Transcripts For CSPAN2 Kenneth Walsh Presidential Leadership

CSPAN2 Kenneth Walsh Presidential Leadership In Crisis July 13, 2024

Justice for all. Thank you. We have had the fortune of having Many Political journalists, both print and broadcast, speak here over the years. The one we have with us tonight has covered six u. S. President s beginning with president reagan. Speaking of president reagan, we were first introduced to canada back in 2002 when he and a handful of other experts came out to the Reagan Library to share stories about president reagan and our air force one tail number 27000. Stories we then used to make our visitors experience and our air force one pavilion that much more rich. Since then hes come to other times to discuss and find copies of his book, prisoners of the white house in 2013, and ultimate insiders white house photographers and how they shape history in 2017. Since he has been covering the white house since 1986 i am sure he is no lack of material for many more books, especially since today he continues to provide insight into the white house of donald trump in the world of president ial campaigns. Perhaps, if were lucky, he will share insight in the upcoming elections. But he is here tonight to discuss his latest book, president ial leadership in crisis defining moments of the modern president from Franklin Roosevelt to donald trump. Speaking of the book, president ial historian alvin wrote ken walsh, one of the nations shrewdest observers of president s and the presidency takes readers on a tour of how 14 president s resolved crises that came their way and how a 15th, donald trump, regards crises is the norm rather than the exception has incorporated them in whois management style. Anyone interested in how power is exercised will come away enriched by the tales walsh tells of success and failure of the highest level of american government. Lets hear tales, shall we connect ladies and jumped him in, its to introduce kind walsh. [applause] great. Thank you all for coming. I will be talking about challenging times president s have faced so we have a challenging times getting here tonight, including me. [laughter] i was just in San Francisco where my daughter lives and i did programs up there for the book and one thing is being canceled after the other so as you well know. But i can also report that all the lift drivers are out there making money from our getting the surgical masks now and its hard to hear them and understand what they are saying but all ive heard is that they dont help you. So its a precaution they are taking but im glad they are doing it but in any case i want to thank melissa for having me and thank you all for coming under these extraordinary circumstances. When you are a White House Correspondent and i have been one for more than 30 years and covered six president s you are always looking for different ways to see the president s and to get insights into them and to find out what they are like as people, personalities, character, policies and agenda and so on. I have found a number of ways to do that through my books. One i wrote a book about air force one and it came out here and helped put together the exhibit and in some small way and nancy reagan was nice to write notes about me for that and i did a book about celebrities and how president s behave in celebrity culture and participate in Popular Culture and a number of other things. It also occurred to me since i covered the white house for so long that every president ive covered in every modern president had to deal with a major crisis from some kind. Maybe this wasnt so true early in our history when we did not have mass media and Mass Communications and world war power but now we are and all those things are true and president s have to deal with crisis. Ill come back to the slaver but President Trump is particularly interesting because he seems to thrive on the idea of crisis and some of the crises he generates himself and then he settles the crisis and likes the idea that he has emerged victorious in a crisis. Now hes dealing with a crisis unlike any he has had to deal with before because hes completely out of his control to start with. He has never dealt with this sort of thing in his private life and as a businessman and he has had some experience with other things hes out with but not this. I think and i will talk about this in a few minutes but basically its up in the air how we evaluate President Trump and how he deals with this coronavirus would he can still correct problems he had initially and some of the confusion and lack of understanding and what the country wants from the president in this situation but he can recover and thats what we will talk about a little bit. Because we cant resist showing the cover of my book but we cant go into much detail on all the president s but i want to give you a sense of some of the things i discovered in looking at this whole concept of president s in crisis as defining moments for these different presidencies and i did come up with a series of standards that i developed a historian in my own right and how president s deal with crises and basically i think the People Public wants and historians expect from the present crisis is taking action and secondly adapting to the changing circumstances and balancing principle with what works and persevering and having an instinct for achieving success and that is all wrapped up in what i am about to talk to you and evaluate the different president s and this is a summary of those standards that i just gave you but i will talk about them in the next few minutes as we go through the presentation. You cant talk about president s in crisis without talking abraham lincoln. The ultimate crisis and calamity weve ever had in the United States is the civil war and lincoln got us through this to accommodation of adhering to those standards i talk about and being someone who represented the values and embodied the values that he was trying to convey through the civil war and win the civil