When many constituencies in the United States because he is trying to appeal to them that is a positive thing. He is going on in his way to communicate where they are in different types of media. You have to be careful to realize the world has changed in recent years and president obama may have a better understanding of that bennetts critics do. For instance, the next president will have to use the same message he is used to he wont be as adept as it because its good that it played to constituencies that the next president will have to realize this is part of the presidency now going to voters in all her diversity of the country and appealing to them in diverse ways. Host president says spotters. Want to read a couple nuggets from here. Jfk had more influence on clothing fashion and style than any other president and in fact the industry back then based in connecticut was not pleased with the president hapless moments. Richard nixon wasnt responsible for many fats but he did start the trend of wearing a small American Flag on the lapel of his suit jacket. The last caller was talking about sports a little bit. Youve got a story about Richard Nixon calling them plays to a couple of teams. Guest it is so much a part of our culture. Basically they are interested in sports. Nixon actually was a big fan the extent to which he was a fan of folk all and he was actually devising place where professional college team and spend them in. Im not aware any of them were very well. A famous play was sentenced to the Football Team in the cultures you would use them to play from the president and give it a try. Nixon fancied himself as an expert on foot tall but his play didnt work very well. Host we have been talking with ken walsh senior White House Correspondent for u. S. News world report of c transfer takes a look at 17 International Universe is faced by president s going back to your return and assesses how they were handled. Mr. Bohn served as the white house situation room under president reagan. Nonmac [inaudible conversations] can and not welcomed here mark with the mark with malcolm acted in School Policy government and International Affairs hearing that george which i had the pleasure to read in draft form and we talked about it at length. It is an excellent work. I am thrilled that he is here to make a presentation based on the research he has builtin his experiences as well in the situation room in the white house. I am first going to introduce my colleague, bob tubman direct or at the center for politics and foreign relation and he is going to make the formal introduction for speaker. I will show you the book. At the end of each crisis or a decisionmaking problem in the white house firm truman threw a bomb he does an assessment which gives it an interesting background. You see which assay kit jfk did during the cuban missile crisis and he looks at how cautious he was and what have been. I think it is excellent, interesting and intriguing book. The author has been an Intelligence Officer for 20 years. He also worked in the Nixon White House and then he ran the situation room in the white house under reagans second term. The atlantic council. He brings a very interesting back around and insult though not only writes about what happens in the white house him about what happens on the golf course then he writes about sports in the 1920s. I introduce the author, michael bohn. [applause] thank you. Thank you for coming. It is an interesting beginning of the book. Part of it because i was at the white house and i got to see how president reagan handled crises. And then i started writing about other crises that have happened and it occurred to me people on the sideline and there are plenty of them dont have a clue how hard it is to manage an International Crisis that comes after 3 00 a. M. Phone call and unanticipated crisis. Everyone on the sideline, mostly opposing the policies and they get to say anything they want to without any consequence of their idea. Both sides of the aisle. They dont have any skin in the game, so they dont have to worry if their idea doesnt go well because nothing happens to them. My initial message is that it is harder than it looked. This is the cover. I will open with a little bit of an anecdote. During the iran hostage crisis commensurately carter in 1979 and it ended the minute that Ronald Reagan finished the oath of office on his inauguration and they arranged to let the hostages go. It is a difficult situation for president carter because if he was too aggressive to solve the hostage problem, they kill the hostages. He tried to be cautious and he was generally except for one exception. Governor reagan was running in the republican primary in march april 1980, leading up to the 1980 election. He had a lot to say about what jimmy carter ought to be doing. He said things like this is a national disgrace. He is just dillydallying. I would give them an ultimatum and i brought the reports and ill do this and do that. Five years later hezbollah terrorists hijacked a twa airliner over europe and took all the passengers in hostage. They flew back and forth returning beirut and algeria several times, let some of the hostages off, killed an american dump them out in beirut and ultimately reagan made a deal with the israelis to meet the terrorist demands and promised a solid that he wouldnt retaliate against hezbollah and iran. If anybody asked about if we didnt make a deal but he made a deal. He negotiated cautiously and all of a sudden he was in jimmys shoes. He did the same thing jimmy carter did. A couple weeks later the wall street journal called him jimmy reagan because he betrayed the promise he made that he would take swift and effective action. I was there for a lot of the time where we didnt mean to take effective action during crises. Even as people look back at president reagan, in some cases the good old days im here to tell you its much harder to do what governor reagan that he was going to do when he became president. This is not going away. They be running the white house situation i was not political, had nothing to do with parties