Cnn chief legal analyst Jeffrey Tobin weighs in on the Mueller Investigation and the impeachment of President Trump. Thats all tonight on booktv on cspan2. For more Schedule Information visit booktv. Org or consult your program guide. Like the office they commemorate, president ial libraries are living institutions, certainly it is my hope that the Reagan Library will become a dynamic intellectual forum where scholars interpret the past and policymakers debate the future. Welcome to the Ronald Reagan president ial foundation and institute Virtual Event series. To fulfill president reagans vision abour center for Public Affairs programming offers lectures and forms presenting perspectives on important Public Policy issues of the day, each year we bring you 20 to 30 events from politicians, authors, members of the media, business and military leaders and more. Since the march 2020 closures of many businesses across our country the Reagan Foundation is bringing its events online to ensure we are still delivering worldclass content even if you cant get to our hilltop to watch it in person. In this weeks center for Public Affairs for Virtual Event we bring you Chris Wallace, anchor fox news sunday. 2014 marked his 50th year in the broadcasting industry. He is participated in coverage of nearly every Major Political event and also secured high profile interviews with dignitaries and us leaders. For the past three years Chris Wallace has broadcast a sunday morning show live from the Reagan Library air force one polian following our Reagan National defense form in december of every year. Chris wallace is with us today to speak about his new book countdown 1945, the extraordinary story of the atomic bomb and the 116 days that changed the world. An unforgettable count of the lives of the ordinary american and japanese civilians in war times as well as merck and soldiers fighting in the pacific. Its the story of how in 116 days harry truman goes from being the Vice President to completely cut out of the sdr white house to suddenly becoming the president , not only historian its the history of scientists, flight crew and others. We invite you to enjoy our Virtual Program coming to you from our air force one pavilion Leadership Academy oval office with Chris Wallace and the reagan Foundation Institute executive director john hi brush. Chris wallace, congratulations. What a terrific book. As you may know, we have a lot of guests come to the Reagan Library with good books and am not able to read them all. I could not put this one down. This was a terrific book. A thriller, really a historic thriller i just loved it. Congratulations on not just the first effort but a great first effort. Thank you thats awfully nice. I will say this idea of the historical thriller seems to be out there because my favorite review was one in the Washington Post that said, i know what happened in 1945 but this book is a thriller and a lot of people have said that its a page turner, they couldnt put it down. And throw because, frankly, thats exactly what i wanted to do. I think so much history is written in the distant past, we know what happened, why did it happen, thats not at all what i wanted to do. I wanted to take you into the moment and in this case count down 1945 the 115 days that changed the world. The key moment in those 116 days from april 12 45 when truman is summoned to the white house. He thinks to talk to president roosevelt and then he finds out that roosevelt is dead and he is sworn in and henry stimson, secretary work takes the side afterward and says i need to tell you about an immense project to create the most devastating weapon in history, the first inkling Vice President , no president truman, has of the existence of the Manhattan Project and to take you not just truman as he is struggling and making the decision but los alamos who dont know whether the gadget the atom bomb would even work until 21 days before the bombing and the flight crew of the enola gay, who on a mission during their mission to hiroshima, the 1500 miles to hiroshima from tinian island dont know if the bomb when they drop it, its never been dropped out of a plane, whether the aftershocks will knock them right out of the sky. Thats what i was trying to do in the fact that you and some other people have done said it was a page turner and thriller. Im thrilled. My father after he was a b29 pilot in the army air force, i was riveted, as you can imagine. Your father does need to be have been in the Army Air Corps to like this book. Really well done. You put us in the room where it happens on many occasions and that is just a masterful job. Well done. Thank you. Thats exactly what i was trying to do. There are so many dramatic moments. Truman, he has a meeting with his war cabinet on june 18 and henry stimson, secretary of war is there, George Marshall the general of the army is there, all the top brass and discussing the nazis have surrendered on may 8 how they are going to finish and win the war against the japanese. For about 45 minutes there is a long discussion of the invasion of japan how many troops it will take, how long it will prolong the war, how many hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides at the end there is a subsistent secretary of war, john mccoy, who ended up becoming major figure in midcentury america, the high commissioner to germany, he was a member of the warren commission, head of the world bank and he was a junior guide and truman said, nobody gets out of the room without telling what they think. His boss says go ahead he says, i think we ought to have our heads examined if we dont at least discuss the bomb. It was literally in the war cabinet the first time in this meeting they been talking about the casualties and the length of the invasion and how