by allowing Huawei or other Chinese companies like ZTE to build out important parts of their 5G telecommunications network. That danger has been averted now for the most part because most governments in Europe, for instance, realized with an assist from COVID that they did not wanna be technologically dependent on a company that is enthralled to the CCP. But that argument has proven less persuasive in the developing world. Price may be the all important consideration for countries in Southeast Asia or Sub-Saharan Africa that are making choices about the future of their telecommunications networks. And so the fact that the CCP subsidizes companies like Huawei to such a high degree allows them to essentially come in with lower prices than firms in the developed world can. And so you may end up with a situation where China finds that its technological influence is easier to spread in the developing world than in the advanced democracies.

Well, I think the basic problem with the responsible stakeholder thesis, which was first explicitly articulated by Bob Zoellick back in 2005, and in some ways provided the intellectual architecture for a lot of US policy toward China during the post-Cold War era. The challenge is that there's just less and less evidence to support it all the time. And so if the responsible stakeholder thesis bore out, we should expect to see a China that becomes more satisfied and more reconciled to the existing international system and all the things that go with it as it became richer, more powerful, more integrated into the system. Because the logic of the idea was that once China saw all of the things it could achieve simply by inserting itself economically into the existing order, it would lose any incentive to overturn or challenge that order.

And it's interesting to look back at the Cold War, because there are some parallels between the situation that the United States faces now and the situation that it faced during the early Cold War. I think most American officials during the early Cold War believed that the U.S. system would prove stronger than the Soviet system over time, but there were moments when the geopolitical balance appeared extremely precarious, either because Western Europe was in danger of outright economic collapse in 1947, 1948, in a way that might've opened the door to Soviet hegemony in Europe, or during the Korean War, when it appeared that the United States was facing a window of military vulnerability that it had to close very quickly. And so there are a handful of lessons that we take away from this, but I think one of the things that becomes really apparent from looking at the history of the early Cold War is not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And so a lot of the legendary policies that the United States pursued during this period, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, things of that nature, were not initiatives that were planned for months or years beforehand. They were things that were basically slapped together in moments of crisis, because the alternative to moving quickly and decisively looked far, far worse. George Kennan's policy planning staff came up with the outline of the Marshall Plan in about three weeks in May, 1947. NATO actually was a European initiative that the United States decided to sign onto. And the sense of the time was that the United States had to be willing to take risks. It had to be willing to work with new partners, including enemies that it had just defeated, like Japan and West Germany. And it had to be able to move quickly to close windows of vulnerability before they became too dangerous. And that's a similar lesson the United States needs to take away in thinking about the China challenge today.

And you give some very concrete suggestions in the book, which I encourage listeners to look at, and also you quote Dean Acheson quite often, and I think it's always, always beneficial to quote Dean Acheson, in particular on the importance of showing strength sometimes to prevent worse outcomes from from occurring. Mike, on this line of thinking, though, I wanted to ask you, how do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction? One of the criticisms that Hal and myself and others and you have made about American Cold War policymaking is, although we did good work in many places and other places we sometimes overcommitted, went into wars we shouldn't have been in, and there were often domestic costs as well, and so you know the very period Hal is referring to in the late 40s is also the rise of McCarthyism in the United States, and I know, and I'm sure you and Hal know this better than I do, you know, for many Chinese Americans talk of more explicit American containment policy toward China raises worries about anti-Chinese sentiment within the United States, which we saw a lot of evidence of during the pandemic. How do we prevent ourselves from over committing in the other direction?

I think on the domestic factor, just making sure that you're separating the Chinese Communist Party from the Chinese people, and that our main problem is with some of the policies that the CCP is pursuing, not China necessarily as a nation. In terms of the, you know, we also try to derive lessons from history of what not to do, and you know, the United States imposed a massive oil embargo on Japan in 1941 and that pushed Tokyo to attack Pearl Harbor to try to survive, and today the United States could have a comprehensive tech embargo on China to try to trash its economy. It could enact across-the-board trade sanctions against it. It could even take some provocative pages from the Cold War playbook and start a huge covert action program to stir up Tibetan resistance, we hear resistance, foment internal violence, and sow chaos in Chinese society. And I think any of those measures would risk catalyzing the exact kind of conflict that we're trying to avoid.

So we try to argue that a danger zone strategy, you're trying to prevent war from breaking out, not catalyze it, and so you have to balance strength and caution, and so first of all, it's you have to prioritize that you should really just be focusing on key areas where if China scores a near-term success, it could radically upend the long-term trends that we currently see as favorable overall to the United States, so prioritizing a defense of Taiwan, making sure that China is not able to carve out this sort of authoritarian tech empire across the global south, but if China wants to spend lavishly on white elephant infrastructure projects across the world through Belt and Road, I think those are things the United States doesn't necessarily have to oppose everywhere and at all times. And there's also limits that the United States can draw in terms of engaging in political warfare with the CCP and potentially destabilizing the regime in ways that would make it extremely desperate in the short run, and then I think you just have to have an eyes wide open approach to diplomacy, you know, if you can build the strength and then negotiate from that position of strength, then you can do things like have you really work on crisis management and confidence building mechanisms, military to military exchanges, hotlines, all the classic kind of ways to buffer geopolitical competition. I think can be done as long as you're coming at it from a position of strength that doesn't give your rival this potential window to do a smash and grab operation over something like Taiwan in the short term.

I really appreciate it in the book how both of you talk about the importance of maintaining diplomatic connections, because I do think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that even in the worst moments of US-Soviet rivalry, talking was important. Diplomatic connections mattered, and the moments when we had least connection were often some of the most dangerous. And I think it's a point you emphasize, and I want to emphasize too, that as one is acting perhaps to strengthen Taiwan's defense, that doesn't mean you stop talking to the Chinese. In fact, it means you talk to the Chinese while you're doing that, and hope that you can make diplomatic progress at that moment. You both make the point in your book that if at some point the Chinese were willing to agree, as the United States did with Cuba, for example, in 1962 to a non-invasion pledge, that might be something the United States would want to talk about as a compromise agreement. I'm correct on this, right, that you, you both see diplomacy as a key part of the story, even as this relationship might become more militarized, yes?

Absolutely, and I think one of the lessons of the Cold War is that diplomacy isn't silly peacenik stuff, it's actually quite useful from a competitive perspective, as well. It's a way of keeping your allies on side. It's a way of convincing your own domestic public that you are actually trying to exhaust all avenues short of confrontation for getting what you want. It's a way of maintaining contact with the other side, so that you know when a breakthrough may be possible. And so, as Mike said, you've got to have your eyes wide open about it, and we shouldn't think that simply talking to the CCP is going to lead them to change how they think about their interests, but the strategic arguments for doing so, I think, are very compelling.

(Hal, your thoughts?) Yeah, well, the book I wrote before this was about lessons of the Cold War, and one of the most hopeful lessons of the Cold War is that geopolitical rivalry gives you an incentive to do things you ought to do anyway to improve your own society, and so the United States, for all of the nasty things it did to itself during the Cold War, also did some really constructive things, it invested massively in its own future by funding the world's best university education system, by developing big infrastructure projects like the interstate highway system, and through a variety of other means. The Cold War, in this case, and this is a contested argument, but one that I think it's true. Actually, helped the United States become a better version of itself, even though the progress was uneven. I hope very much that we will see the competition with China as an opportunity to do something similar today. I think there has been some initial progress in that direction with the passage of chips just recently, which Mike referred to, of course, there have also been some ugly aspects of the turn toward competition, including a surge in anti-Asian violence and a variety of other things, and so sort of the angels and demons always compete with each other, but we have been successful in the past of using competition as a way to strengthen ourselves internally, and that's the precedent we ought to try to emulate today.

Right? And our economies are certainly much more.. this is this is a point John Gaddis made a long time ago, that one of the unique features of the Cold War is that the United States and the Soviet Union actually had very few economic and trade interconnections, that's of course not the case for the US and China right now. I think your point, Zachary, is very well taken, and it echoes what both Mike and Hal said here on the podcast, and say in their wonderful book, which is that we study history, and their book is filled with useful historical analysis. We study history because it shows us that human beings have choices, they're difficult choices to make, and I think our discussion today is about the difficult choices the United States, as a democracy, has to make in order to avoid war, in order to avoid conflict, and hopefully build a more stable international system, where perhaps there's more space, as Mike just said, for a discussion about democracy, as well. I think this book and this discussion open up so many avenues, really, for thinking about current conditions in a useful way, in a way that's not simply about name calling and a kind of determinist assumption about war. And so I really, really appreciate the conversation. I highly recommend the book to all of our listeners. Again, it's called Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, written by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, filled with contemporary information, but of course, the part that's always most valuable: historical knowledge and research that's useful in understanding the present. Mike and Hal, thank you so much for joining us today.

He talked about the great chess match of leadership, and he knew he was outmatched by Khrushchev during those two vital days, and knows that Khrushchev leaves that summit emboldened, thinking that Kennedy was, in Khrushchev's words, too intelligent and too weak. By too intelligent, he means he's book smart, but he's not street smart. I can exploit this guy, Khrushchev thinks, coming out of this.

Kennedy knows this. He goes back to the American embassy in Vienna and talks off the record to Scotty Reston, and he admits to Reston that he has been savaged by Khrushchev. He realizes until Khrushchev doesn't respect him that there could be a crisis that emerges out of Khrushchev's deep confidence that he can outmaneuver Kennedy. That becomes this crucible in Kennedy's leadership. He knows he needs to show Khrushchev that he is a strong leader, or Khrushchev will move to exploit him.

But while he had the country rallied around him, he quickly stumbled with the Bay of Pigs and the failed incursion of Cuba as we tried to oust Fidel Castro from leadership. And yet, and this really says something, Jeremi, and yet in that desperate hour in his presidency, so soon into a very auspicious run in the White House, he sees his approval rating at 83%. This is after the Bay of Pigs.

But we also realize that it was so important to have a strong leader at a time when the Soviet Union was vying for hearts and minds across the world and trying to dominate much of the world landscape. That was the central crisis of the age. In that moment, Jeremi, and then at that desperate moment in his presidency, I think Kennedy shows to some degree his character. He's humble. He takes accountability. As he says in a press conference, success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with me, as Truman might have said. He took responsibility and vowed to the American people to do better. And he does.