involved. I had just been recruited to come over there and take over the safe room, which is not just a calm picture appeared as the president s intelligence center. Stafford24 7 over there. World events for the president. They called people of the middle of the night when things happen. The happen. They handle all the communications, office head of state calls and its the theme of my first book, the white house. I have a good but only a few people i had a friend seat during the reagan administration. That it periods allowed me to gain interviews with heavyweights from previous and succeeding administrations. I spoke to two former president s. People like. Mac to merit from the Kennedy Administration and on and on. Henry kissinger you name it. All the way through both cabinet secretaries and they all told me what happened in those meetings. A lot of times they left minute and he taped his conversations so we know exactly what he said which is very helpful. So i was able to develop an analytic model and gain interviews in order to pull the information i need to recreate a crisis. I did it in a way that reads like a narrative. It is as if you were in the room. People are talking. It talking. They came for the medium itself. It is kind of fun to read and it takes you through the suspense of the crisis. I got sort of started on this one i wrote an article from a classy news paper in 2011 on the 10th anniversary of the 9 11 attacks. I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing the people on duty in the same room that day. And the head of the situation room who was traveling with president bush that day as condi rices representative. She explained to me what bush did that day. All the places she went and that sort of gave me an insight into a profound president ial crisis. The following year i did the same thing for the 50th anniversary. That is a group of newspapers that ran from miami herald 24 words to anchorage. I had the good fortune of having a journal from one of the kennedys advisers had never been published before. He is what is today the head of fema. It was the office of emergency preparedness. He kept this journal and his children gave copies to be and they will that into this story into the chapter in the book. In 2013 i wrote an article for the Washington Post magazine on the 50th anniversary of the hotline, which you hear about has been a red telephone on the president does. It never was a telephone. It was always a record communication. In the beginning a teletype. They didnt want to telephone because they would be staying around being in the crisis. That is what they told me. He and johnson is it 19 times during the 1967 war. So i just went back and recreated the history which each president used and my research led me to believe i was the last person to use it for real. Ever since 1985 all they have done this Exchange Text messages. This was a handwritten letter from gorbachev to reagan that came over the hotline faqs and into disfavor when i peered me to the officers called them in the middle of the night. They said what do we do . Who is 13 pages. This is the first page. I called John Poindexter and i said to him to get it translated . He said no, we dont know what it says. And its really kind of fun. I had the english translation. I got this from the reagan library. But a two ncos in the basement of the white house in the east wing who ran the white house and of the hotline. They made rudimentary russian which they needed to make up their dictionary out and they were on it translated the handwritten letter. Ever since then, it has been mostly Text Messages. Here is the picture that i took at the pentagon terminal of the hotline. The pentagon of the hotline. The white house was just a consumer. I forget what ford is fun but they gave me a tour and they had an old telephone that wasnt connect it to anything. Anyone that comes in polled said. Mustve been as a joke. What they do is use a chat protocol to coordinate with moscow in the Text Messages or emails back and forth. Its come a long way but it still going on at still there. Weve had some opportunities to use it recently. There is a separate line to secure back from hot line that goes over by satellite and fiber optics and on and on. So their stories kind of led me and what i did was i picked anticipated crises in the 1950s for 12 president. They had one some had to pick the crises that were most meaningful that could be a teaching or a learning experience of love for illustrative of the demands of an International Crisis. You can see chernin up in the invasion of the south. Eisenhower kennedy in the cuban missile crisis. Johnson had two of the six day war, the pub of. General ford. Carville as i mentioned, reagan. Bush of course the persian gulf war, the iraqi invasion of kuwait. Clinton, bush 9 11 and two things from the obama arab spring. The libyan intervention in this era and chemical redlined crisis. So what i did is i try to assess each of the 17 crises on two axes. The first was how bold the president s response was on the horizontal and whether successful in the long term for a longterm failure and plotted them based on not just my analysis but assessments from experts throughout the foreignpolicy world insert is made aggregated grade. Rather than giving it a b. C. D. E. , i tried to put them in the appropriate quadrant because none of us would agree exactly where this one should go. We could probably agree it would go in this quadrant which made a cautious and it was a failure. Up here for the cautious success is end over here in the bold successes, both of which have an asterisk on them and these are the bold failures. The bottom line is the caution succeed more than an aggressive response. So people that find obama to be timid are growing against the history of management in the white house. The best one was kennedy. I would get to that in a second. So what i will do is just very briefly go to reach crisis. Stop me if you have a question at any point. Just to give you a little highlight of the key findings. The first one is the start of the korean war. Everybody gives true that a