Will hear about this and get going pennsylvania and ohio are considering. There will be movement in vermont. It has passed in virginia virginia, florida, texas, a large state the first date was colorado which was a democratic stronghold. And texas which is fairly conservative again it nearly had unanimous support and it isnt that the law is perfect och or they will solve every problem that exists but it is such a tremendous improvement over what we have now that is closed door if you have a terminal illness to exhaust conventional treatments there are a lot of drugs that can prolong lives. Is such an incredible improvement over where we are today but i will draw people to the chapters in the book where i talk about the term investigational and experimental a baby in the United States but there are dozens or maybe even hundreds of drugs approved in the European Union in israel, japan and other countries the Standard Operating Procedure that works better like chemotherapy so we call on congress and that fda to allow for reciprocity if it is approved overseas through a legitimate regulatory agency, let our patients have access. Host i am looking forward to following this story. I hope we can see different ways for the right to try a lot. Thank you for joining us. Good afternoon. My name is bill and on behalf of the store owners, welcome to the store. It is a pleasure to have you here and a pleasure to be hosting winston groom. He will talk and read for about a half hour. Then he will take questions for 15 or 20 minutes more. We encourage questions and we just need you to ask them from the microphone right over there. Also so everyone can be involved and for our cspan audience. Its great to welcome winston back to d. C. Where he was born and worked as a reporter for the washington star. Hes an author of both fiction and nonfiction with novels including as summers die and force gone. Histories including shiloh 1862, and tonights book, the generals. One of his gifts on display is the ability to flush out the characters of these three influential but different leaders, discussing their expenses in the First World Waru and giving us insights on how experiences shape their personalities. Another gift is his style. That makes this work of history informative and a page turner. Please welcome winston groom. [applause]. First i would like to thank everybody for coming out to hear me on this lovely saturday afternoon in washington d. C. I have been on a book to her for couple weeks now. One of the first questions im usually asked when i do a tv or radio show is why did you choose threes three men from the Second World War . The answer is, they embody, i believe certain characteristics of courage, character and patriotism which seem to be traits that are on the wane somewhat today. I dont think we are going to find out if thats a a problem until we, god for bid, have another big war. The second question i think is pertinent that people have asked is what do you think these three generals would do today in the face of the enemies that we are looking at. Of course these unfortunate events in france last night give new meaning to these questions. I think im going to address it right off the bat by saying, i dont know what they would do obviously, but i think i think what they would do is they would assemble a reinforced Mechanized Infantry Division of which there are about a half dozen in this country at the present. They would take them over to where those isis people are and these people are about 20,000 of the best trained, toughest, well armed in supportive, meanest sons of bitches on the planet. They would go to those isis people in about a week. However, the two generals would not have the authority of course to do this deed. It would have to come from administration. I dont know what is going to happen with this administration. These isis people, i can tell like anybody with a brain can tell, that they are very dangerous. Right now they are either occupying or seeking to occupy several countries in the middle east. With all of those countries assets resources, if they consolidate they will have the ability to purchase very dangerous weapons of map mass destruction. Sooner or later they will have to be dealt with. So, with that that in mind, lets continue. These three guys, they were 18th century men. They were born in the 1880s. He graduated from west point and they served in the philippines and before the turnofthecentury and after the turnofthecentury, along the First World War on the mexican border. They became heroes. General marshall is a traffic organizer. Always was and always had been. He became the chief of staff ultimately. The other was a colonel at that point, douglas macarthur, and general patent became involved in tanks. That was very important at that time. He led an enormous attack. Lets go back and look at General Macarthur. After the First World War he became the superintendent at west point. He remained a general. He then became the armys chief of staff and later in the 1930s, he resigned from the army to become a fueled marshal of the philippine army. The filipinos were worried about the japanese. Macarthur told them he could assemble an army and it would take ten years but he thinks they could defend the philippines. While they ran out of time. General marshall, he continued with his organizing skills. He didnt have to stay in the army. He was offered a job by a banking format jp morgan as Vice President where he wouldve made millions of dollars, but he was a soldier and thats what he was trained to do and thats what he did. He turned them down. It wasnt necessary for general patent to stay in the mark army either because he was the richest man in the army. He would go to military bases as a young lieutenant with a string of ponies and a yacht. They didnt begrudge him because he was the best polo player in the army and the best yachtsmen in the air