war. Of course, he did not start out being a particular critic of slavery but felt that he had to keep slavery to save the union he would do that but he changed his mind as time went on and became a moral issue with him. During the waging of the war the union had terrible setbacks initially and lincoln realizing he been in a military earlier in his life briefly but he had a lot to learn and that is one important thing about president s in crisis but are they willing to listen and learn and lincoln was willing to do that. This is him talking with general mcclellan known as little mac at the time and talk about adapting to changing circumstances and doing what works but he hired mcclellan, fired him, hired him again, fired him again because he wasnt chasing down the confederate armies the weight lincoln wanted him to do so you can see the perseverance again with lincoln as well and you saw that very clearly in his dealing with the civil war. Of course one the civil war ended up abolishing slavery and i want to show you one other i like to show these pictures were i discussed lincolns before he took office and shirley before he grew his beard and he was given a famous speech at cooper union in new york and it outlined his agenda but keep this in your mind. This is what he looked when he took over as president before he grew his beard three weeks before he was killed the ravages of the war had taken such a toll on him that he became to embody the suffering of the country was going through in the civil war and that was very important to people, even in the south he became known as among the three enslaved people as father abraham largely because he had been gone through such trauma with all the debts that he was ordering himself and also lost a son during the civil, not because of the war but because of a fever he had, but just amazing how the toll took on lincoln. He looked like a spectral presence here. He came to really embody, for many, Many Americans in history the best crisis manager we had as president. But now more recently this is the focus of the book and this is the depression, soup kitchen. During the early 1930s we had a terrible terrible economic calamity and unemployment today is about 4 and its a little less than 4 we dont when he gets up to eight, nine, 10 but it was 35 during the great depression. One out of every three people looking for work basically meant at the time and that is away the culture was and cannot find it so they had to go to soup kitchens and this is an evocative picture of what they had to go through. This was considered humiliation to ask for charity and help. People felt it was their fault that they couldnt find work and so people were tremendously upset by the whole circumstance and have a couple images here and wanted to get to this one here of people lined up to just get a cup of coffee and donuts. This is dressed pretty well. They would get dressed up to do this even though they had no work but what was happening is people were asking for help and so desperate and this is a terrible economic calamity for so many people in Franklin Roosevelt stepped in to do that in one think that roosevelt did in addition to the standards and talking about, he persevered in a specific way and that reflects optimism. That was what he is known for in every president since roosevelt has adopted this technique, including president reagan, by the way, who admired roosevelt all his life and had been a democrat but became a republican of course but reagan did but he admired roosevelt particularly because of this optimism that he could convey to the country. This is a picture of Franklin Roosevelt giving a fireside chat. This is what he did refuse the media of his time, radio which basically every american could have access to either with their own radio or a neighbors or whatever and he scheduled what he called fireside chats, talking directly to the country about the depression and the problems we have and what he was doing and this is a particular example of him talking about the banks and he had a very clever way of doing what he was doing having the federal Government Act in to include the economy but instead of talking about shutting down banks or you know making sure things were solid by terminating their operations he called a bank holiday and its a pretty color term so much lighter and nonthreatening idea but he was closing banks and so he went out and gave the fireside chats and throughout his administration and you could walk to the city or the town or a hamlet or around the country and people had their windows open and you can hear Franklin Roosevelts words because he had such incredible Market Penetration as they call it now where people wanted to listen to the president and you could hear him wherever he went and it was a tremendously effective thing he did with these fireside chats and this is an example of roosevelt optimism and the positive president s that so many people of a certain age remember and again i cant talk too long about each want but they were all in the book. President roosevelt died in 189a lot to prove. A lot of people did not think he was up to the job and people felt we had present roosevelt for four terms and he was elected to just before he died so hot will be survive without drinking roosevelt but during the truman time we had the korean war and this is a little example of what those soldiers had to go through during the korean war, terrible, difficult conditions in initially the war to not go well and then the war started to get better and partly because we had general that so Many Americans admired from world war ii in the pacific, douglas macarthur. What i suggested to illustrate harry truman was firing General Macarthur. Obviously, a lot of historians will do defining moments of president s in terms of military conflicts of war and peace but president s have to deal with so many things now that ive chosen to illustrate this book with examples that are not just war and peace but other things that would defining moments for the