He doesn't accomplish a great deal in the presidency, particularly compared to his successor, Lyndon Johnson, who was a legislative genius and promulgated the Great Society, which fundamentally changed America. But those ideas that Kennedy put forth so artfully, so elegantly in the speeches he gave made us believe in ourselves as a nation, and I think made citizens of the world believe in the United States as a leader, as a beacon of freedom. He goes on this rhetorical hitting streak at a last year of his life that is tantamount to Ted Williams in 1941. It's remarkable, all these speeches back to back to back in different areas that fundamentally change who we are in many respects.

I want to dig a little deeper, and you have so many nuggets in your book about this, because every president, of course, tries to be eloquent. Kennedy was in some sense trying to be Franklin Roosevelt, and every president since Kennedy tries to mimic Kennedy or mimic Reagan. Why is it that some presidents are able to do this and others aren't? And why was Kennedy able to do this, and even his successor, who interestingly comes on stage late in your book, Lyndon Johnson, why was he unable to do this?

The television age was coming into prominence when Kennedy came into office, but for television, it's likely that Kennedy wouldn't have been chosen as our 35th president. The debates, the first presidential debates in history, were held on television between Kennedy and Nixon, and many of us as presidential nerds can summon those images of a very pasty-faced, five o'clock shadowed Richard Nixon versus this glowing, handsome, leading man type in John F. Kennedy, and that image really mattered.

So, good politicians understand the importance of the mediums of their time, and they understand the importance of image. Kennedy got both of those things very vividly. Just in terms of the speeches he gave, Jeremi, let me just give one example, if I may, of why Kennedy was so effective, and it comes in 1963.

Kennedy had reacted largely to the crisis of civil rights. He wasn't proactive at all. He was trying, in fact, to tamp down the Civil Rights movement because it exposed not only the nation but to the world to the worst of American apartheid at a time when, as I mentioned, we were trying to compete for hearts and minds across the world with the Soviet Union. That made us look bad, like we weren't living up to our ideals as a nation.

Absolutely, Jeremi, and you and I have talked about this, how Kennedy was so reactive on this, but eventually, he sees the crisis brewing in Birmingham where Martin Luther King had brought his campaign, the most segregated city in America. He finally realizes he's got to go on TV to ensure that George Wallace, who is standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama trying to prevent its integration, does not get the headline that night, does not get the lead story on the 6 o'clock news. He is encouraged by his brother Bobby to go and speak to the issue of civil rights on television.

Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter, tells Kennedy he doesn't have enough time, in eight hours, to write a presidential primetime speech, but Bobby encourages his brother to go on anyway and to speak from his heart. This very iconic speech about civil rights is largely extemporaneous from Kennedy, who had the courage to go on national television and speak his mind about the issue of civil rights, and in so, he calls it a moral issue, elevating the cause of civil rights to a moral issue for the first time in our history, and it is a turning point in the struggle for civil rights.

I wanted to point out also, Mark, that one of the many things I learned from your book is how effective Kennedy's press conferences were as well, which I think is another version of what you're talking about now, his ability, yes, to use the words that Sorensen and other speechwriters, Richard Goodwin, had put together for him, but his ability to own the words and often to extemporize off the cuff and connect with an audience. You say, it's extraordinary, this is around page 60 in the book, that about 18 million people on average saw his press conferences, 90 percent of Americans, 90 percent of Americans watched at least one of his first three, according to a 1961 poll. That's extraordinary, that's the Twitter of its time, isn't it?

That's exactly right, and I think the American people were able to see Kennedy in his element, going toe-to-toe with some of these wonderful journalists. Kennedy had been a journalist himself at the close of the Second World War when he left the military, he went and worked for Hearst Newspapers in Europe covering the war, and he had great respect for journalists. That didn't mean he always agreed with what they wrote about him, and it certainly took exception to a lot of what they wrote, but he was so beguiling, and I think the American people could see his facility with language, with the English language, his extensive knowledge of the issues, and frankly, this was the must-see TV of its time in many ways.

We were just so beguiled, the press included, with this young, elegant, auspicious president. It's interesting, five days after his inauguration, I believe a third of all Americans tuned into that first press conference because we were so entranced by him, and among other things, Jeremi, he had to tell the American people to stop sending letters and telegrams because the West Wing was becoming overwhelmed.

Those are two fundamentally different skills. On the one hand, you have somebody who needs to convey ideas to the American people, to the press, and on the other hand, somebody who has to work behind the scenes to get his agenda done. Your dad mentioned LBJ earlier and why LBJ was not able to effectively communicate as JFK did.

Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, while he was incredibly effective behind the scenes, perhaps no one was more effective than him in the 20th century, contrived this ostensibly presidential personality that simply was not authentic. It was disingenuous and it really in effect tamped down the Lyndon Johnson that was so powerful behind the scenes. I think that was part of Kennedy's appeal. He was really the genuine article. He was the real deal and part of that was his authenticism.

Right, and you certainly show that very well, in a really well-described few chapters, I think, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I want readers to read the book. I don't want us to share all that with them. I want them to buy the book to read that, because I think the Cuban Missile Crisis, as you say, is probably the most significant Cold War crisis.

He began his career writing some of the cutting-edge scholarship on the Black Power movement, then went on to write about Stokely Carmichael and Barack Obama, and now, of course, this really great book on The Third Reconstruction. I should also mention, I almost forgot, his wonderful and really groundbreaking book on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as well as The Sword and the Shield. And now, as I said, we have The Third Reconstruction. Before we go to our discussion with Dr. Peniel Joseph, we have, of course, Zachary Suri's scene- setting poem. What's your poem titled today, Zachary?

Right, and you see a cycle, right? I mean, in some ways, you're doing your own cycles of American history here, right? You see these cycling through these moments of Reconstructionist promise, the first one after the Civil War, the second one after the Second World War, reaching its pinnacle with the Civil Rights Movement and the third with Obama. And you see also in each case a pushback or a backlash, as you call it, right?

Absolutely. I think we are in these unhappy patterns of history and we can see it in all three periods of Reconstruction. I think the reason why we usually focus more in the second Reconstruction than the first is because it provides us with a context to get to Barack Obama. And like I say in the book, it's not just Barack Obama, though. That second Reconstruction really configures a social justice, racial justice consensus for the next 50 years. And that's how we get Hillary Clinton. That's how we get John Ossoff. That's how we get really the most wealth and power and equity that people of color have ever had, and women, in the whole history of the republic. It's from 63 to 2013.

When you look at our republic before then, you don't have as many people of color and women who are elected officials, who are businesspersons and entrepreneurs, who are successful, fabulously successful, who are able to create wealth, who are able to become leaders in so many different industries, not just acting and pop culture and sports, but in the sciences and at universities. I mean, me and you are examples of that. So I think that period is hugely, hugely important.

In the second Reconstruction, the narrative that wins is going to be King's narrative, the I Have a Dream narrative, John F. Kennedy's narrative, the narrative that it's a moral issue of civil rights and human and political rights.

And I think in the third Reconstruction, what we've seen is really two narratives budding together, really at least three narratives truthfully budding together. One is the Obama narrative, America is a place where all things are possible. Really what he reiterated to us, he iterated the first time at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and then in 2008 throughout the whole campaign, 07-08, but certainly in Grant Park in November 4th, 2008, where he's saying America is a place where all things are possible. And in some levels, he says his election proves it, but also just that multiracial crowd proves it. 40 years earlier, that place had been a site of real political catastrophe for the country and the Democratic Party when the Chicago police brutalized nonviolent, peaceful, anti-war protesters.

And those protesters shouted, the whole world is watching. And they were really mocking the United States. They were mocking the notion of American democracy because in certain ways, when we look at 1968 in Chicago, they were saying the whole world is watching that American democracy is a sham. We are being beaten and brutalized, including there were grandmothers being beaten by the Chicago PD in the summer of 1968. You flash, you fast forward 40 years later and it's a peaceful demonstration with really a couple of hundred thousand people in Grant Park celebrating a president-elect who many thought was an impossible dream. That's really, really powerful. So that narrative seems to be winning.

You know, one of the things I talk about in the book, and I think me and you agree with this, Jeremi, is that we need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but that doesn't mean we don't need a positive story of America, right? And I'll say that again. We need to move beyond American exceptionalism, but it does not mean we don't need a positive, consensus-building, aspirational story of America. Martin Luther King Jr. called it building the beloved community.

1199, SCIU is the most multiracial union in the country. So we have to tell that complete story. The story of Black people forced to be so-called scabs because they weren't allowed in labor unions, but also the story of utilizing the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, DRUM, and the different revolutionary union movements coming out of Detroit and wildcat striking against the UAW so that Black folks could be foremen and have dignity on the shift line and on the worker line.

Most people, millions across the United States are going to need them. So I would say this requires courage because yeah, you have to remember Dr. King pissed people off. Obama pissed people off. Jesse Jackson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker. You're not always going to get the standing ovation when you tell people what they need to hear instead of telling people what they want to hear.

But one of the things King says in his speech, a drum major, for the drum major speech is that he's not interested in molding some kind of phony consensus. He says, I'm a builder and I'm going to shape consensus through my organizing. That means you tell people what they don't want to hear. So part of this, it requires courage on us, really. And again, it requires a lot of study and listening and patience because yes, the story is complicated, but there are some really robust truths that we should all be willing to articulate. And I think at our best, we do.

Certainly, she wanted you to be careful, but to demonstrate that belief. And so she's been hugely, hugely important. The history of Haiti and the Haitian revolution, which I discuss and its connection to Black American history, the connection between Black feminism and these different social movements, but also just American politics and history. She's a big fan and reader of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy alongside of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Really loved reading books on not just the Haitian revolution, but Theodore Roosevelt and the American presidents. I remember getting my first book on the American presidents and kindergarten with her from the local public library in Queens. And that was a book that we used to always check out, check back in, check out, check back in.

And she, again, throughout the book, I look at these different Black activists, a lot of them Black women like Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Tamika Mallory, but she's been my biggest example. And she does provide me a measure, a large measure of hope. And hope really is a discipline. It's a faith and it's a discipline and it's a belief. And it's a discipline based on our practice. I think sometimes people who don't feel hopeful are really not out there in the world trying to help and do good.