bloody it was gonna be a nobody ever said, but we might have the bomb, until he said it and then basically it was dismissed at that point largely because it had never been tested. It wasnt tested until july 18 just 21 days before the bomb was used against hiroshima and at that point back in june truman viewed it as a science project. If it worked, great, if it didnt, we had to go ahead. So many historical moments you wrote about, i wonder, i know you are a student of history, what is it that made you choose this particular moment . Its a funny story. I had the idea of doing exactly what i talked about, to take a key moment in history and try to put you in it. At the time they didnt know all these, faced with these momentous challenges and they dont know whats going to happen, it would be like talking about reagan and what ended up happening in terms of berber control of gorbachev, i was fortunate enough to cover six years of reagan including world war reagan gorbachev. Some have it covered in real life the drama of the wreck of it. Just say they went there with these hopes and have this meeting and creates a tremendous sense of suspense and so i wanted to do that but i didnt have the subject. In february 2019 it was the day that President Trump was going to deliver his state of the Union Address and nancy pelosi, the speaker of the house, invited several of the tv anchors over to her hideaway in the capital and this was the hideaway that a lot of speakers have and a tradition in washington that if the speaker and the president are of opposing parties, this is true for republican president , democratic speaker, vice versa, that the speaker will deliver a prebomb, basically before the president even delivers a speech to tell you all the reasons that bad. We are sitting in this room and nancy pelosi says this is the board of education. I dont think the other folks in the room knew but i knew that the board of education used to be sam rayburns hideaway. This is where he would have people come after hours to gossip or plot strategy or have a bourbon and branch water and Vice President truman was a regular there. On april 12 after he finished residing over the senate he went to pelosi telling the story she said it was in this room that truman called the white house, he was told they wanted to speak to him, he calls and speaks to a white house official and said, you need to get to the white house as quickly and quietly as possible and it truman puts down the phone and says, jesus christ and general jackson. [laughter] which i had never heard before. I thought to myself, thats it, thats my story, thats the one im going to delve into and try to create a historical thriller and as it turned out i didnt know then, 116 days from when he is alerted that roosevelt has died and he is president , until the bomb is dropped on hiroshima. Your first book, chris, some writers report after their first book, they just had a fabulous time, they loved the experience. Some found it miserable. How did you find writing your first book . It is a very odd experience there are times you get a delicious fact. Thats whats so exciting, i didnt know that when truman, i knew the story of jesus christ and general jackson, knew that would be a good start. I didnt know when i started the project that when truman gets to the white house and sworn in, he is alerted for the first time about the existence of the Manhattan Project and so many juicy Little Details like that. One of the details is the fact that they only attested the bomb once on july 21, july 16, and 21 days before they ended up using it. Now there at tinian island, the launchpad for the flight to hiroshima about 1500 miles and somebody says, if we put this 10,000 pound bomb, which was very inappropriately called to a boy, in the front of the plane and then we have to put a bunch of baxter gas in the back of the plane so that it will fall down, it will be more weight we ever carried and the plane might crash on takeoff. And if there is an atom bomb we could have an atomic explosion at the u. S. Which will destroy all of us who want to anything to the japanese. They suddenly say, this is only about two days before the mission we cant take off with a live bomb were to have to arm the bomb on the plane during the mission. They turned to the chief ordinance officer a guy name deke parsons and said, can you do that . He says i never have but i guess i will learn. So he sits in the plane on the ground in tinian island in sweltering heat working on it trying to do it and when they finally take off an unarmed bomb off safely and they are on the way to hiroshima, he gets down cradles in the bomb bay next to little boy and has to take off some of the case and do some of the rewiring and then they have to take off the safety plugs and put in the arming plugs and its only then midway through the flight that they say the bomb is actually armed and ready to go. So moments like that its a joy and then there are times that you are just trying to, hideaway told the story and how i put all these different elements together. You think, this is hard work. My daughter is in publishing and at one point, shes been in publishing for 10 years, not my publisher. I said to her, writing a book is hard work and she rolled her eyes and said, g dad, im glad you discovered that. [laughter] its tough to make a living. Chris, did it surprise you, it did me, that truman didnt know the first thing about the building of this bomb. Then i read you had written that he and roosevelt had only spoken a couple times during this fourth term of the presidency. But it just seems almost as the Vice President not as went into something as important of this but i guess that was the case . A lot of people have asked me about that. It does seem incredible. He had been