Chosen successor to follow macarthur. The second part part of it is that roosevelt is already working in the depths of the depression to be given to prepare the country for some level of mobilization for world war ii. It is great to have a conservative republican leading guy go up to the hill as army chief of staff and take some of the flak when saying that our military budget needs to be increased. To note note the military budget was a 1935 . Total military budget for the army part, it was Something Like 400,000. It is rather incredible in that. I think there there were reasons to keep him around. Theres no indication to try to get rid of him . Im sure sitting in the house not too far from here there are many times that roosevelt wanted to get rid of macarthur. There are always reasons why he didnt. Ill be glad to sign books. Thank you all for coming. [applause]. Every night on cspan through august, book tv is in prime time. Tomorrow we will highlight our guests in indepth and afterwards, including will haygood, hiv researcher, natalia holt and journalists and and journalist and political commentator, heather macdonald. That starts at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan2. Youll have a front row seat to every minute of the republican and Democratic Conventions on cspan. Org. Watch live live streams without commentary commercials. Use our video clipping tool to create your own clip of your favorite convention moment and share them on social media. Read twitter feeds from delegates and reporters in cleveland and philadelphia. Our special Convention Pages have everything you need to get gavel to gavel coverage. Gavel coverage. Go to. Go to cspan. Org Republican National convention and cspan. Org Democratic Convention to update Schedule Information to see what is happening. Every speech will be available on demand for viewing when you want on your desktop, laptop, tablet, and smart phone. Her special Convention Pages and all of cspan. Org our public of cspan. Org our Public Service of your cable and satellite provider. If youre cspan watcher, check it out, on the web at cspan. Org. Convoy. Good morning. Welcome and good morning. I am on the faculty of the Political Science departments and also a Research Fellow at the piece of more center. It is my great pleasure and honor to have this conversation with the 2016 winner of the recipient and winner of the famed court be military history award. What we we are going to do todays have a conversation, you have read his bio i am sure. You should take take a look in that pamphlet that was handed out. He is a very famous journalist. He helps set up times magazine addition. He lives now in singapore and works for bloomberg. He has written this book called midnight fury. What we wanted to do today was on pack this book and i have not intentionally read the entire bio because i think would be more interesting to have a conversation about the book in perspective. So this a book that that deals with events that happen in countries far away, overs 17 odd years ago. But i would contend that the book is timely and relevant to where we are today. It connects with headline issues that you see in the newspapers every day. The word in afghanistan, the war in iran, americas engagement in the world, americas leadership in transforming to transform what the 21st century will bring in asia, the role of religion and conflicts, and if i might might say, how important it is for politicians when they are running for office or otherwise to be very careful in what they say. So i want to take you back if you will come a few centuries. I was born a long time ago, not that long ago but a few centuries and ill take you back to india where for hundreds and hundreds of years there existed this multicultural civilization with hindus, muslims, christians, all, all living together, worshiping at each other shrine. This is especially true of muslims and hindus who did that. Even today you can go to virtually any village in pakistan or india then you will find hindus worshiping at muslim shine said muslims worshiping at hindu shrines. There are two marriages, when the partition of india took place after 150 years of british presence in india and another 200 300 years. It was a hugely significant event. The point to bring out before we get into conversation is nothing is as simple as it looks. This is not strictly a religious conflict. I will give you a personal example. An uncle of mine rose to be the head of the ending of force. His family, like many like many muslim families did not leave india because it was hard to go home. In in the pakistani worse heres my uncle leading the air force against the Pakistani Air force, was once a muslim. Patriots on both sides, both owing allegiance to their own country. So the big point that i want to make is that as important as religion seems to appear, that that is not always the case. So i want to start by asking you , for hundreds and hundreds of years these people have lived together, hindus and muslims. In 1947, millions get injured or killed, why . Im glad you, why . Im glad you started with an easy one. [laughter] ill give you one word answer, power. What changed in 1947, what was different from the previous 150 years was for the first time, power was an offering. British were leaving, they made it clear for several years at that point they were headed out, they did not have the money to maintain their empire in india, they didnt have the political will to do and they did not want it. It its hindus and muslims always live together, theres always tension but there were limited in local and small riots would break out in a city or another but would last a day two. You did not have the mass scale of violence. Like you did in 1947. What happened was because the british were leaving the Muslim Community in india, the political leaders saw future in which they would be a permanent minority, they become out of power in india under a parliamentary system the Congress Party led by Mahatma Gandhi which was dominated by his nose would always win. They would get the majority of votes wherever they