Well, they do. Although, you know, it depends, I guess, on what one means by conservative, right? What is, and what does radical mean? You know, conservative, you know, at least in a kind of mid-20th century context for a lot of conservatives, did not necessarily mean conserving, did not mean conserving, let's say, the welfare state, or did not mean necessarily conserving, you know, U.S. foreign policy as it was defined in World War II or the early Cold War. It meant upending, right?

What did he mean by that? Well, he meant, I think, that the society enabled people to take action in their communities against the communist menace. So instead of just talking about communism, instead of just lamenting that, you know, communists and their allies had made inroads, the society allowed people to act. And in fact, Robert Welch and the Birch Society, the headquarters, one of the innovative things they did is to give people, give members, opportunities to go out in their community and take over a school board or a PTA or, you know, protest Earl Warren or put stickers up.

The best estimates are 60 to 100,000 members in the mid 1960s, 64, 65, around the time of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign and shortly thereafter. But it's, you know, it's been hard for historians and contemporaries at the time to get a real handle on the numbers because, you know, the society was quite secretive about its membership. The membership was, I think, constantly in flux. As I said before, they had these small chapters. So it was really hard to track, you know, who was a member, who wasn't.

Well, for some Birchers and Birch supporters, it meant Brown versus Board of Education. It meant that Warren deserved to be impeached, because he had trampled on states' rights, and he had basically destroyed what they called the right, the freedom, to segregate by race in their states, in their towns. But to other people, also, it meant they did not like Warren's jurisprudence on banning prayer in schools, giving rights to criminal defendants. All of the kind of what we think of today as these sort of cultural hot-button issues. And impeach Earl Warren could encompass all of these pieces. And some were motivated by one piece, and others another. And it really was, I think, a powerful and memorable‚ and also Warren himself, apparently, was not a fan of this movement.

And they have a sense of a lost America, right, an America that had vanished. And it had vanished in part because of the growth of the welfare state, the encroachment, as they saw it, of civil rights, judicial intervention and overreach, and also the liberal internationalism, right, American engagement in the world.

I think that maybe that's one aspect of the book and kind of some of the themes of the book. I mean, Hofstadter, obviously, I mean, Hofstadter has to inform whether one agrees or disagrees with him. He's really seminal and he informs anyone who's writing about the modern American right. I tend to shy away from the use of the word paranoid in the book because, well, it's clinical and also it's pejorative. And what I also resist is trying to define the Birchers primarily through conspiracy theories, because at the time they were known for the, well, Robert Welch's, the Founder's Theory, that Dwight Eisenhower was a dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy. And that's a fluoridation of the water supply was a communist plot.

He got primaried by a guy named Joe Schell, who took about a third of the primary vote, was not a Bircher, but won the support of a lot of Birchers who were powerful in Southern California. And that really damaged Nixon. So Goldwater came along and had some critical things to say about Robert Welch, knew him, he was a problem. But as you said, right, he sort of said, you know, I know a lot of Birchers and they're fine people.

You know, even Ronald Reagan, for example, and George W. Bush, right, they signed renewals of the Voting Rights Act or civil rights laws. They, you know, when Reagan said, well, you know, Martin Luther King will know in 25 years if he was a communist. Well, he had to backtrack and he apologized for that.

It goes beyond that. And because in the 1960s, the criticism, one of the criticisms lodged at the Birchers was that they were alien, right? As I think one senator at the time said, they're a weird presence in America. And, you know, my argument is no, actually they're not. They're deeply, they're kind of endemic to the country and to its traditions. They're not necessarily the majority of the country, but they're a powerful tradition. And I think it's a tradition that since, especially the New Deal and then the Great Society and civil rights movement that many people have thought, many, especially liberals, but also some conservatives too, a tradition had thought had really just been marginalized, right?

A couple things. One is American institutions, government institutions, mass media, but also civic society, right, the NAACP, Americans for Democratic Action, most importantly the Anti-Defamation League. A lot of folks, a lot of groups, worked to constrain the Birchers, to really push them out in the fringes, to make them toxic in the political culture.

Absolutely, and I think just to underline one of the many excellent points you just made, Matt, I think for me one of the big takeaways from your research and your writing is how important organizations that care about democracy, that care about inclusion, grassroots organizations, how important they are. One of the heroic organizations in your book is the Anti-Defamation League, known to many as the ADL. I don't want to give away the whole book, but I encourage those who are interested to read those sections of the book where you talk about a number of measures, including spying undertaken by these organizations to help federal authorities and help state authorities deal with the threats of hatred and violence, and there's a lot to learn from that, I think.

I think that's exactly right, and the thing is, too, in mid-20th century America, even in the 1960s, you know, J. Edgar Hoover and others in law enforcement were more interested in trying to ferret out alleged communists in American society. They were less interested in going after, you know, far-right groups that may have promoted racism and anti-Semitism, and so it was even more important then for a group like the ADL to fill that gap, right, because it was a real void, and today, I think fortunately, at least under the Biden administration, for example, we have seen a Justice Department that has taken white supremacy and neo-Nazis and those threats seriously after January 6th, of course, and, you know, there are a lot of insurrectionists who are sitting in jail right now.

Well, I think what your research shows, Matt, and this is true actually throughout all three of your books, but particularly your work on the Birchers, which is that American democracy has enormous capacity to learn and react. We don't always see that on a day-to-day basis. But just as the ADL and the FBI and elements of American politics in the 1970s learned to discredit and in some ways eliminate the Birchers as a major political force, that can happen again. And the craziness, the hate that we see in our politics that comes often from small numbers of people who are amplifying their voices, there are things we can do about that. And I think you give us a lot to think about, and you give us a great example of exactly what our podcast is about each week, which is studying the past, learning from the past, not as a recipe for the future, but as an inspiration for new creativity in our politics today. Matt, thank you so much for joining us.

Oh, wow. Yeah, many reactions. First, on that last point about the Judeo-Christian tradition, it just reminds me of, I believe his name was Arthur Cohen. He was just a writer in the 1970s on religion in America. And he contested the idea that there was such a thing as the Judeo-Christian tradition because, for most of the last 2000 years, Christians have hated Jews. And that tradition was a construct of the, mostly the mid 20th century and Cold War politics and other things. So Zachary, I think your tension is not only felt by you, I guess, I'd say historically.

Yeah, and people like William Bell Reilly, who's a very famous fundamentalist minister in the Minneapolis city area was key to this. And one of the things that is a through line from the post Civil War period to the post World War II period is that Dispensationalist understood their highest calling to be missions, evangelization, converting people into Christians. And this took on a different implications for sort of national and international politics. By the end of World War ii, and the sort of dawn of the Cold War anti-communism becomes a key way that, or the threat of communism becomes a key way that Dispensationalist understand the world, and particularly as a threat to their highest calling, global missions. And so, in some ways, that is the answer to the question is that, Communism becomes such a threat to the mission's enterprise that many fundamentalists and dispensationalist who were sitting on the sidelines in earlier periods decided that this was such a existential threat that they needed to join the fray.

Yeah. One interesting fact about Graham is that he was the successor to William Bell Riley in the sense that when Riley died in 1948, he had handpicked Billy Graham, who at that time was a less well known revivalist who was traveling around the country to be his successor at his college in Minneapolis, Northwestern College. So Graham has a direct connection to Riley in that sense. But Graham became, yeah, the most influential evangelical, maybe most influential religious figure in the late second half of the 20th century, and Graham's relationship to Dispensationalism is that he grew up basically a dispensationalist and his early revivals taught. That there would be a rapture at any moment, and that that was one reason why listeners needed to convert was because you didn't wanna be left behind. And this gave an urgency to, not just individual conversion, but to the Cold War because communist societies wouldn't allow missionaries into them.

And so we needed to sort of support the downfall of communism in order to allow more missionaries to enter those countries. So that that was certainly part of his, earlier, his early career, we're talking about the 1940s, 1950s. Graham gradually moves away from that theology and he is a major figure. He's like a planet that everyone orbits in the evangelical world. And so for his entire career there were prominent people around him, and in other parts of the many organizations that he ran, that were dispensationalists and held to those views. But you definitely see a shift in the sixties and seventies and eighties where Graham is moving away from that sort of otherworldly theology, and getting much more invested in a, you could say, this worldly understanding of what the Christian's role is. And so by the, you know, by the 1980s, Graham is visiting the Soviet Union. He's visiting Jewish and Christian communities behind the Iron Curtain. He is a calling for a nuclear freeze. He is concerned about the environment and you just have a much different issue set for someone like Graham, as he develops into a major world leader.

And again, it's not the only argument that Christians are making, but for people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye, who I mentioned, and Hal Lindsay, this is the way they decide to try to activate the broader Christian community. And it's so striking that no more than 15 years before that in the 1960s, you can get quotes from people like Jerry Falwell who are making the exact opposite argument when it comes to the civil rights movement, which is that, he has a famous sermon called, what is it called? Ministers and Marchers. And he basically makes the call that no pastor should ever be found in a civil rights march. Because it goes back to that separation of the church and the world. And yet 15 years later, he's making the opposite argument, which is, you better find the pastors in the pro-life march, because of this threat of secular humanism.

 He's the author of, many articles and two really important books. The first, "The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South," and then, more recently, "The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights," a book that puts the March on Washington, which everyone has heard of, especially because of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

 Will's book puts the March on Washington in the context of labor history as well as civil rights history, which is really important. Will, thank you so much for joining us today.

 The UAW also played a really critical role in the civil rights movement. It was one of the unions that, you know, provided consistent funding for the major campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The UAW sent money to help support the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the March on Washington. The president of the UAW, Walter Reuther, spoke at the March on Washington, you know, just before Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. So this, these are institutions that have really been vital to American democracy and to the sense of sort of creating a more egalitarian United States.

As you said, I'm the last of 12 children of Ike and Fanny Stubblefield who, like most of their era in the rural South, were consigned to work farms as sharecroppers. So when I was born, we lived on a plantation which had, perhaps, as much as 100 families living on the land and working the fields.

And the crop, the principal crop, was, of course, cotton. So it was fortuitous that I was the last because, as you might imagine, the oldest children were the heaviest workers. They were consigned to toiling in the fields to bring in crops.

