Im really most interested in this but it gives you have managed to do in a readable length what many other authors have tried to fit in many many pages and im just curious about your interests and eisenhower. How familiar with were you with his record when he developed an interest in the subject . Guest so i covered the pentagon for six years. Obviously i had a healthy appreciation of general eisenhower. But i didnt really have an appreciation of the eisenhower presidency. Im a college golfer, former college golfers still a golfer and i got the holy grail of golfer down to it Augusta National and i was on cloud nine and went down there and was driving down meg elia lane. Its just such a spectacular place and for golfers as you know its the place to be. So i went in and they told me you are staying in the eisenhower cabin and i couldnt believe it. I couldnt go to sleep then i poured myself a glass of wine and walked around the eisenhower cabin which is just the tech aware. Its a little white house really and the memorabilia on the wall is the books of the statues and the arts that your grandfather painted. I was kind of overcome in the midst of getting ready for my round the next day i realized i did not know and i covered politics a lot about the presidency of eisenhower because our generation and younger seemed like history as the focus started with kennedy Going Forward and i thought to myself is there a way to breathe life into that and to share that experience with younger people so soon after then i traveled to abilene, kansas to the library and boyhood home and that is where i talk to the folks there and they said this moment, this transition while a lot of books have been written about your grandfather that had not been focused on. The Farewell Speech and i went to the library and the great folks there brought out the box and i put on the gloves and they pulled out the plastic sheath and actual speech that he held in red in 1961 with the scribbles and markings and i got goosebumps. I said this is it. Thats what im going to do. Host its so exciting to be studying someone who is predigital age is that there experience, the tactile experience of that. So how long did you ask a work in this book . Guest its roughly three and a half years from the start to the birding of the book and it had a lot of help as far is researched and it was a labor of love and in. I discovered a lot and i think really susan is relevant to today and thats one of the things i love about the book, is that it really can translate your grandfathers messages can translate today. You can read that speech. President obama could have read this speech the other day in his farewell address. Posted on the course of your research on mice fascinated. Were there any surprises for you . Did you have a feeling by the end of this that there were some misconceptions about the way he ran the white house, the way he brought his leadership skills to public life . Completely. My perception of his presidency changed dramatically. I thought it was going in, it was always perceived in the press as quiet time and he was a little disconnected and played a lot of golf. Im a big proponent. And i looked at it and he got us out of the korean war and a booming economy. The first civil rights love legislation since reconstruction, that Massive National highway builds on the interstates that we drive on today under god in the pledge of allegiance, in god we trust is the National Motto printed on our currency and have this amazing ability to keep us out of foreign war where we didnt need to be yet be Strong Enough to hold off an expanding an ominous soviet union. The stat after the korean war, there really wasnt a single combat soldier killed or covert operation but through the rest of your grandfathers presidency is really stunning. If you think in retrospect and finally the bipartisan nature really was something that drove me to him because the meetings that he had with sam rayburn to House Speaker or Senate Majority leader Lyndon Johnson once a week sometimes. I mean that stunning if you think about recent president s. Host actually i was surprised to read out myself. I knew that he made a big priorities of reaching out to members of congress and i knew this he had a drink with sam rayburn and Lyndon Johnson on a regular basis but you have wonderful detail about that. Guest their histories were really something that gave us a lot. Jim haggerty as press secretary, a lot of folks and go whitman as secretary of and she is just chock full of stories and we found documents and things that had not been tapped. The other reason i did a susan was because hes the First Television president or tv anchor. It was a big deal and i was surprised and i did not know before your grandfather no transcript of News Conferences were put on the record. He could get a the News Conference and asked to present a question but you could not quote directly from the president of the United States. You would paraphrase that they would rise happy out to say the president didnt say it that way. When your grandfather came in, he said forget that. I just a campaign where everybody had a camera. But the transcripts on the record and i quickly evolved to record the News Conferences on tv and radio and then he did, the first live News Conference. The first time the American People saw their present being questioned was with president eisenhower. I was quite amused by the story of having makeup applied which he found deeply uncomfortable. How do you think, how would you compare him to other president s today in terms of his comfort with the media and television in particular . I know hes the First Television president but guest he had a lot of good relationships with the people who covered him but they did like to cover his style and his answer is this kind of stilted sometimes than he would stop and start. They made fun of the way he would talk about some things and kind of get away but i think it was transparent. For example when he had a heart attack