ran so the muslim parties would be confined to impotence. In the systems, they feared it was almost a winner takes all system where if you ran the government, your friends and family, cronies would get the contracts. You would write the textbooks in school, you would write the rules of worship and so on. So the program will leaders, argued that the only way muslims could be saved after the british left was if they had a state of their own were they were a majority and they ran the government. Those at the very top level. What happens is political leaders as you say you had to be very careful with how you talk about these things away say. They would paint these pictures or their followers of the terrible things that were going to happen if they did not get their own state. Not only would she be forced to convert, but your daughters would be kidnapped and raped, your grandfathers would be killed and so on. This filters down from the top levels of Political Leadership in new delhi. Once you get to the ground level it becomes the message become simple and it is killer be killed. About a year before partition, terrible riots broke out and still unclear of who started them. It was about 10 15,000 people were killed. And this and this gave india a vision of what they thought would happen if they did not defend themselves. So they started to arm themselves. They started to organize, you have to remember that this was just after world war ii. You had a lot of young men who had been trained in the military, they fought in africa, europe, asia, and many still had weapons. So unlike previous riots when violence broke out after the british left, these organize laws you could almost call them were much more effective and deadly than previous attacks. They were were not fighting with this a nice error using shooting guns of the death toll skyrocketed. Thats an interesting series of dots that you tried to connect. Let me ask you, that a lot of the trouble, i grew up in bombay so my family and i went through, but there is possibly there i want to ask you if you unpack that part of your book where you talk about the killings, why were they localized . Why did it happen all over . Its important to remember and i think a lot of people have the idea that the british left and all the sudden violence and riots broke out across the continent, people work on each other. It was not that at all. My family my father who is here was in bombay at the time, no memory of any violence. It was most of india was unaffected by this. There is one particular providence called the print job which is now split between india and pakistan. This is where the border was going to go. They wanted to divide where muslims and hindus were majority. So a new border was going to be drawn. There was a Third Community in the area known as the phoenix, they were concentrated in the middle of providence, the border was with their community in half and historically there is a memory of how it speaks in buffered under muslim rulers centuries ago, much more recently, in the spring of 1947 as part of this rolling series of riots muslim mobs had massacres several thousand people within a few months. They had a vision of what would happen to them if the british jew this border they found themselves on the wrong side of the line. Also there were overrepresented in the armies but also really heavily militarized. So there death squads as it were started the violence after the border was strong. That is widespread very quickly but is very concentrated in this area. It was muslims on the indian side were pushed out and hindus were pushed out from the other side. As you have this movement of people, Something Like 14,000,000 people across sites of the of the border over a span of a few months, you had miles long convoys of refugees, 250,000 people in a convoy, essentially defenseless. There are some essentially defenseless. There are some soldiers trying to guard them but they would swoop in and were able to massacres several hundred thousand people at a time. It was that combination of communities in the poon job that provoke them. I wanted to commend you and your dad for so calling out bombay, many of us are used to climate moon bay. So the hindu muslim issue came to providence along the border areas but it didnt spread to the rest of the country, to set that tell us anything about how deeply embedded in religion the swallows or whether it was a local facts having to do more with tara terry an advantage in revenge . I think its easy to think of this is a hindu muslim conflict, but you have to remember the leaders of india and pakistan were completely secular. They were not religious at all. They barely knew the cron, he drank drank alcohol which was forbidden by islam. [inaudible] he was a man of fine taste. Very dapper. And the other was a cambridge socialist, he did not believe in any of this hindu mumbojumbo. So it wasnt about religion for them. It was again about territory, but community, it was fear that was driving them, they were afraid that theyre going to be massacred. The strongest drive to create pakistan was not in the areas that became pakistan, because in northwestern northeastern where they were majority, they were majority, they were in power. They did not have to fear what happened after the british left. On this issue on how importantly a lot of muslims felt about not creating another country called pakistan. So my dad at that time was an up and coming screenwriter and hadnt made a big movie. We were young and he was having a hard time. He had a petition for pakistan to produce a movie and he said great, this is going to be my big opportunity, and my mother of course is a Freedom Fighter in india. She said of moss on your life. Youre not going to that horrible country to start a movie. We dont have any money and two children. I will have to think about this. He came back and told me when we were growing up, my mother had her suitcases packed and he said what are you doing . She sai said you go to pakistano make money. Im going back to my mother. So thats how intensely coming as you point out, a lot of