And since that was the most important thing that they could do, they sacrificed school in order to be able to work the farm. And that meant, frankly, that the older children in my family did not have the opportunity to graduate from school. It was too far away and the work itself called.

So the younger members of the family were able to go to school because we moved away when I was seven years old. And when we moved away from the farm, we were required to go to school. And that was what saved me, really, that I could get an education.

So in spite of that, I would say that for all of my childhood up to my graduation from high school, we had a very bare existence as, again, most of that era and of that economic station had. We lived, we moved to Houston in Fifth Ward, and it was really a very poor community at the time with laborers principally and maids occupying the meager opportunities for employment in Houston at the time. So my father became a janitor when he moved to Houston and my mother was a maid.

Growing up, I understood in the racial environment of that moment that I was not to have the hope for a different kind of life because, as Zachary said, hope was illegal in that era, certainly for blacks. So the aspiration to do something significant with my life simply didn't exist. I was going to follow in the footsteps of all the women I knew who were maids.

It was only the fact that I was able to go to school and to be inspired by teachers and to love learning that I began to see a way different from what I was supposed to do. And that was through the good graces of teachers who inspired me, who encouraged me, and who did the most miraculous thing, and that is they were able to dream of a different future from the one we lived in at the moment.

And I often say that had it been up to us, we would never have anticipated that life would change so dramatically, and therefore we wouldn't have worked toward that end. But because they were not mired in that reality, they could dream of a future for us different from what we knew, and it was their dreams that made possible our aspirations.

We had, this is before the civil rights gains. This was before Jim Crow was definitively eliminated. This is before really any robust integration.

So here we are isolated in our community, told that we could not achieve, told that we were worthless and should not expect much of life, and so on. And yet, here are these individuals who are guiding us to a place that's very different and instilling in us aspirations that go far beyond what we understand to be our limitations.

But I should also say that I fell in love with learning, the power of learning, because it was the antidote that I needed to remove me from a sordid world. And by that, I mean, by reading, I could escape the Texas of the 40s and 50s. I could read about foreign environments and imagine worlds that were very different from the world that I lived in.

And learning about the existence of other environments rescued me and allowed me to believe that quite possibly there were other worlds that I could inhabit at some point. So I would say that by the time I was in high school, I was already enthralled with this, the power of education. Because, although, they could tell me that I couldn't go into a department store, or I couldn't go to a particular university or school, or I couldn't enjoy the full benefits of citizenship, they could tell me that, but they could not control what I put in my mind.

And it occurred to me as a young person that learning was the most powerful thing I could do, because it gave me absolute control over what I could know. And so, in a way, I would say that's what fueled my journey in education.

The fact that it was so important to me, that it rescued me, that it gave me hope, that it propelled me beyond what I thought I'd ever be able to do. I was absolutely sold on the idea that education was the most powerful thing that we could offer young people, and I wanted to be associated with it for the rest of my life.

How did you make that transition, especially from Dillard to Harvard, going from what had been, through most of your life, largely African-American environments, to a world where there were not many other African-Americans in roles such as yours? How did you make that transition?

The one thing I knew I could not ever tolerate was to have the same narrowness of mind that had subjected everybody I loved to the worst possible consequences. And so I didn't want to be a racist. I wanted to be open to differences of all kinds.

Salim Yaqub is the author of three books that I highly recommend to all of our listeners. His first book, Containing Arab Nationalism, is really, I think, as close to the definitive work as is possible on the Eisenhower Doctrine in the Middle East, which was really the first American Cold War Doctrine for major influence, even perhaps for attempted dominance in the region.

But, in answer to your question Jeremy, the the seventies really are a very pivotal decade for a lot of reasons and in a lot of places, but certainly for the history of the Middle East and the history of U.S. involvement in that region. I mean, what you see in the 70s is the you know, sort of the last vestiges of European imperialism being removed with the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf region in the, in the first couple years of the decade. You know, the French had vacated North Africa in the previous decade and earlier than that. And so what you see then is a new, or maybe the continuation of a previous era in which the superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union becoming more and more active in that region.

It's also, and also, you know, they're bringing the Cold War struggle, you know, to the region in a way that hadn't quite happened previously. Also, I mean, certainly the 1973 war is very key for all sorts of reasons that we'll probably get into. It's, you know, during and shortly after that war that the power of the oil producing Middle Eastern states, and in this case, particularly the Arab states, because they actually mount an embargo against the United States and some Western countries becomes, you know, unavoidable, you know, it becomes impossible to ignore.

And if, you know, if you want to count, consider the Middle East in its more, in a broader geographical frame, you could look at the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, also right around that time in December 1979 as ushering in a whole new set of issues that will define the last years of the Cold War and set the agenda for the way in which the Cold War ends.

And this is something many of us have chewed on for a long time, right? How to evaluate Kissinger's diplomatic shuttle diplomacy and his efforts to, as you say, take Egypt out of what had been a coalition of anti Israeli states. One other point I thought I'd add for you to comment on, and then I know Zachary has a question too, is part of what he's also doing is making the United States the most powerful external actor in the region. He's sidelining the Soviet Union, which had been an ally of Egypt, right? And that, of course, has implications for the United States in the region, taking us all the way up to the Iraq war, correct?

And that's a huge strategic blow to the Soviet Union. And again, that gets masked because the Soviet Union in some ways is more visibly active in the region in the years thereafter. I mean, it really, you know, it flexes its muscles. It, you know, has all kinds of agreements and makes various diplomatic gains on the Arabian peninsula with its relationship with South Yemen and, you know, further to the East, it's invading and occupying Afghanistan. It's cementing its strategic alliance with Syria. It's doing all these things that are on the surface fairly menacing, but that masks the underlying diplomatic reality, which is that the Soviet Union has basically been frozen out of Arab Israeli diplomacy and becoming increasingly irrelevant to it. And then, of course, it's not too much longer after that, that the Soviet Union itself ceases to exist.

In the United States, even though it had already been flexing its muscles pretty aggressively in the Middle East during the 1980s. And for that reason, I sometimes argue that, the cold war, the post cold war era began a decade earlier, a decade early in the Middle East. Nonetheless, by the time we get to the early nineties, it's unmistakable because the Soviet Union has ceased to exist. And the United States really is now the sole remaining superpower. And its ability to call the shots is made even more unmistakable by the victory in the first Gulf war of 1991.

And then, as I started researching the book more and more, I realized what a significant role the US military would play. When I started this book, I sort of understood that the military today plays a major role in humanitarian operations, but I assumed this was a later 20th century development, sort of a post-Vietnam, post-Cold War effort to reinvent the military, but in fact, as early as the early 20th century, you start to see the US Navy, especially, but also the Army Marines, depending on if they're on the scene, responding to a lot of catastrophes, the War and Navy Department committing rations, tents, their supplies to help disaster victims, so these three together, the military, the State Department, and their partners in the voluntary sector, are really responsible for cooperating to carry out disaster relief operations.

There were also a few examples in the book where the United States really didn't get permission to extend the aid that it wanted to. There was a famous case in Jamaica in 1907 in which US Navy commander, sort of due to some miscommunications, landed several hundred armed US sailors in Jamaica, which was a British territory, without having the proper consent. This led to this diplomatic uproar. Later on, in the 20th century, there were attempts or considerations, even by the US government, to force aid into countries like China, after the revolution, as well as Cuba, after its revolution, attempting to show people living under communist governments that the United States cared about them through aid, so these very political motivations, these offers were refused by those governments, but you sort of see these, the ability for diplomatic tensions to arise over the issue of aid and unwanted aid, especially.

Yeah, so as I spoke about, sort of at the beginning of our conversation, in the early 20th century, the United States really kind of burst onto the scene as a world power expands its territories overseas as well. In the aftermath of World War II, or sort of during and after World War II, we see this other sea change in American power as the United States goes from being a world power to a superpower. It comes out of the war with the nation, or the world's largest military. It has access, or it has bases, or access to bases in some 2,000 different places, it means it has airplanes and ships stationed all over the world, as well as service personnel, as well as diplomats and consuls, and a lot of money.

Yeah, and I would say that it is very much both at once. Again, you do have a lot of really well-meaning, you know, aid workers who are really concerned with the people they're assisting, who want to cooperate, collaborate, who want to kind of do things the right way, and to really improve people's lives, because they care about that as a value that they hold dear, but they're working with a lot of people whose primary goal is to defeat, you know, defeat global communism, to maintain US stability and power in the world, there's a lot of sort of private state department memos and correspondence, which are now fortunately declassified for us historians, where they really talk very explicitly about using aid to to counter communist propaganda or to really show the United States good side, the State Department takes a lot of notes on how much aid the Soviet Union is giving to other countries and makes sure that the United States is giving more in as many cases as possible. So, these political calculations are going on at the same time, and sometimes it leads to disagreements, there's fights, sometimes internal infighting between those people who really see aid as an international project and those who see it more as in line with national interests. So, I think that those kind of contests and competitions over the meaning and significance of aid are important to the story too.

One of the fun sources for this book was actually reading letters that people would write to, sometimes their congress people, sometimes to the state department, sometimes to the president himself, expressing their opinions about whether the United States should or should not give aid to a certain country, and people are very kind of clear about sometimes pushing for it, sometimes because it's the right thing to do, sometimes because it's a way to show American compassion, other times calling on their elected officials or their representatives to not give aid, because there are problems at home, though there are more important things to kind of focus on domestically, or maybe this country is an enemy of the United States and doesn't deserve, in their words, American aid. So some of these same debates that I think we see today, right, in the 21st century, over questions of a foreign, either humanitarian or even military assistance, really play out throughout the 20th century in the wake of a lot of these catastrophes.

But of course the Cold War decolonization, the growth of a right wing free trade tradition that we touched on at the very beginning of this discussion, all of these things are going to start muddying the waters, so to speak, and make the, what seemed like a new freer trade system, much less easy to maintain.

I think it does. I think it's also the last question in particular, last answer, was a really important reminder that oftentimes the questions that need to be asked or are not necessarily, like, ones of ideology, but of whose interests certain policies are serving. I think the sort of description of how the, at least the ages of free trade, was overtaken by neoliberalism in the 70s and 80s is a really important lesson about the importance of keeping in mind whose interests our policies serve, because, looking at it on paper, it can seem that the neoliberal policies are of the same tradition, but, in reality they were serving very different interests. And I think also this vision of left wing free trade is something that we should all take very seriously, especially at a moment when our, when the sort of liberal international institutions, which this movement created or the descendants of this movement created after World War II seem most threatened. And certainly when our, when the sort of free trade world order that developed after the end of the Cold War seems most threatened as well.