president did this was firing macarthur. This was or took a great allele of political courage for truman to fire macarthur one of most popular people in the country and during the pacific he promised to return to the philippines and became the Supreme Leader of japan as the American General in command and occupy forces and launched a brilliant move to do an invasion of the north and very risky but Successful Operation so he started off after the war was going badly and he started off the war was going well and you might remember the history of it in the American Forces in south korea started to move farther and farther north pushing the North Koreans back and they got too close to the chinese border and the chinese entered hundreds of thousands of chinese troops pushing the allies and the americans back again almost forcing them off the korean peninsula. Then the americans and allied forces had to push their way back up again. During this time when the chinese entered macarthur started to say this is a different war now but i need to do things differently. He was talking about using Nuclear Weapons and about bombing the chinese mainland and bringing the nationalist chinese from taiwan into help which was out rage to the chinese. Harry truman kept telling him publicly we are not doing at and we might bring the soviets into this but this is a cold war and we dont want to have a wider war so for truman it became a concept of civilian control of the military. Will he let this very popular general run of the war the way he wanted or is the president who supposed to be our commanderinchief going to run the war so truman went and met macarthur on wake island in the pacific to get a sense of what the general was up to in the meeting went okay and did not get along very well but then macarthur started to make these very aggressive comments again and truman fired him and of course, a huge firestorm. Now, historians basically feel it was the right thing to do and he was defending the constitution and principal of civilian control military and it was popular at the time and it cost truman a lot of support but he always defended it and now in reading the history people who write the history books feel it was the right thing to do but at the time it was a tremendous gavel for truman but this is an example of a political military related defining moment that i think this president did in the retrospective do very well in dealing with it. President eisenhower again, we have to go rapidly here because i want to be respectful of your time but president eisenhower generally is not just considered a popular present but successful 100 he had to terms and americans return to normalcy and eisenhower delivered that. Initially he got along pretty well with the soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev but he was still worried of course during the cold war about what the soviets were up to so he authorized these spy planes over the soviet union and these planes flew a tremendously high altitudes beyond the soviet technology of being able to shoot them down until the soviets improved their technology and then he authorized several of these spy flights before International Conference in 1960 which he thought would be the capstone of his presidency because he would meet with khrushchev and germany, france and the uk and so on in paris but he wants the speight mission about three weeks before this International Conference was supposed to happen and wouldnt you know it, the soviets shot went down. It was a tremendous blow to the prestige of the americans but it looked like we were the more mongers and initially president eisenhower authorized a lie about it. He said it wasnt a spy flights but a weather mission. He made a bad judgment here and admitted later that it was the worst mistake of his presidency and set both sides back in the cold war but his feeling from his advisors but the u2 planes cannot survive of an attack because they were fragile and the pilot would not survive, they were being shot down and landing on the ground and the pilot also had poisoned needles to inject himself with so he could kill himself. Well, the soviets not only found the debris but captured the pilot. Francis gary powers. Khrushchev showed the debris in very wellpublicized menstruation and exhibits in moscow and said not only are the americans the warmongers flying over our country the soviet union but eisenhower is a liar. It was a tremendous blow because eisenhower prided himself on being an honest politician and so it did hurt his reputation. The soviets played this the Public Relations of it much better than the americans thought they would because they canceled the paris meeting with but khrushchev went initially and said he demanded that eisenhower call off any future you two missions and eisenhower didnt want to seem like he was being bullied so he sort of waffled on that so it was a real Public Relations mass for the United States but this is a case where the defining moment did not go well for american president by large the eisenhower years were considered a success. Here is president kennedy with khrushchev. Chris jeff is still in office and president kennedy was elected in 1960, takes office in 61 and shortly or a few weeks after he takes office we have the bay of pigs invasion where america forces supported cuban exiles trying to retake cuba from fidel castro and it was an utter failure. A lot of people in the Exile Community that we did not give them air support or do what we would want to do but kennedy adopted the plans that the Eisenhower Administration had come up with for the invasion but it did not work so it was a tremendous setback and goes ahead and meet with khrushchev and the accommodation with bay of pigs and this meeting in vienna and chris jeff concludes kennedy is weak and callow and inexperienced that he can get the better of him so what happens, we have one of the most dramatic and dangerous moments in the cold war which was

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