muslim families felt. But the question i have for you now is i want to focus on, therefore, the importance of leaders, and the importance of the british. Do you think that if the british had stuck it out and said no, we will work this out coming as they had over 150, 200 years, or if the leaders themselves had stuck it out is very failure on the british side to have that . There were mistakes made on all sides. There were failures and guilt to be assigned to everyone. You cant prove a counterfactual obviously even if it hadnt happened, there is no proof that india would have stayed unified. These pressures still would have been there five or ten years later could have broken u up alg different lines. The other thing to remember is that in 47, the british only control about half of the subcontinent. The other half were independent kingdoms ruled by monarchs. They would have decided to declare them independence. But all of the leaders made mistakes. They did try to compromise the british, for a year tried to bring the two sides together. And almost a year earlier in the spring of 46, they had come up with a compromise as a very complicated compromise where you would have the unified india with the Central Government and of the muslim areas at a certain degree of autonomy and the individual provinces but have other powers. It was a way for everybody to agree, and they did a great. Great. Everybody did agree to this. But then almost immediately after they agreed to it, the Congress Party leader in the press conference was being pressured by people saying why are you giving up all of this autonomy to the areas . We fought for decades to kick the british out. He said something stupid like dont worry, we are just saying this now. Once the british leave, we will do whatever we want. For any muslims hearing this, you have to think how can we trust these people . They will sign the document and then they will be in power and turn on us. So, he backed out of the agreement and then became virtually impossible to bring them back together. They did try up until the summer of 47 trying to get back to that compromise. The americans were putting heavy pressure on the sides to come back to that compromise. They wanted a united india to help as the defense of the soviet union they didnt want it to be broken up. Between the time they struck a compromise ithecompromise in th, thats when the riots started to spread. It grew between the leaders themselves. You have to remember they had known each other for 30 years. They argued with each other and they have friends in common. You would think they could have found common ground. Even the personal relations grew. In the moment im going to open it up and ask questions but to close this purpose the conversation, to think about history i had the pleasure of interviewing Gordon Sullivan the board of trustees and he pressed upon me how important it was for him to get this in a huge liberal and i used this in the classical sense, education. There is very little you can do as far as making sound decisions at the top levels of any chain of command. And so i wanted to take us forward now. We spent trillions of dollars in this Strongest Army of the world that we wanted it to but we havent been able to prevail against the taliban that has no gdp we have 15 trillion. The same thing in iraq so my question for you is we have the same of its history. When someone says something you think is irrelevant you say that history and i think we ought to do away with that. You buy multiple copies of the book and christmas isnt that far away. Can you now take us forward. Its important in two ways. For americans in particular you mentioned afghanistan. The reason we are still fighting in afghanistan 15 years later almost is only because the couple then had a safe haven across the border in pakistan. That has allowed them to keep the insurgency alive forever as long as they have that safe haven. Why do they take billions of dollars to support the taliban. They fight the attacks like the mom by attacks in 2008 and why are they building u up a Nuclear Arsenal so rapidly and creating Smaller Nuclear weapons and so on. They dont believe the Pakistani Military still treats india as a threat that doesnt believe in their existence and want them to survive and would like to see them be reabsorbed within india. Its a few months in 1947 was in the pakistani establishment among the ordinary pakistanis and thats why the military has been able to rule the country for half of the existence. We are going to protect the country they blended this with islam and used other excuses but that is the justification for drawing the majority of the budget when the military you need us to defend. So, for americans and any outside power its important to understand the roots of this mentality. You cant start to unwind it unless you know where it came from and when it was created there was a certain degree of legitimacy. It isnt the truth now and they have no interest in taking over pakistan, quite the opposit oppt it did come out of Something Real that we have to accept and understand. I agree with you in that sense but on the other hand, americans have a very healthy ability to examine general history and to be selfcritical and not to feel like they have to hide things or sugarcoat them or ignore them and then they can move forward. We can move forward. Weve given lots of readings and airborne after partition. They shouldnt have any personal connection to this yet the way they talk about the pakistanis and vice versa is no different than 1947. Still the sense of paranoia and suspicion coming and its because they are taught a version of history thats different than this. They get one version and they are compatible and neither side really wants to admit they could have partly been at fault. Maybe gandhi wasnt entirely a saint and it did make mistakes. Maybe he wasnt such a nice guy and maybe he was a little powerhungry and so on. So until they can come up with some kind of a joint narrative that assigns the blame to all sides i dont think they will be able to move forward either come a