And by 76, Humphrey is so ill with the cancer that'll kill him that he decides not to make one more try. And so he's not on that list of presidents. And I think even to the people who remember him, he suffers in the historical collective consciousness because the recollections of him are about the reviled latter part of his public life, when he's Lyndon Johnson's vice president, and they both support the escalation in Vietnam.

And Humphrey himself said that supporting the Vietnam War was the biggest mistake of his life. But all this completely effaces this valiant part, earlier part of his political career, starting as mayor of Minneapolis, going through the Senate, and really his first one or two years as LBJ's vice president, when he was essential to the passage of these key, and in fact, landmark civil rights laws in 64 through 66.

Right. I mean, he's central to the story of civil rights in post-war America, though largely forgotten. Your book focuses almost exclusively on that, taking us really from Humphrey's birth in the early 20th century through 1948, through the Democratic Convention in 1948, which is really your crescendo, Humphrey's speech at the convention calling for civil rights. How does a young man like Humphrey, who's born in South Dakota, has a very difficult early life that I knew very little about until I read your book. You talk about how he had to leave college during the Great Depression because he couldn't afford to stay at the University of Minnesota. He then goes back as an older undergraduate. How did he come to be a proponent of civil rights from a rural South Dakota background?

Here's another example of the conventional wisdom not being quite right, that when people talk about or even rhapsodize about and sometimes even overly romanticize the Black Jewish Alliance, they think of it as being a product of that mid-1950s to mid-1960s civil rights movement. They think about Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great rabbi, marching next to Dr. King in Selma. They think about Cheney and Schwerner and Goodman becoming martyrs together in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

One of the reasons that Harry Truman, having won election as a civil rights candidate in 1948, wasn't able to convert that into legislation, some of the legislation he'd been proposing as far back as 1946, is that in the climate of the Cold War, when in the snap of the fingers, the idea that America's existential enemy is fascism and its remnant and fascism and its home front apologists, anyone who's listened to Rachel Maddow's podcast, Ultra, knows this very well. She's done excellent work on that.

All of a sudden, now the Soviet Union and global Marxist-Leninism is seen as the enemy. It's not that the Cold War competition with Stalinism wasn't real, but that it had an effect on domestic issues of shoving civil rights to the side, of shoving a lot of elements of liberalism to the side. That's part of the reason why it's not until 1963 and 64 that the process of legislating for civil rights that began in 48 can be picked up by Lyndon Johnson as president, by Dr. King in the mass movement, and by Hubert Humphrey then in the Senate.

Well, Truman blows hot and cold in a way that reminds me a lot of Lyndon Johnson. People compare LBJ to Franklin Roosevelt, and I think that's an apt comparison on the domestic agenda of the Great Society legislation, but on civil rights, Johnson reminds me a lot more of Truman. They're both from border states. They both, in their public life, had been perfectly fine with segregation for a long period of time, but they both had some kind of deep reservoir of personal decency that was offended. As we know from Robert Carroll's magisterial work and also people like Robert Dallek and Nick Kotz, when young Lyndon Johnson teaches at a Mexican-American school in the Rio Grande Valley, he's appalled at just a primordial level by the poverty and the racism he sees.

It's not a theoretical response, it's a visceral response, and that remains in him up to the point he breaks cover as a civil rights supporter as president. With Truman, who is descended from Confederate soldiers and from slaveholders, what gets to his heart is a series of attacks on returning Black GIs, because the second V in Double V doesn't come through. The Black GIs come home, and instead of being rewarded with the national movement against segregation, there are multitudes of incidents of Black GIs in the uniform of their country being beaten, being killed, being denied service, and in the case of this particular army sergeant named Isaac Woodard, being yanked off an interstate bus, thrown in South Carolina jail, and having his eyes gouged out by the sheriff. And Walter White of the NAACP, who did incredible, brave work investigating white terrorism, brings this case to Truman's attention, and Truman cannot bear the idea of people who serve the country being assaulted this way.

It's interesting how important these personal experiences are. The same could be said for Ulysses Grant, whose experiences during the Civil War with African American soldiers transform him. It was startling to me when I was writing about this in a recent book I wrote. I mean, how much you see this in Grant's correspondence, these personal experiences coming out to shape political viewpoint. It's also interesting, Sam, how politics pushes against that at times. What you're describing in the 1948 Democratic Convention is pretty similar to the 1964 Convention, where Johnson refuses to seat the Mississippi Free Democrats. How does Humphrey push through? How does he get through the resistance that's obviously there?

Ironic because when Humphrey used that phrase, it was right when he announced his candidacy in 1968. In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, in the midst of the horrible Vietnam War, and it sounded totally tone deaf. It was one of the times when Humphrey badly misread the mood of the country. And yet his idea that politics should have a joyful element is maybe now being redeemed because coming out of a period of time that has felt so bleak for a lot of us, so at times such despair and real dangers to democracy, that the idea that there could be something positive and exalting about the work of protecting democracy is really appealing to people. And this goes to other examples we've seen of leadership, of whether it was Fiorello La Guardia as mayor of New York during the depression, reading the funnies over the radio mic, or whether it was FDR's great orations about nothing to fear, but fear itself. These were people speaking into bleak times, but also saying that there was reason to see something positive on the horizon.

And Houston, however, is a bit of an outlier. This is why I think she was uniquely poised to make this stand and to succeed. It's because Houston had been a hotbed of activism for Black voting, and this goes back to the 1940s and I described this movement that was led by her Minister, the Reverend Albert Lucas, who worked with Thurgood Marshall. Reverend Lucas was head of the statewide NAACP, and he and Marshall, together really forged not just a court case, but a social movement behind what the case that became, Smith V. Allwright, and so Lucas was one of the first civil rights leaders who used the church to educate ordinary Black people about political issues and to use the pulpit as a means of political education and political mobilization.

So as you can see, it's a kind of constellation of forces. She's an extraordinary individual. But there's a movement among, now, you have Black voters joining forces with liberals and labor to try and create a coalition to elect more liberal Democrats. It's a one party state, after all, (right, right) into office. So when Jordan is running now, okay, the obstacle of the White primary has been removed. But the there are other obstacles to voting. There are other forms of disfranchisement that still exist: the poll tax, for example. But the most terrible one for her, from her perspective, was malapportionment. This is before the Voting Rights Act, and so you have a terribly malapportioned Texas State Legislature. And in her case, the Senate was an institution where all of Houston with a million people had one senator, and then you had rural districts with only a few 1000 people, had a senator too.

And so because of a series of court cases, beginning with Baker V. Carr, liberals and other activists brought lawsuits that challenge the malapportionment and forced a redistricting of the Texas Senate, and eventually the House, but that comes later. So when Jordan is running in '62 she loses. She loses again in '64. And really this is a result of not just so much losing votes, but also a reluctance of people, of Whites, to vote for a Black woman candidate, and then not having an appropriate district to run in. When she gets that district in 1966, finally Houston has four senators now. So this is new. And the way the lines are drawn, the way it was explained to me, it was, it was not drawn with her in mind. That suit was brought to bring greater power to labor and to urban populations, but the way the district was drawn, it was just simply that it was slightly a Black majority, just not quite even, I would say, a Black majority, but it was favorable to her.

I do. I do. Thank you, Jeremi. Yeah, this is, and I don't think it's just her, like, this is when the movement is moving from the streets to the State House. This is Bayard Rustin's vision, right? From protest to politics. How can we be effective in making the ideals of the Civil Rights Movement real? And this was her quest, (yes) you know, this was really her goal, (yes) to do that. And no one knew how to do it, right? It hadn't been done before. (yes) And this is, you know, Rustin is good, like in theory, all of this coalition should work, but as we see over time, coalitions are complicated and messy, and everyone has their own agenda. How do you get people to work together who don't really have a long history and sometimes their goals clash, so people have to give and take, (right, right) and it's a hard thing. And, so, but this, I do think that she, and many others, Julian Bond, for example, we forget about him running and succeeding in the Georgia State Legislature in 1965. (right, right)

We all know that part where she says, 'My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total.' "My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; It is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." But what we don't remember is what she said before that line where she says, 'when this document was completed in 1787, I was not included, but now through the process...' And then she lays out all the ways that the Constitution can be amended to, right, Because through that process of judicial review, right, and additions, I am now included in "We the People." And here she's talking specifically about the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act. So now I am included in the protection of this great document, and that is why it is so important that I fight for it, and that is why I believe in it so completely.

So, for example, with Robert Byrd, she introduces him at a party convention, at a mini convention (powerful senator from West Virginia) correct, who is going to play a very important role in the Voting Rights Act extension, she develops a kind of not, it's not a quid pro quo. It's never that bald, you know, but it's an understanding (yes) that, hey, here's somebody who represents the growing Black vote. This is the other thing that Jordan is never just about herself. A lot of her power, the perception of her power, comes from what she represents, which is with the Voting Rights Act, more and more Black people are registering to vote, and they're participating in primaries. And this is a new thing that Democratic, White Democratic politicians have to now take account of and Jordan is somebody who can explain this to them. (yes, yes) So, in terms of how she's perceived, I think it's quite mixed, actually, on one hand, the public perceives her very positively. On the other hand, people within Houston are still, and Austin, are still quite perhaps puzzled about how she was able to go so far so fast, and they are suspicious of her relationship with the power structure.

Hmm. Well, she always acknowledged, and you can see this in her testimony against Robert Bork, for example. She always acknowledged the importance of court cases and protection of Black voting for the success of Black politicians. This was one reason she was so against Robert Bork's confirmation (Yes) to the Supreme Court (Yes) because he had said he had opposed those cases. He didn't think Baker v. Carr had been properly decided, et cetera. And she, that just appalled her (Mm-hmm) because she said, 'Well, if, if his way of thinking had persisted, I would not be here.' Right. 'I would never have been able to run and to win.'