lot of credit these days but he made a really serious mistakes and it has turned into a classic case study for the term groupthink, which is when people get together and theres no devils advocate today but for consensus among themselves and pretty soon they are doing things they might not have done before because there is no devils advocate in the room and that came about because everyone in washington became intoxicated with macarthurs success in pushing the North Koreans. They let him change his mission. Mission creek and tell it was really not just pushing them back to the 38th but punishing them going all the way to the chinese border and the chinese with the soviet approval led them into his traps that they were divided in the counterattack and this is where we ended up with the threeyear stalemate. So it is a classic case of consensus in the oval office if you will. You take intuitively that is a good thing, but it is one end of a two edge sword and i get to the other edge later on. At the end after the chinese counterattack, truman in a press conference they spoke about giving macarthur had the authority to use the atomic bomb messages do, which was entirely wrong. The president is going to use the abomb korea and then that is not the case. It was the case of a president losing control of his emotions and some of his advisers said his mouth got ahead of his brain a lot of times. In this case he did. Eisenhower the egyptians nationalized the suez canal and the british and french to like that at all. They created a secret agreement with the israelis. The israelis would attack egypt. Britain and france would come to rescue the canal and they would take control of the canal back. They really made by combat. He lost his temper. He relied on principle and so he energetically and aggressively pushed back on the french and the british and the israelis. And he was worried about losing the 1956 election if he had to push too hard on israel. So let me tell you domestic politics is never much further than this in an International Crisis. Its always in the background. Always a consideration. He stopped. He forced the entrance to back off. But he later called it his greatest foreignpolicy mistake of his presidency. They never regained their status as a world superpower. They developed Nuclear Weapons because they didnt take the u. S. To come to their assistance in both britain and france never helped the u. S. When we got stuck in our quagmire in vietnam because we didnt help the french in the mid50s. It was kind of a mass and so did nixon and the Vice President at the time. They had had assigned a Reconnaissance Aircraft for years to help dispel the missile gap everyone thought we were suffering from. And the two cryptography spelled all of that. We at connecticut information on where we were relative to the soviet weapons system. They were successful. The one in the night in 60 was the 24th mission over the soviet union because the antiaircraft surfacetoair missiles couldnt get that higher to get the plane. So the imagery they would take off from the southern neighbors of the soviet union to fly all the way and land on a oneway trip up and over. I got lucky on mayday in 1960 and we thought the pilot had perished in the plane had disintegrated. Well, he is survived. They had them in custody, the wreckage of the airplane and i ache didnt know that. So he lied and covered up the whole thing and then khrushchev just pulled the string and mud in deep enough into the trap and they played out through the moscow showed pieces of the plane and ike was stuck because he had been lying about it. He said it was a terrible mistake. That is one way not to handle a crisis and it gives rise to the Crisis Management, which applies to ordinary scandal in washington d. C. Tell the truth and tell it early. Thats the lesson everybody can take from ikes handling of the shootdown. They were showing the imagery. Then the cuban missile crisis everyone is familiar with that. Remember, the mythology that came out of the crisis had kennedy forcing the soviets to back away and he really made a deal through his brother and the soviet ambassador that we would remove our jupiter missiles from turkey if they removed their missiles from cuba and we promised not to invade cuba. Both men back each other into a corner and then they both realized they didnt want war. I think it was the best handled serious crisis of the 65 years i looked at. This is from the day after the crisis ended because they wouldnt let photographers in those meetings during the crisis. And then john said, there were two, 67 war, sixday war and the seizure of the uss pueblo. This is part of that. In this they brewed in the early version of website a room in a holiday inn sorted casement paneling, smoking was obviously okay. You can see them blowing the smoke out of his nose in the ashtray. They were down there virtually the whole six days and as i mentioned earlier, trying to keep it from expanding and getting the superpowers involved. They exchanged the 19 hotline messages during that day. There is a little bit of humor. The first one from us they didnt know how to address the letter from johnson to chris egan, so they have the technical people ask the folks in the kremlin had addressed him and they said comrade chris egan. So they put that on the table and the russians thought we were being flip and but it was an honest mistake and we figured it out later. But again, it is a mideast war. The israelis but it put lbj in a tight spot on the political side of supporters of israel. What he said publicly was stay back out of the fray, but privately he told the israelis to just go ahead and get it over with and make it quick and they did. On the pueblo, the intelligence gathering ship in international waters. They just overwhelmed the crew. They had no time to scuttle it. They try to throw some of the classified information on the side. In the deliberations in the white house, we dont want to start another war in asia over the skies. We just have to be patient and that is indeed what they did. It was solved in an interesting way. The office