in 1955 and he was considering obviously whether to run again or not he says to jim haggerty put everything out, jim. Then there is this note about a week later that said dear jim this is all fine but i could do without the once a day update on my bowel movements. [laughter] so i mean theyre a little nuggets of humor. Posted that little notice a keeper, suitable for framing. That is most interesting. I was also trying to read one of his last dinners before he left left office was for the press corps. Guest exactly and they really loved him as a person. I dont think they fully appreciated all the things that were happening behind the scenes. Nobody did that afterwards as a nation and thats why a look at these three days in the speech enabled us to look to the narrative and get back to his life. You know he was a humble leader ante i think got back from his time as general. The huge egos of bradley and patton and montgomery and degaulle and these huge figures that he had to figure out how to get on the same page. Host so im wondering how you see the leadership, his leadership during world war ii and his leadership during the presidency. Were you able to connect those dots and do you think he brought the same set of skills or did he have to learn new ones as president . Guest he had to learn new ones but he definitely tap those skills. The dissenting views and airing out things. He set up a National Security apparatus in the white house much like what he had in his military ability for dissenting views to happen and then the buildup to dday. I think he was someone who had a steady hand and lift people up and empowered them to do their best and gave them credit frankly. He kind of let them have the spotlight, which is an interesting story about the Nixon Eisenhower relationship is that nixon when your grandfather says you know i think you may want to run for cabinet positions on an issue to be credited with changing something if he knows he wants to run for president and nixon sees that as he wants to just kick them off and that wasnt what we found. So there was the skepticism i think that drew a bilk at that moment. Maybe thats one of the reasons he was kept off a trail in nixons campaign. Nixon said it was because of your grandfathers health but when your grandfather gets on the trail in and it turns the tide of that campaign to the point we found kennedy talking about it and he says every day that eisenhower is on the trail i feel like im standing on a pile of sand and the waves coming in and then syncing. I was thinking, and they believed if he was out a few more days that nixon might have won that election. Host thats actually one of the big controversies, isnt it about why nixon used eisenhower and the eisenhower family. There was some discussion whether ike was asked. But you know its unusual for a Vice President to be elected, isnt it . Guest well, it is. If you look back in history Vice President gore did something similar with no clinton. Obviously they were different circumstances and he was trying to distance himself from all the controversy but at the same time clinton was a great campaigner. The same kind of deal if you look back in history. Perhaps it might hit been better for Richard Nixon to own an issue. Host of all if is relationships with the great man which do you think was the most intriguing of them . Guest i almost wrote the book on the relationship between your grandfather and churchill and the letters that they sent back and forth. I think there is a lot to explore that i just didnt go back but its there at the library. They really valued each other in the world and i thought that was the most intriguing. I do think the relationship with kennedy is very complex and we talk about it here. You know this book as you know starts with president elect kennedy meeting president eisenhower after the election and they are talking in the oval office. It ends by the way with president elect trump meeting president obama in the oval office so the relevance is there eisenhower from what we found didnt think there was a lot to kennedy. He was kind of hollow when he was young might not have a lot of experience. What he was saying on the trail was really making him back specifically the u. S. Missile gap charge. The soviets were churning out missiles like sausages in the u. S. Was not. Your grandfather knew that and yet he still used it and that made your grandfather very upset. He finally meets him and in this meeting we have great detail from both sides. Eisenhower is very impressed and says to himself, you know maybe the American People got this right. Theres a a lot to the sky but what concerned him most is that he didnt allow kennedy the National Apparatus that was set up for dissenting views and that comes back about a month later in the cuba situation. Host obviously it was not sought bys favorite National Pastime in the sense that he found politicking and what politicians are forced are willing to do not so inspiring sometimes. Were you surprised by that . He has some natural charm and ability to connect with people. Guest he did. He obviously had that huge megawatt smile. He did like campaigning clearly but he was good at it as who is a relatable. I love the story and i talk about him as a humble leader. I love the story after world war ii he comes back to the ticker tape parade in new york and back to abilene and he is in the car waving and everyone is cheering and someone turns to your greatgrandmother ida and says you must be so proud of your son and she says, which one . So it gave you a sense of grounding growing as eisenhower as he did. I think that reflected itself later on. Host in the book you made the comment that maybe eisenhower didnt want to know what party people came from when they came to the white house. Do you see this, you might say nonpartisan streak in his governance . Guest really nonideological. More practical. Figured out you have to deal with the other party no matter what they said about you on the campaign trail which