It is the lesson. And I would add one thing, again, that makes her extraordinary, is that not only could she mobilize Black voters and people who agreed with her, she was also really good at talking to people who had not experienced oppression (yes) and making them understand it. So she could speak to conservative White audiences, as she did time and time again in Texas, editors, White elites, and persuade them that it was in their interest to support change.

Sure. Well, you know, in the 1930s, by the 1930s, every country had an external broadcaster, big or small, whether it was Radio Moscow, whether it was Radio France, whether it was Nazi Germany, whether it was Radio Canada. Everyone had a broadcaster except the United States, and advisors came to President Roosevelt and said, 'You know, we, we need to set something up.' And he hesitated because there's actually pressure from private broadcasters who wanted to dominate the shortwave broadcasting on, you know, space. But once World War II started, once United States was attacked in Pearl Harbor, those plans were actualized very quickly. And, of course, VOA was brought in as part of the war effort to tell our story. And I think what's very important to keep in mind is the first words of VOA spoken in German were 'We will tell you the news, whether it's good or whether it's bad. You will hear factual information,' something along those lines. Very nicely done.

I'll give you another very vivid example of VOA. Those may be listening who are older may recall that President Reagan made quite a blunder in 1984 when he thought that the microphone that he was testing his voice was dead, but it actually turned out to be a live microphone, and he said, 'I've just canceled the Soviet Union. We're about to begin bombing in an hour.' That made news everywhere in the United States, on every channel (I remember) and we broadcast it in Russian on VOA just like everybody else, and I know that because the director, I was then the head of the USSR division at VOA, and my news chief called me up at home and says, 'What do we do?' I mean, this is, I mean, in Russian to the Soviet Union. (Hahahah) And I said, 'You know, we have to do it. It's the law.' I did call the director of VOA to inform him that this was... and he says, 'Absolutely this is what we need to do. Now, don't play it 100 times necessarily, but it has to go on the air.' (Yes, yes. Zachary?)

Yes, thank you. I think that the creation of VOA was to really be the voice throughout the world of US society, of music, of culture, of politics and so forth. Radio Free Europe has a different sort of charge. It was really created with the start of the Cold War, interwoven with the Cold War as part of our effort to confront the Soviet Union, and it was addressed, and its origins really start, and it's very important to understand this, with the millions of people from Eastern, Central Europe, Soviet Union, who fled to the West during and after World War II. They were living in displaced persons camps throughout sort of the American sector in Germany. And George Kennan, who was really instrumental in creating both RFE and RL, and others as well, but he was more instrumental, and said, 'You know, these are people we could put to use. They are eager to do something.' They have a lot of connections. Some, in the case of Czechoslovakia and Poland, had been in the governments before, and in the Baltic states before World War II. And so RFE started first as a voice of Poland outside of Poland, so the idea being that you're in Munich, Germany, but you're creating a Polish broadcaster as if you were sitting in downtown Warsaw, and the same would be true for Czechoslovakia, for Hungary, for Bulgaria, for Romania. That was the beginning of Radio Free Europe. That same model was used three years later to create Radio Liberty for the Soviet Union, and very important to note, not just in Russian, but in the different (Mm-hmm) languages of the Soviet Union.

You know, I like to remind my British friends that, you know, the BBC only broadcast in Russian, whereas RFE/RL, or RL in this case, Radio Liberty broadcasts in Ukrainian, in Estonian, in Latvian, in Lithuanian, in Georgian, (Amazing) Armenian, (Amazing) Kazakh, Tatar Bashkir. (Wow.) You know, I'll tell you, I was in Kazan, which is the capital of Tatarstan. This was obviously in the '90s, and I was introduced at this very important gathering that I had worked at Radio Liberty, and this man comes up to me and he says, 'My parents listened to Tatar Bashkir. We didn't even know that Americans knew we existed' (Wow.) let alone to be able to broadcast in that language. (That's quite a story.) And I think it... and by the way, that has a whole very important tie to the whole decolonizing of the Soviet Union because what Radio Liberty did in particular was gave Ukrainians a voice, Belarusians a voice, Georgians, Armenians, that they would not have at a time when there was Russification throughout the Soviet Union. (Sure.) They kept alive a voice that otherwise would've been muffled.

Exactly. They were, used the term surrogate, which kinda has a harsh tone to me, but it was called surrogate radio. And the idea being, again, that you were presenting a lineup of news as if you were in that city. And by the way, let me give you an example from yesterday. Now we're jumping ahead. We're jumping ahead, I grant you, but Radio Liberty, VOA have all been closed. There's no money coming in. Radio Liberty and RFE broadcasters are, they're in Prague, and there's a good story as to (Hmm) why they're in Prague, which we should get to. And they're working for free, and they're putting out only a website. There's no nothing other than a website, and I looked at their news (Yeah) and their news is what you would expect news to be in Moscow. Uh, I mean in free (In a freer Moscow) freer Moscow. (So they're reporting on the Ukraine war, for example.) So they had who was arrested for protesting the (Yeah) Ukrainian war in Russia, but they also had a whole thing on Alexander Ovechkin winning that. That was one of the lead stories. (Sure, sure. They had- Passing Wayne Gretzky for goals, yes.) Yeah. They had a piece, very straightforward, totally objective on the latest Trump discussions, with any, uh, over tariffs. In other words, they had a lineup of things that a Russian would want to see. (Yeah.) And that's really the core of it.

(And why are they in Prague?) They are in Prague... It's an interesting story to start with. In 1992, '93 with the Clinton administration coming into power, there was a lot of discussion of 'do we need the radios in general because the Cold War's ended, and life is wonderful, and who needs this very important tool of the Cold War?' And the Clinton administration was quite ready to zero them out, and it was Václav Havel and Lech Wałęsa who really pleaded with Clinton that we need these radios for a while. (That's so interesting, that's so interesting.) And Havel said, 'Here is a gift to the American people, a building in downtown Prague to commemorate sort of your contribution to our freedom. We're giving it to the Americans for free.' That won the day. And by the way, I can say that the bipartisan support led by Senator Joseph Biden, (Hmm) by the way, Biden was critical in bringing together the Republicans and the Democrats to support the continuation of the radios, but with the proviso that as countries graduated to free media, those services would close. So the Polish service closed, the Czech service closed. In time, the Romanians, Estonians, Latvians, and it was... idea behind it was that through analyzing and understanding the evolution, that when those countries no longer needed an outside domestic voice, then of course that would be the end of it. (Right.) While they needed it, RFE/RL would continue to provide that. That was the understanding, and that's the way it has always been developed.

So I mean, it was that "virtuous circle." Now, I will also say that, and, and this is something I'm working on another book, and I have a whole sort of chapter on that part, is the important role that Radio Liberty did for the Jewish emigration. (Yes, yes.) It was instrumental in sort of, what was then called refuseniks, Jews who had wanted to emigrate to Israel or the West. They were denied the emigration visa, which you needed, but they also were fired from work, so they were in this no man's land in the Soviet Union. And that story is very much part of the Radio Liberty broadcast.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've oftentimes, partly because during the shortwave radio broadcast years, of course, VOA was very hard to listen to in the United States, and it was not intended for Americans. (Right, right.) It was intended overseas. Of course, once technology took over and you could watch it, listen to it, I really encouraged people to do it because it's calm, it's normal. The surveys I have seen of media, fact-based, very close to the center, VOA always came out (Yeah) pretty much next to AP. I mean, those (Yeah) were sort of the...

Well, I think first of all, supporting and knowing about these entities, media entities, and they're much more than just RFE/RL and VOA. It also is Radio Free Asia. It's also Middle East Broadcasting. Middle East Broadcasting being extremely important given what's going on in the Middle East. You definitely want to have an American, you know, presence there rather than Al Jazeera and others, I think, supporting it. But in a broader sense, I am encouraging people, and I'm actually writing another book to encourage even more people, to study the radios as part of American and world history. It is so rich in terms of scholarship. It so invites people to look and examine how we function, good or bad, mistakes or no mistakes, but really it's part of it. Fortunately, the Hoover Institution has the entire RFE/RL archive, which would take several lifetimes to go through, but it's there. It's available. It's open. The Open Society Archives in Budapest have tens and tens of thousands of broadcasts that you can dial up from your home and listen to in whatever language you happen to know. So I think it's there to be studied, there to be incorporated into our understanding of world history, American history, and that may lead to a greater appreciation for what has been done and what needs to be done.

Yes. I mean, what always inspires me, I've spent time, as you know, Mark, originally in the archive when it was in Budapest before it was moved to the Hoover Institution. I've worked in it at Hoover, and I've listened to many of the broadcasts, especially from key moments in the Cold War. And it's inspiring, I think, to hear, particularly for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the various emigres covering news in their society, bringing a passion and a commitment to it, and innovating new ways to tell the stories of what's happening in their society. And I think for young journalists like Zachary and so many of our listeners, there's a lot we can learn from this, and there's a lot we can do, even within the constraints we face, to try to tell those stories and use the stories of the past to help inspire us to tell the stories today, we were talking about this earlier, Mark, you and I, before we came on, about what's really happening in Ukraine, for example.

So that's a call to action, and I think it's a call to action not based on politics. What I respect so much about what you do, Mark, I really do respect this, is that you try to tell the story of the radios in a way that is historical and fact-based. You're not trying to promote one policy or another. You're promoting the most essential element of democracy, which is the fair distribution of information so people can make better decisions. You want an informed citizenry in the US, and in Russia, and in Ukraine, and elsewhere. And the United States has played a crucial role, as you've shown and discussed today, over about 80 years encouraging and promoting and supporting the spread of real information, fact-based information, to audiences that were information deprived. And if we get out of that business today, democracy is poorer at home (Absolutely) and poorer abroad. (Absolutely.) And so all of us need to stand up for this, I think.

Medgar Evers was the first field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi. He was a very prominent activist in the late 50s and early 60s in Mississippi, particularly around school integration and university integration. And he was shot, assassinated by a member of the KKK at his house in Jackson, Mississippi, which we visited a couple of years ago.

That's a question that's relevant back then and today too because we see over and over again people in the lower reaches of the class structure as voting against what we would think or others would think were their self-interest. They will support in many cases the oligarchs and what they stand for. I try to make the distinction, I do make the distinction in the book between class politics in which a struggle goes on for the distribution of resources, are we to spend the collective goods on more investment funds for the planters or making life better for the poor farmers and poor laborers later on as time went on or are we to fall for the status politics situation in which I feel better than somebody else and that's all that matters. So you see that in racism. Racism was about, and white supremacy in particular, that form of racism in which the whites benefit and the blacks don't from the status allocations, not just class, it's status.