army. In 1912 he participated in the olympics in sweden in an event which came from the old greek olympics where you have a marshall event. You have about half an dozen Different Things that you do. In the old greek version actually kill one another but in the new version they set it up to be something we had to ride and fight and swim and shoot a pistol. Patton, at that point, was a captain and he was very good at all of these things. He was the best horsemen in the army. He was one of the best shots in the army. He was the best soldier in the army. He had learned to swim around Catalina Island because his family owned it. [laughter] he made lifelong friends of his competitors. Each of these men had to live up to something, and their family, their fathers usually. He had won the congressional medal of honor in the civil war and became the commander general of the army. In macarthurs youth, he was still a young captain and he remembers as a child, being seven or eight years old, he learned to ride and shoot before he learned to read and write. General marshalls father, they were from pennsylvania, his dad was a very successful businessman until his business failed. There is no way of really telling, telling, but its my suspicion that George Marshall was such a great organizer because he was trying to live up to not failing as his father had done. He was a superb organizer. George pattons father was a lawyer. He had missed all the wars that we fought, but his grandfather had been a confederate general who was killed in one of the last battles of the war. Patton had grown up with stories about him, about his grandfather and he had always wanted to be a soldier almost from the day he was born. He was always nervous that he wouldnt live up to the bravery of his ancestors. He was always tempting death to find out. One day in the battlefields in france and world war one, they found themselves talking to each other. Many of the men were down in foxholes. There was a barge coming which they could see. They continue the conversation as patton later wrote to his wife because neither one of us wanted to be the first one to say we better get down. So they let it roll right over them. They werent hurt, but that is the kind of stuff that these kind of men were made of. They were oblivious to danger. They were walking through the battlefield standing up trying to find out what was going on. He did that at the beginning of the war when the japanese attacked pearl harbor. At that point he had a good size American Army. President roosevelt ordered General Macarthur to leave the philippines. He was taken later to australia where he became the commanderinchief of the southwest pacific army. He made about through the press and said i shall return. That quickly became, because this was the dark days of the war, he became the iconic slogan of all the americans. They heard this and this was something they wanted to do. It was written on coffee cups in the bottom of ashtrays. It was engraved on walls and on trees. I shall return. And return he did. It took him three years. He developed a strategy and some people call it Island Hopping but what he really did his, the japanese had had years to occupy numerous islands. Rather than take everyone of them, he would simply bypass them and leave the japanese on these islands to wither on the vine in his rear. It saved a heck of a lot of men because they were very ferocious fighters. He finally landed back in the philippines and he almost lost that fight because Admiral Halsey who was the naval commander of the battleship and air Carrier Task Force was decoy up a couple hundred miles out of the way by a japanese trick. They didnt have any planes on them but he sent them up as a sacrificial lamb because it got halsey out of the way. As soon as he was out of the way, General Macarthur was there for about three days with the all his ammunition and transport ships out in the harbor there. Suddenly, the entire japanese Surface Fleet appeared. They had come through the straits of San Bernardino where Admiral Halsey was supposed to have been to watch and make sure they didnt get through, but they came through and fortunately, im writing about this in my next book, it will be called the admirals. As you might expect. That morning there was a Small Task Force of air force carriers that were half the size of the big aircraft carriers and basically no armory. They had 15 lunch guns and they were surrounded by three destroyers and three destroyer outlooks. This huge japanese ship was surrounded by battleships. It was a super battleship with 18inch guns, bigger than any battleship in the world and certainly better armored. The american force, commanded by vicki, somebody reported to ziggy that they could see these huge ships on the horizon about 20 miles away using a big telescope. He said thats gotta be Admiral Halsey. A plane went up to look at it. They launched the plane and this guy said no its not Admiral Halsey, its japanese. He said it cant be, it has to be Admiral Halsey. Take another look. The plane radioed back, sir they are shooting at me. I know its the japanese. They have a big red sun on the flag. Everybody went into a grand panic and they begged Admiral Halsey to come back he was at that point engaged in the aircraft carriers, sinking one after another. He was very busy. To make a long story short, which i will, this little group of six destroyers and destroyer escorts and aircraft escort carriers held off the entire japanese Surface Fleet. The only thing i can compare it to, to, its like a High School Team beating the dallas cowboys. They lost over a thousand soldiers lives, but they distracted them enough from these little escort carriers and they werent prepared for this. They said launch them anyway because if they sank, they would lose the planes. They would go straight for these battleships with machine guns. Every time you made a run, if