Moment. Welcome. I am mark rosella the International Affairs here at George Mason University and we are delighted to have mark bone here to do a presentation based on his latest book which i had the pleasure to read in draft form and we talked about it at length. It is excellent work. I am thrilled that he is here to make a presentation based on the research he has done in his six years as does well in the situation room at the white house. I am first going to introduce my colleague, the director of our center for politics and Foreign Relations than he is going to make the formal introduction or speaker. I teach a class on the presidency from jfk to obama, so im going to use this for my next few classes. What i like about this book presidency in crisis from truman to obama is that at the end of each crisis or decisionmaking problem in the white house from truman through obama, he does an assessment which gives it an interesting background. You see what jfk did their in decisionmaking during the cuban missile crisis and he looks at how cautious he was and what happened. Its excellent, interesting and intriguing book. The author has been a career Naval Intelligence officer for 20 years. Hes also worked in the Nixon White House was social military aid, how to let nixons daughter. And then he ran the situation room in the white house under reagans second term. Since then hes been in the atlantic council, so he raised a very interesting background. He not only writes about what happens in the white house, he writes about what happens on the golf course. And he writes about sports in the 1920th. Ill introduce the author, michael bohn. [applause] thank you. Thank you for coming. It is an interesting beginning of this book. Part of it is 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 been. It occurred to me that people on the sideline and there are plenty of them, dont have a clue how hard it is to manage an International Craze says that comes after the 3 00 a. M. Phone calls and unanticipated crisis. Everyone on the sideline, mostly opposing politicians and pundits who oppose the president s policy dont have a clue. They get to say anything they want to without any consequence of their ideas. And its both sides of the aisle. They dont have any skin in the game so they dont have the worry if their idea doesnt go well because nothing happens to them. My initial message is that its harder than it looks. This is the cover. I want to open with a little bit of an anecdote. During the iran hostage crisis as jimmy carter in the teams 79 it ended the minute that Ronald Reagan finished the oath of office on his inauguration and the iranians let the hostages go. But it was a difficult situation for president carter because if he was too aggressive to solve the hostage problem, they would kill the hostages. He tried to be cautious and he was generally except for one exception. But 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 and he said things like this is a national disgrace. He is just dillydallying. If our president , i would give them an ultimatum and i would do this and do that. Five years later hezbollah terrorists hijacked a twa airliner over europe and took all the passengers and crews hostage. They flew back and worth between beirut and algeria several times, kill an american dumped them on the tarmac in beirut. Ultimately reagan made a deal with the israelis to meet the terrorist demands and promised assad he would retaliate. It is a no deal deal. And when asked about it we did make a deal, but he negotiated cautious way. 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 times where we didnt really take their effect in action during crises. Even as people looked back at president reagans in some cases the good old days when i am here to tell you its much harder to do what governor reagan said he was going to do when he became president. This is my going away. I was at duty navy running the white house situation room. I had nothing to do with the parties involved. I had been recruited to come over and take over the situation room, which is not just a conference room. If the intelligence center. Staff for its 20 for seven over there, twice daily summary. They call people the middle of the night when things happen. The center, the name of my first book so i have a did that only a few people have. I had a front row seat during the reagan administration. That experience allowed me to gain interviews with heavyweight from previous and succeeding administrations. I spoke to former president. People at. Mac and a mayor from the Kennedy Administration and on and on. Henry kissinger, tony lake, you name it all the way through cabinet secretaries and they all told me what happened in this crisis meetings. A lot of times they left minute and god bless john kennedy 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 in the information they need to recreate a crisis. I did it in a way that reflected narrative. It is as if you are in the room. People are talking. I used a lot of dialogue which i did make out. It all came from the meeting at valve. It is fun to read and takes you through the event of a crisis. I got started on this when i wrote an article for Mcclatchy Newspapers in 2011 on the 10th anniversary of the 9 11 attacks. I had the good fortune of meeting and interviewing the people on duty in the sit room that day and who was traveling with president bush that day. So she explained to me what bush did that day, all the places he went, all of his conversations all of his thoughts. That gave me an insight into a profound president ial crisis. And then, the following year i did the same thing for the 50th anniversary of the cuban missile crisis for mcclatchy. As a group of newspapers from miami herald to fort worth to encourage to modesto to sacramento and their wire service. I had the good