And so they called them bourbons. And they were the bourbon faction of the Democratic Party and the populist faction of the Democratic Party that struggled for a long period of time. In fact, did so throughout the history of the South up until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

That's well said. Bryan, one of the one of the key moments in your book is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It's an important part of what you talk about toward the end of the book. First of all, why was the Voting Rights Act so important?

So the Voting Rights Act made a marker of when Jim Crow ended. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made sure that the South could no longer use laws to segregate Blacks from whites, to keep Blacks from having the same rights as whites. So these laws are just enormously important.

And unfortunately, much of the Voting Rights Act has been struck down by the Roberts Court, taking away some of the mechanisms that were used to break out white monopolies in the voting rights. So you're finding that over since 19, or 2011, is that right? With the Shelby County decision in Alabama again, that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, there has been another fall off in Black voting because of the actions of whites passing laws and ordinances that gets in the way of Black voting. So then...

Well, yeah, the ID laws, that's not the worst thing, but most of the problems are in registration. You file up your registration form or something like that, or you move and people forget to... There's a lot of what some of my colleagues call bureaucratic burdens, administrative burdens that are put in the way that affect Blacks more than they do whites.

So what you do is you try to keep this oligarchy together through these status-based systems, the bourbon rule, as the populists call it. So you're absolutely right. This is absolutely deeply about that form of government and how Jim Crow kept that in place legally for 75 years, at the end of the period of populist revolution to 1965.

And we know a lot about the Civil Rights Movement and how that got broken up, and I write about that in the book. We know very little about the populist period in which we almost broke it up. We almost got an interracial political class division back then in which the oligarchs had to contend with both whites and Blacks.

You talk about George Wallace, Governor George Wallace, who is a populist and himself a Democrat, but becomes someone who defends, obviously, segregation. And you talk about this moment in March 1966 at the University of Alabama, where you were a student. Foster Auditorium, I think, is where this occurs, where both George Wallace and Robert Kennedy come.

When Kennedy said that Negroes must be as free as other Americans, not because it is economically advantageous, not because the law says so, but because it is right, we, and I think you mean all the students who were there at the University of Alabama, we cheered lustily. As he left the auditorium, students reached out to grasp his hand. I did so as well. It really felt like a chapter was closing in Alabama, with the state joining the nation in unity. Boy, was I wrong. Why were you wrong then?

And the resentment comes out. And who is the resentment directed at? These days, it's blacks, browns, immigrants in particular. We find somebody to hate. And George Wallace found that. And other demagogues in the South, George Wallace spread it nationally. And I think that was the start of our troubles. But we have to remember there's more people who these days, not like Alabama in 1966, but these days, I think there are more people that object to that system than support it. But the coalition, the interracial coalition that failed in the populist period that we thought won in 1965, we just have to be honest with ourselves and say we didn't. But if it doesn't get organized again, we're stuck with that kind of white supremacist regime for a while. And I don't want that to happen.

In Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America's Civil Rights Revolution, Professor Joseph argues that 1963 marked the first critical successes and several important but tragic losses of the civil rights movement that would transform American democracy. 1963 was, he writes in the book, quote, "the defining year of the black freedom struggle." And because of the importance of this year and one of the documents it produced, a letter from Birmingham Jail by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., instead of a poem this week, we will be hearing Dr. King read a section of that speech and he will read what is perhaps one of the most famous sections.

So, Professor Joseph, Birmingham and this letter play a central role in the story that you tell. It's the site of some of the most brutal televised police crackdowns on peaceful protesters in 1963. It's where MLK is arrested and writes this letter, of course. Why Birmingham? Why were the events there in the spring of 1963 so critical to the cause of civil rights and to the history of our democracy?

But Birmingham becomes such a huge global site of struggle for dignity and citizenship in 1963, primarily because of the brutality that is experienced by peaceful demonstrators and over time by really thousands of young Black students who were called Negro students in the context of 1963, unless Malcolm X was speaking about them. And what's so interesting, Zachary and Jeremi, about Birmingham is that so Birmingham is a dying steel town. It's the citadel of the old Confederacy.

But what Bull Connor does as city commissioner, not police commissioner, but city commissioner who has authority over law enforcement, is that he unleashes fire hoses through the fire department that are powerful enough to strip the bark off of trees. And they also unleash canine units and German shepherds that route peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham in April and in May of 1963. So really, Birmingham, even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, attracts global attention.

And even more so than the Freedom Rides in 1961, and even more so than the Meredith admission to Ole Miss University of Mississippi in September of 1962, because that's a concentrated episode. It's over three, four days. There's going to be a couple of people who are dead.

Meredith is going to be escorted by over 500 federal marshals. But there's also going to be National Guard and others deployed. In the spring of 1963, it's a slow rolling crisis that continues to build and build.

For the Kennedys, one of the things I wanted to show in the book, Jeremi, was the evolution of Bobby and Jack Kennedy on race matters. And it's not always a complete evolution. It's not always a linear evolution, but both of them really have their finest moments vis-a-vis civil rights in 63 during that, the course of that year.

And so for the Kennedys, who are very reticent about not allowing civil rights to upend the administration and especially the administration's legislative agenda, which is the state of the union, as I show early, they want a tax cut. They want a big tax cut so that they can get portions of what become the Great Society past, including Medicare. That's what they want.

And they don't want the the coalition that they need, which includes Southern segregationists or Dixiecrats, to be so concerned about civil rights that they block the president's agenda. And Bobby Kennedy, who really serves as a kind of domestic and international prime minister, certainly the the second most powerful politician in the country to President Kennedy, is very wary of anything that might taint his brother's presidency. And what we're going to see over the course of the spring is the Kennedy brothers collectively, almost symbiotically coming to the conclusion that they have to lead in the context of this crisis and not just lead from behind, but to take some risks.

Bobby Kennedy had met him in 1962, already at a White House function. And throughout 1963, Jimmy is on tour, not just for his new books, but also for the Congress of Racial Equality. And he's going to historically white colleges and Black colleges, speaking about the need for civil rights.

And he's really calling for a reckoning, a confrontation over America's original sin of racial slavery. But Baldwin also wants us to really wrestle with the lies and the cover up. He talks about a crime has been committed, but what's worse for him is the cover up, the lies vis-a-vis American exceptionalism and the lies that everything is fine, we're all good.

There's nothing for us to wrestle with around racial segregation, around violence and terror and inequality and injustice in the United States. And so Baldwin really hammers at the Kennedys. He says he admires the Kennedys, but he's deeply disappointed in the Kennedys.

I wanted to ask the moment that I think, at least for most Americans, we remember most from 1963 is probably the March on Washington, that moment. We all know the images from the Lincoln Memorial of people gathered listening to speeches from sort of great leaders of the civil rights movement. What made that moment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial so impactful? And how do you see that moment fitting into the larger story of 1963?

Well, the March on Washington is an unbelievable high point, and I think the longest chapter in Freedom Season is the chapter 11 called The Language of Human Joy. Which really does an in-depth examination of the March on Washington, but it tries to look at it from different perspectives of people like Bayard Rustin, Malcolm X, the Kennedys, Howard Zinn, a very, very famous professor and author of A People's History of the United States.

But one of the key adult advisors, young adult, 41 years old to SNCC activists, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a mentor to somebody like Marian Wright Edelman, Spelman College professor, really extraordinary figure. I would say the March on Washington is a high point because of the previous seven months, seven and a half months, almost eight months of activism and debates and conflicts and deaths, but also triumphs that occur. So the start of the year, Jimmy Baldwin flies to Mississippi to meet with James Meredith, who's the first Black student to enroll at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, and he meets with Medgar Evers.

Jack Van Dyke and Rena Denise is his daughter, and Darrell Kenyatta is his oldest born, middle name Kenyatta, named after Jomo Kenyatta, who becomes the first leader of Kenya December 12th, 13th that year in 1963. So Medgar Evers is this extraordinarily courageous and heroic and upright figure who I think we all know in popular culture because of his assassination. And I wanted us to see Medgar Evers in Mississippi, to hear him deliver speeches, to see the organizing that he's doing in Jackson, Mississippi, and also the constraints he's under because Roy Wilkins, who's executive director of the NAACP, is a very cautious, pragmatic civil rights leader.

He's a civil rights leader who's very competitive with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., constantly feels the NAACP is losing credit to competitors that don't put as much skin in the game, financially at least, as the NAACP does. And Medgar Evers is really at the center of these concentric circles, which include Roy Wilkins, which includes Martin Luther King, Jr., who's a friend of Medgar Evers, which includes young student activists who are connected to the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who want the NAACP to be a much more direct action centered civil rights organization, getting arrested, boycotting, being in the scrum. And we see Medgar Evers as somebody who's under the constant threat of death. I show the way in which there are white activists like Joan Trumpauer, who's still alive, who's getting arrested alongside of Medgar Evers at sit-ins.

John Salter is the half Native American, half white professor at Tougaloo, who's getting arrested and beaten and brutalized alongside Medgar Evers. And so what's going on in Jackson, Mississippi, I also look at what's going on in Greenwood, Mississippi in April of that year, where people like Bob Moses are being brutalized and arrested. Somebody tries to assassinate Bob Moses in April of 1963.

And Bob Moses is the Hamilton College graduate, philosophy major, mathematician, who later is a MacArthur Genius Award winner and author of the book Radical Equations, who is really one of the single most influential student activists of the 1960s. He goes to Macomb, Mississippi and influences and inspires people like Tom Hayden, who follows him into Macomb. And Moses writes that famous letter from a prison in Macomb, Mississippi, about SNCC activists being in the middle of the iceberg.

And the iceberg is a metaphor for the racial subjugation and the white supremacy that they're under. And Moses vows to resist nonviolently, to resist. And he becomes this figure who attracts really hundreds and then thousands of students.