they see you coming, hes going to change course. They slowed them down enough and finally after about three hours of this, the japanese commander orders his ship to go back north to reorganize. That was the original plan. When he finally got all his ships together he discovered about 13 of them had been sunk. So he went back to the San Bernardino straits and General Macarthur had continued on his mission. But if they had gotten through, they wouldve sunk all their supplies and equipment and they wouldve murdered everybody on that beach. They had bullets the size of a fullgrown hawk. Anyway, in the meantime, back to the story. General patton, while General Macarthur was winning his battles in new guinea, patton took command of the invasion of north africa. He landed in morocco, and the enemy there was not the germans or the italians, at that point, it was the french army that was being commanded by this puppet yacht minh in france. The question was are they going to fight. While they did fight and they started shooting at macarthurs troops. He sent a message to the french commander and said if you dont surrender the city by 5 00 oclock this afternoon, i will have it destroyed. They could look out there and see all the big warships. They could have leveled that city in about a half hour. So they surrendered. Patton was successful and of course god himself them all the newsreels he then conquered sicily before going on to england. There he commanded a dummy army. It was designed to fool them. It didnt have any troops but it had a lot of radio traffic. This was because of the infamous slapping incident where he lost control of himself and found a soldier in a a hospital ward who was there for some kind of combat fatigue and general patton did not believe in combat fatigue so he jerked the soldier up and gave them a browbeating. This was reported by the hospital doctors and when they found out about it they initially didnt do anything about it. He put a letter in his file. But then the press got a hold of it and yes he had been slapping the soldiers. Thats a violation of military law. Anyway general eisenhower was thinking of finding general patent. Of these three men, two of them had enormous egos. General partial had practically no ego at all. He could have, if he wanted to, a point himself to take command of the european invasion which was probably the most dreamed of job by any military commander. General marshall had not ever had the opportunity to do that. They asked him to stay in washington because they thought he was a calming influence, so to speak on the usual tensions between the army and the navy and what later became the air force. So general marshall did one of the selfish things and he said yes sir, ill stay here. At the same time he realized that he had two very temperamental people on his hands in general patent and General Macarthur. General macarthur was making very unkind statements about washington and the general staff in the pacific because he felt he wasnt getting the right kind of support and supplies and in fact he wasnt because Winston Churchill came to an agreement and said most of the stuff over to europe and the i lies so general mcarthur was getting the short end of the stick and he didnt like it. So he began to talk to the press about it which is a politics thing for the general to do, unless hes the head general which he wasnt. They looked at all of this and they kept eisenhower from firing patton. They realize that both these men were indispensable in the winning of that war and the shortening of that war. They probably wouldve one anyway i i suspect, but they shorten the war. In any case, you know what happens in the story. In france, they sadly unleashed general patton away from his dummy army. He was like a race horse that had been in append too long. They had already landed the Invasion Army but they were stuck in normandy and he saw way to break out of normandy and he first came to the scene but he liberated paris and they stopped him because they ran out of supplies, the reason being that we were giving the supplies such as gasoline and ammunition to the british. They were trying to catch up and eisenhower was trying to play the politician. General patent counteracted this his strategy was this, let me explain it first, in the depression the poor people or the hobos would go to somebody on the back door and they would knock on the door and they would have a cup of water with the rock in it. Maybe two or three rocks. They would say to the lady, maam im trying to make some soup and i wonder if you have an onion or some old celery i could put in here. So she would give him a carrot or an onion and hed go back and say maam i hate to ask you this, but do you have a potato or peelings of potatoes that i could put in my rock soup. Oh yes, i have one. Hed go back and say it would sure be nice if i had just a piece of meat for my rock soup. So should give them that hed walk away and the need to have soup to eat. So what he would do when he got stuck by general bradley, they would say youre going to far in the first thing he would do is pick a fight. That fight would get bigger and he knew that if his people were gonna fight he would employ that rock soup strategy. Every time they said they were going to far too fast it would be rock soup every time. After words he was in charge of the largest state in germany. General eisenhower had said they werent want to employ nazis in any type of important position. General patton disobeyed this order. He did it because he said he was worried about the welfare of the people because they had a big winter coming on and there was a a big shortage of everything. Especially firewood, food and things like that. Patton didnt think some of the nancys were so bad because some of them had to be nazis. Some unfriendly press Corps Members figured this out and they had a very unpleasant conference in which they