fortune of having a journal or one of the kennedy advisers see cap that had never been published before. Yesterday wouldve had if he meant. Then it was emergency preparedness. He kept this journal in his children gave copies to me and i woven into the story. In the chapter in the book. In 2013 i read an article for the Washington Post magazine on the 50th anniversary of the hotline. Which you hear about as being a red telephone. Well, it aint and it never was a telephone. It was always record communications. In the beginning a teletype. They didnt want a telephone because it would be scared to say the wrong thing in the middle of a crisis. He and johnson used it 19 times during the 1967 war. So i just went back and recreated the instances in which each president used it. My research led me to believe i was the last person to use it for rail. Ever since 1985 all theyve done is Exchange Text messages. This was a handwritten letter from gorbachev to reagan. They came over the hotline fax and ended in the sit room one night. They called me in the middle of the night. They said what do we do . In response to a handwritten letter from reagan. 13 pages and this is the first page. So i called John Poindexter was National Security advisor and i said you wanted to send it to stay and get it translated . No, we dont know what it says. And its really kind of fun. I had english translation. I got this from the reagan library. But its umc is in the basement of the white house in the east wing who ran the white house and of the hotline. They had rudimentary russian which they needed to court made with the moscow end. They got their dictionary out and work on eight translating the handwritten letter. Ever since then it has been mostly Text Messages. Here is a picture that i took at the pentagon terminal. The pentagon of the hotline in the white house is just a consumer. I forget about florida sun, but but they gave me two or i may have to read telephone that wasnt connected to anything. Anybody that comes and says where is the red zone . They hold it out. Mustve been as a joke. They use a chat protocol to coordinate with moscow and the Text Messages or emails back and forth. It is still there and actually we have some opportunities to use it here recently. Putin and obama have a separate line that is secure, that piggybacks on the hotlines trunk. It goes over by satellite and fiber optic and on and on. And so, those three stories led me to the book. What i did was i picked unanticipated crises starting in 1950s for tall president s. Some had one some had to. I picked the crises that were most meaningful, that could be a teaching or a learning experience that were illustrative of the demands of the international crisis. You can see it was the north korean invasion of the south. Eisenhower would kennedy on the cuban missile crisis johnson had two of the sixday war and the pueblo. Richard nixon, the october war. General ford, of the maghrib seizure. Carter has been mentioned, read again. I did three. And then plotted them based upon not just might analysis but assessments from experts throughout Foreign Policy world and sort of made aggregated grades. Rather than giving them abc i tried to put them in their appropriate quadrant. Because none of us would agree exactly where this one should go but we could probably agree would go in this quadrant, which meaning it was cautious and it was a failure and end up here are the successes and over here are the bold successes both of which have an asterisk on them. And then these are the bold failures. The bottom line is that caution succeeds more often than aggressive response. And so people defined obama to be timid are going against history and Crisis Management at the white house. The best one was kennedy. I will get to that in the second second. What it wanted it is very briefly go through each crisis, and stop me give the question at any point, and just give you a little highlight and the key finding. The first one is started the korean war and everybody gives truman a lot of credit these days but he made some really serious mistakes. And it is turned into a classic case study for the term groupthink, which is when people get together and there are no doubles advocates and to look for consensus among themselves and pretty soon theyre doing things that they might never done before but theres no doubles advocates in the room. That came about because everyone in washington became intoxicated with mcarthurs success in pushing back the North Koreans. They let him change his mission until it was really not just pushing the North Koreans back to the 38th parallel but punishing them invading north korea and going all the way to the chinese border. And the chinese with the soviets approval lured him into a trap, so his forces were divided and the counterattack and thats where we ended up with a threeyear stalemate. So its a classic case of a galloping consensus in the over office in the oval office, if you will. Intuitively you would think thats a good thing but its one edge of a two edged sword, and i will get to the other edge later on. And then at the end after the chinese counterattack, lost his cool, got mad at some reporters and bespoke about getting mcarthur the authority to use the atomic bomb if he chose to which is entirely wrong. The Wire Service People went running out of the room president is going to use the abomb on the koreas. Thats not the case. It was the case of a president losing control of his emotions and, and that some of his advisers said his mouth got head of his brain a lot of times. In this case he did. Eisenhower, they were to the suez war, and what was the british and french did like the because is important to their Oil Shipments from the far east. And they created a secret agreement with the israelis and the israelis would attack egypt britain and france