So when we look at the March on Washington, the March on Washington is a culmination of one, a very brutal winter where civil rights activists are hoping against hope and organizing that the federal government is going to be on their side and that President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy will lead. They are very disappointed, perhaps none so as much as James Baldwin. But by the spring, Birmingham and the crisis in Birmingham gives civil rights activists an entree into compelling, coercing, shaming the administration into taking a moral stance.

Jimmy Baldwin sends the Kennedys a public telegram saying what's happening in Birmingham. It's their responsibility. This is a human rights movement, a human rights campaign.

And over the course of that spring, especially after the Mother's Day bombing in Birmingham, which is an assassination attempt on Martin Luther King Jr. at the A.G. Gaston Motel, you start to see the Kennedys respond and do more. And Malcolm X, who's in Washington, D.C., uses Birmingham as an entree to really become in 1963 a national figure. It's very interesting to watch all these different stories unfold, but they intersect, which makes them so even more interesting.

That makes a lot of sense. Of course, 1963 was also defined by two other tragedies in September of 1963, the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls and the assassination of JFK in November of that year. What affected these tragedies? Also, obviously, public televised, what effect did they have on the movement and how in particular did the JFK assassination help change public sentiment around around civil rights?

Well, I think I want to stick for a second, Zachary, with the March on Washington just to talk about what happens that day, August 28th. I think 250,000 people come to Washington, D.C. and what's so powerful is the coalitions we're seeing of labor, labor movements, different social justice movements, political, religious movements. You've got Jewish and Christian organizations and secular organizations that come together. But you also have the left that gets in there, too. There are people who are socialist and Marxist and feminist at the march.

And so the march is really extraordinary in showing a kind of solidarity publicly in front of a global audience, including the Kennedys. The Kennedys invite the march leaders to the White House afterwards and they spend 75 minutes there. And what's so extraordinary about the March on Washington is that it's a generational march.

And in that speech, he talks about reparations. He says, we come here to cash a check, a check that has been stamped insufficient funds, but we refuse to believe that the Bank of American Justice is bankrupt. So it's an extraordinary day.

So it's really an extraordinary day and moment, not just for the movement, but for really the idea of multiracial democracy in that sense. And that's important because it's a real high point that year because, Zachary, by the time Birmingham happens, the second act of Birmingham, which is the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15th. And there's four girls who are murdered that day.

And there's a 20-year-old, Johnny Robinson, who's shot and killed in the back by Birmingham police in the aftermath of a melee where people are protesting against the bombing that has just happened at the 16th Street Baptist Church. So those six deaths really impact James Baldwin. And I show, as we continue the narrative, how Baldwin is leading demonstrations and efforts at a Christmas boycott and a real searing critique of what kind of country are we that allows these six children to die.

So it's, and Baldwin says this at Howard University, November 30th, 1963, he says, we mourned separately the deaths of Medgar Evers and the children of Birmingham, and now we're collectively mourning JFK because Black Americans were bereft at the Kennedy assassination because they were his most enthusiastic supporters as that administration went on. So it becomes really interesting. JFK becomes part and the most well-known martyr of America's second reconstruction, but for much of the year, it doesn't seem as if we're ever going to mourn collectively any of the fallen heroes in this struggle for citizenship and dignity.

Peniel, at the end of your wonderful book, you connect, of course, the moment you've just described to the rise of Lyndon Johnson and how in this terrible, violent, chaotic moment, Lyndon Johnson, who was a largely ignored vice president by the Kennedys, comes into office and is able to create, as you say, a more powerful bully pulpit than any president had really had before, at least not in recent memory. And is the progress that's made, particularly in 64 and 65, the Civil Rights Act of 64, the Voting Rights Act of 65, where so many of us focus our attention, was that a necessary outcome of Kennedy's death? Would another vice president ascending to the presidency have done the same thing, or was there something particular about Lyndon Johnson?

Oh, I think that Lyndon Johnson is really the right person who steps into history at that moment. I don't know if another vice president would have been able to take command in the same way. I think that trying to make Kennedy's assassination and his death, trying to leverage that for the passage of legislation, I think most people would have tried to do.

And I think it's important for us to remember in the context of the time of 63, 64, 65, LBJ needs Black votes where he can get them. And we're thinking about states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and of course, not the South. And he needs to hold on to a coalition that now has venerated the slain President Kennedy, and who's now this very, very iconic figure.

So in a lot of ways, being pro-civil rights was also pragmatic. There was no way to hold on to that coalition through cautious deliberation in the immediate aftermath of the president's assassination. So his instincts are correct.

LBJ had great instincts. And I think what's interesting about LBJ in 63 is that even months before the assassination with his Gettysburg address, his Tufts University commencement speech, him receiving an award by the National Association of Black or Negro Journalists. They're giving him an award.

LBJ had really, really stepped up on civil rights in very public ways, to the point where he became at least a part of some of the Kennedy private deliberations on civil rights, and was speaking to Ted Sorensen. The tension with Bobby Kennedy is always there, and with the assassination only amplifies. But he's in the White House on June 22nd, when Dr. King has both a private meeting with Bobby Kennedy and Burke Marshall, and then the very famous private walk through the Rose Garden with Jack Kennedy, and then being surrounded by the 28 or 30 civil rights leaders. LBJ is there, and he's speaking, and he's upright. He's there when they meet after the March on Washington. But he's also telling Ted Sorensen, and he mentions James Baldwin, that President Kennedy should use the presidency as a bully pulpit.

He admires Kennedy's June 11th speech, which I get in depth in, in Freedom Season, in the chapter, Kennedy's Finest Moment, but feels Kennedy should constantly use that bully pulpit. So he was much more willing to use, and much more understanding about the way in which the presidency, in and of itself, it provides a kind of ballast for whatever political situation you're in, because people are really looking towards the president, especially, I think, at this time period, 1963, than Kennedy. So I think Kennedy, and you could see it in hearing some of the White House tapes, Jeremi, with the ADA, Americans for Democratic Action, Kennedy's saying, and Arthur Schlesinger's in the meetings with him, saying, well, FDR's fire chats, he never gave more than four a year, and I don't have FDR's velvet voice.

And people want to see people want to listen to Kennedy. So there's a kind of underestimation of what he's capable of doing through the bully pulpit in a way that LBJ really embraces in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.

And what's so important is that by 1963, in the aftermath of the March on Washington and the Kennedy assassination, we get a rough consensus by the aftermath of JFK's death, led by Lyndon Baines Johnson, that multiracial democracy has to be the beating heart of the republic. That's very, very important. And I think for at least the next 50 years until the Supreme Court's decision, Shelby v. Holder, 5-4

So I think that idea of multiracial democracy is really important, and the idea of building consensus around that. It's not unanimity. There's going to be disagreement of how we get to it, but consensus around the idea of multiracial democracy. The other lesson is about coalitions and coalition building. So I think throughout freedom season, you see the way in which civil rights leaders from the grassroots all the way to those who could have the privilege of meeting with President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy and meeting with governors and leaders really were interested in coalitions.

So what's so interesting about 1963 is the way in which words and rhetoric and their ability to persuade people mattered. I think Martin Luther King Jr. is who we always look at, but it's Malcolm X, it's Gloria Richardson, Lorraine Hansberry, and then certainly it's Jimmy Baldwin, where Baldwin's words are so extraordinarily profound. You've got the right wing, the left wing, the middle of the country all trying to grapple with him.

So there's an intellectual praxis that happens in 1963 that is massive and national and monumental, and it's really global in scope, because there are students who are part of the Peace Corps and Crossroads who are going into Africa, who are going into Latin America, and those countries are also looking at the United States, and people are trying to walk the talk. They're trying to live up to their social, political, cultural, moral, religious ideals, which is really extraordinary to see. They don't always succeed, but the very fact that in good faith they're trying to live up to those ideas, it's really important to see.

Well, for one, you know, you look at the threat of national security and the Cold War coming from the Cold War. The threat of national security has been used by the executive to push the idea that only the president can protect the nation. There is some concern that a body like Congress that has endless debates and an endless number of ideas cannot come together quickly enough in order to protect the country in a proper way. A lot of people would say that too many voices are being heard and that you need a single person to make a decision. That said, in the 20th century, Congress has not necessarily used all of its powers to its best advantage. So I'd say one of the things that is not directly talked about in the Constitution, but is a constitutional power that Congress has that relates to war, is their investigatory powers and their powers of oversight.

Well, I'd say that the why is, you know, somewhat of a psychological factor of the threat of nuclear war that comes, you know, directly after the end with the Cold War, directly after World War Two. The country is afraid. People are afraid that of possible annihilation of possible World War III. There is a sense that there are, as I said before, too many voices in Congress that that you need one single strong person to push forward. You know, the president is tasked with defending the nation. And one thing that really comes clear in the atomic age is that the nation needs defending.

Yeah. Really good question. I mean, so, you know, War Powers Act comes at an amazing time in American history because this act probably could never have been passed at any other time other than in 1973. Nixon is completely on his heels after Watergate. People are still fuming over the Vietnam War. Nixon, Nixon actually. So and the thing that's most remarkable is that Nixon vetoes the the amendment and then it's the the act and then it's overwritten. So from the beginning, this is a major departure that that the president is against going forward. Some presidents see it as unconstitutional and completely ignore it.

So and then, you know, you look at the 1970s and actually starting in the late 1960s. And in fact, that's something I think that it's really important to mention is the Fulbright Vietnam hearings. So holding hearings, the 1970s, you know, the uproar against Vietnam and the War Powers Act didn't just come out of nowhere in the 1970s. It came because of these public sized hearings and because of the Pentagon Papers and because of things like that, where Congress was doing investigations, you know, overseeing the executive branch as it should be.

Yeah. A lot of this has to do with the authorizations of force from the early 2000s, that the president points to and says, "This allows us to do this and you'll have to give us the money." Now, Johnson made a similar argument during the Vietnam War where he said, "You guys keep giving us the money. If you wanted the war to end, you could just stop giving us the money." The appropriations issue is difficult because as I said before, you have troops in the field. You have people who need this money. I think that the only thing that Congress can really do is plan ahead with scheduled decreases.

I think that's very well said. Certainly, I think we've been educated in the last 20-30 years on the importance of having debates over the use of war power. I think one of the points Clay made so well is that during the Cold War, there was a premium placed on acting fast and delegating authority because of the concerns that if we acted too slow, we would be the subject of a nuclear attack or some sort of communist expansion.