Vice President for 82 days and he met privately he had been in some big meetings but he met privately with roosevelt twice in those 82 days. The fact why does come you got to remember, this is roosevelts fourth term. This wasnt his first or even his second Vice President. He had gotten pretty good at ignoring Vice President s and i think he thought, Vice President s come and go i got my war cabinet and those of people i count on to make the decisions and he had just sorted Shonda Truman off to the side so i mentioned the fact that stimson takes him aside in the day he is sworn in and says im going to tell you about this project but he knows that truman is overwhelmed, he just become the president so he says im going to give you time to settle in and then i will come back, on april 25 13 days later he comes into the oval office to brief president truman now that he is settled in, not even quite two weeks, meanwhile, general leslie groves, the real military commander of the Manhattan Project his snuck in through underground tunnels and one of the reasons was theyd given this a lot of thought at the pentagon they thought that the two had come into the front door together people are going to wonder, he was a big mission man, what rose and stimson were doing together. So he snuck in and they gave truman a detailed document to read, which really explained the Manhattan Project in historical detail and technical detail and truman complained he said, i dont like reading long documents like this. Groves said, mr. President , we cant say it any more briefly or simply, its a complicated project. Thats how out of touch he was with it but by the end of the time that it counted when he made the decision, he knew had mastered all of it. Another remarkable fact i found from reading your book was 125,000 people, americans, working on this Manhattan Project and not a word gets out. Thats just amazing. You are exactly right its one of the things that astonished me too. People say to me, what was it you covered trump in your covering all the ups and downs in the ins and outs of washington today, what was it like writing this book . I said one of the things i enjoyed most about writing, researching, writing and talking about this book is that it has absolutely nothing to do with donald trump. [laughter] its not a knock on the president. Just to say that it took me away from all the stuff we are in and goes precisely to your point because they had been working on this project for almost 3 years, 2 years, 125,000 people at oak ridge tennessee uranium enrichment lows almost working on the bomb flight crews in wendover utah and not one word leaks about the project. I thought to myself, if you had 125,000 people today working on a secret project to bake apple pie by day two somebody would tweet, this is outrageous its immoral, im gonna blow the whistle on this. It was a simpler time, it was a time when the country was more unified, everybody pulled together in common cause to win the war against the nazis and the japanese and, boy, could we use that now. You are not kidding. Then another fascinating thing about how you wrote the book was of course to cover the major major figures involved in the project from truman to tibbets and groves and oppenheimer but then you also chose to focus in on root system and tomorrow. Tell the listeners about those two because i thought it was a great juxtaposition throughout the book. One of the things that we wanted to do with this book, i very much wanted it not just to be on top level because of course the war wasnt just top level of the scientist. It engaged all of america and one of the stories i wanted to tell was the home front. We found ruth sisson, there are websites and where there is commentary about various people and amazingly we found two people who are still alive, high obviously the big players long gone. She was a 19yearold girl, she had volunteered to work at oak ridge at the uranium enrichment facility, she didnt know what it was she just knew it was a big factory and there were these giant machines called couch on machines it was a different time, they were called the couch on girls. They basically had a bunch of knobs that they had to keep the needle or in the right place not go into the red. They had no idea, they were just told, keep the meter in the red and you will help win the war. They had no idea what they were doing was enriching uranium, creating 235 and plutonium to fuel the atom bombs. What made her story especially interesting was not just that she was on the home front but she had a boyfriend, later her husband, Lawrence Huddleston who was in europe, had been an army medic and survived all the fighting. May 8 the war in europe ends, the nazis surrendered and like a lot of other people shes delighted because her boyfriend has gone through this but shes terrified because hes not going to come home, the expectation is hes not to be shipped to win even bloodier conflict in japan. So what she didnt realize was this dramatic irony of this is she is helping create the weapon that if its used could save her boyfriends life. Thats exactly what happened. Its one of the great things as you know as a student of history often times history there are plot lines that you would never dream of inventing yourself if you are going to write a novel or to a movie. Hideko tamura was a very wealthy girl, they didnt have expectation of an atom bomb, they hadnt been bombed at all. So the parents would send their children out to the countryside so that if there were a bombing they would be safe. They sent hideko tamura, she hated it, she couldnt send a letter home because the school sensor that i think because a lot of students were telling their parents can get me out of here, she snuck into the town and she mailed a letter in