would come to the rescue of the canal, innovate take control of the canal back. And when they did it really made ike matt. He lost his temper. He relied on principle, fronted his sense of personal. And so we very energetically and aggressively pushed back on the french and the british, and the israeli. And he was worked by using losing the 1956 election if he had to push too hard on israel. Domestic politics is never much further than this in an international crisis. Its always in the background always a consideration. And he stopped he forced them britain and france, to back out but he later called it his greatest Foreign Policy mistake of his presidency. Britain government fell and never regain their status as a superpower. France ultimately withdrew from the develop their own Nuclear Weapons because they didnt think the u. S. Would come to their assistance. Both britain and france never helped out the u. S. We got stuck in our quagmire in vietnam because we didnt help the french in indochina in the mid 50s. So it was kind of a mess and ike you did that what and so did nixon who was Vice President at the time but the other one was in 1960 you to shoot down. Weve been flying u2 High AltitudeReconnaissance Aircraft for years and help dispel the missile gap that everyone thought we were suffering from that the soviets were added for some Ballistic Missile and bombers. The u2 photography dispelled all that and with some good information on where we were relative to the soviet weapons systems. And they were successful the one that was shot down in 1960 was the 24th mission over the soviet union. Because antiaircraft and surfacetoair missiles couldnt get that high up to get the plane. And some of the imagery was just one, they would take off from southern neighbors of the soviet union to fly all the way and land in norway a one way trip up and over. They got lucky on that day when the soviets shot it down. That any government that the pilot had perished and the plane had disintegrated. Well he survived, francis gary power, they had him in custody, they have the wreckage of the plane and ike didnt know that. So he lied and covered up the whole thing and then khrushchev just pulled the string when he had them deep enough into that trap and then the bottom fell out and they paraded power out to the kremlin, this is the plane and ike was stuck because hed been lying about it. And he said it was a terrible mistake. So thats one way not to handle a crisis. And it gives rise to one of the fundamental rules of Crisis Management which applies to your ordinary scandal in washington, d. C. Is to tell the truth and tell it early. And so thats the lesson that everybody can take from ikes handling of the u2 shoot down. That is his son john in the oval office. They were showing what imagery from the u2 looked like. Then the cuban missile crisis, everyone is kind of the my with that but remember the mythology that came out of that crisis had kennedy forcing the soviets to back away, and it just was overblown. He really made a deal to his brother, and the soviet ambassador that we would remove our jupiter missiles from turkey if they removed their missiles from cuba, and we promise not to invade cuba. And so both men had back to each other in a corner with their belligerent sort of initial actions and then they both realized they didnt want war and they figured out how to get themselves out of that problem. I think was the best handled serious crisis of the 65 years that i looked at. This is from the day after the crisis, because they wouldnt let photographers in those meetings during the crisis. And then johnson there were two, another mideast war the 67 war the sixday war, and the seizure of the uss pueblo. This is a photograph in 1967 in early version but it looked like a room in a holiday inn sort of basement paneling smoking was obviously okay as you see man sealed blowing smoke out of his nose and the ash trees. That they were down to virtually the whole 60s but as i mentioned earlier trying to keep it from expanding getting the superpowers involved. They exchanged hotline messages during those six days. Theres a little bit of humor there. The first one from us they did not to address a letter from johnson and so they had the technical people ask the folks in kremlin how to address in there and they said comrade. So they put that on the cable and the russians thought we were being flippant, but it was an honest mistake and figured it out later. But again it was a mideast war. The israelis won it handily but it put lbj in a tight spot with the domestic political side of supporters of israel. And wanted to publicly was stay back out of the fray but privately he told the israelis through very covert channels, go ahead and get over with and make it quick. And they did. On the pueblo, North Koreans seized. It was an intelligence gathering ship that was in international waters. They just overwhelmed the crew cc. The skipper had no time to scuttle it to try to throw some of the classified information oversight. Once secular one sailor was killed. During deliberations in the white house it was we dont want to start another war in asia. Over the skies. We just have to be patient, and thats indeed what they did. It with salt and interesting way. The desk officer for korea at the state department, he and his wife one day at dinner said why dont we just say that when we sign an apology that we dont mean it . And that became a solution. They work through to the top floor of the state department and it was the u. S. Signing this apology to north korea and we were inside the waters but we dont mean it. Its all a lie, we are making this a. The North Koreans to do because all they wanted to do was show internally. We could do whatever we wanted to do internationally which was to disavow the agreement but thats how it was solved. Jo