is the beauty of how he deals with sam rayburn and Lyndon Johnson and in the essence of passing the national highway bill that was so amazing. He had a temper and he tried to deal with it. I love pam wittmann story. She is the secretary, where she says that he went back on the south lawn to swing the club. He did that a lot. He cleared his mind. He came back and he was so angry because there were squirrels in his back swing. Every time he went back there were swirls everywhere. Squirrels so and wittmann says mr. President they have a right to be there just like you do. One day he tells the secret service to take all the squirrels off the white house lawn and transfer them to rock creek park. So thats one of the little jim stories. Host incher helps to be in charge. To have the squirrels sent into exile. You know you very artfully talk about some of the principles that guided his presidency in terms of decisionmaking and his view of the situation domestically and internationally. What struck you the most in terms of being a contemporary way of looking at this challenge . Guest he articulated this in the Farewell Speech, this caution, this balance, this want and need to not jump to things, to really act when you have to, that paperweight on his desk, silent in manner, strong in deed. I think he was all about getting things done and not dealing with the personalities and i think that is related throughout. I found a lot of examples of leadership style that he didnt steer it and he said you dont have to hit people over the head to be a leader. You have to empower them to do their job and thats how we look at it. To go back to the cuban missile crisis, another controversial thing that we really dug into to try to find how that played out. So he tells kennedy that the National Security apparatus and how important it is. There is an operation in the planning stages but your grandfather says there are stipulations that have to be met he makes this clear to kennedy in the first meeting. He says one, there has to be a cuban exile government ready to go off site. Two there has to be some leader thats able to take over for castro and three there has to be significant power to support these operatives that we have trained. It kennedy moves forward and the whole thing moves forward. Its been a disaster obviously in the firstperson kennedy calls is your grandfather. He gets them out to camp david here and this iconic going up the path and a quote is confirmed by both his kennedy turns to eisenhower and says you know you never really know how tough this job is until you were in it. Your grandfather turns with a smile and says mr. President with all due respect i think i told you that three months ago. And you know in retrospect the kennedy folks understandably look back at that that time differently and said the operation started was very going and just move it forward but they were very specific things that your grandfather said that have to happen that did not happen and in fact it was called off at the last minute. He didnt want the world to know the u. S. Was involved in your grandmother said the world will know. Posted the world will know. You hosted a wonderful documentary last night with the same title of your book and i briefly made the point that the green light had not been given by the entire eisenhower frustration and use what was in the planning process. Do you think part of that was a misunderstanding between the way military minds work in civilian minds come in other words he would have any number of agencies ready to go so the president always had options . Guest of course and i think thats lost in time, that is lost in the years that have gone by. It kind of rolled into the storyline that obviously fit the kennedy folks to be able to talk about this is an operation that he move forward but they were real clear stipulations that your grandfather made. He did not actually decided to go ahead. Im curious, there are some wonderful speeches you have given. One of them was called, it was the one to the press. In a way its sort of the book into the farewell address. What was it about the farewell address aside from the balance . You do an elegant job of handling the militaryIndustrial Complex but what was the process that is particularly relevant today . Guest first off it took almost two years. I mean almost two years thinking about his ending message. Thats a long time and 21 drafts he worked at it and work did and worked it and as you know which are grandfather who wrote for macarthur. People dont know that. He was an eloquent writer and editor. His ability to be a wordsmith perhaps was much better than his ability to deliver it but he could craft it and he really take his time to craft it which tells you how significant he thought that moment was. So it was not about his list of accomplishments. It was not about him. It was a out bout of blueprint for america to come his concerns and warnings about not only the militaryIndustrial Complex but he says we cant mortgage our children and grandchildrens future. How relevant is that today . Host i love that line. Guest if you look at that again, bipartisanship. Figure out what you can get done together before you argue about what you cant and i think there were a lot of messages. If i may, one thing we didnt include in the book was bought key of who was a speechwriter. Just brilliant and we talked to him in the documentary. He said at the time i was in technology and every draft had to be retyped by secretary ann whitman. Your grandfather was editing all the time and she tried to preempt things. Bob, there were these letters from ann whitman to bob. Do not use the word merit as a verb. Use it only as a noun and second never use the pronoun i do for two consecutive paragraphs. Third this morning a mild grumble from the loss you are using to adjectives, warm best wishes. Bob, clearly you can make wishes warm or you can make them best but you should not make them warm best. For, never take it for granted the president know s