Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Presidents Boo

S. [inaudible] ultimately what hope for the book is that young man gets a sense of what it takes herself interrogation, to ask questions of oneself and ones identity and position in the world. I think that theres a pretty establish narrative for what it is to be a young black man and experience racism and White Supremacy of what that looks light. We have a body of literature that deals with that. We have the folklore. We have the oral history of what that looks like but i dont think weve worked on enough is for young black men and thinking through what it means to experience that but also be in a position in which your identity may be denying someone else humanity, to be a heterosexual black man that exist within the context of the patriarchy and homophobia and all these other things. How is it that youre wrestling with your position within that come. Implicit within that come and to say, my friend, its easy recognize whose boot is on your neck. Its much harder to recognize whose neck your boot is on. End into question that i to say how do i do that myself from that when my identity, like william at my core, we shipped but all of these experiences and by the systems. How can i truly fight for equality, justice and liberation for all people, not just those who experiences the same position and identity as i do. So hopefully thats what it starts to get young black men thinking about. I guess with that, thank you so much. [applause] thank you again. We have books in the lobby for sale so please go out and purchase this thoughtprovoking book. I begin, thank you, mychal, for your wonderful presentation. And thank all of you for coming. And he will be signed by here at this table. So books are for sale. [inaudible conversations] when they tune in on the weekends usually its authors sharing their new releases. Watching the nonfiction authors on booktv is the best television for serious readers. They can have a longer conversation and delve into their subject. Booktv weekends, they bring you author after author after author. I love booktv and im a cspan fan. Hello, everyone. For those of you who were this morning, welcome back. For those of you who are new the session, welcome to the 2016 roosevelt reading festival. We are glad to have here today. I think you know the format. We will talk for about a half an hour and then it will be about 10 minutes of question and answer, and i will go back and they will set up and you will be able to get signed copies of the book which are pretty wonderful. We are very excited about this year to at the library. This will be our 75th anniversary at the end of june and we are celebrating in many ways and this reading fussell is one of the ways we think both franklin and eleanor was a would be happy about because this is exactly how they wanted the site to be is, as a search for people to talk about presidency, about the air and to bring people together to the meaningful conversation. To support programs like this, we have our membership table. We would strongly encourage and we appreciate. The challenge we face with someone like david is that he is highly accomplished. I could spend the next half hour talk about his background. He served during both the clinton and the george w. Bush administration as an Intelligence Officer. And daily intelligence brie brir from the ca which is of course wakeup the idea for the book. It was a desk officer at the state department as well. He consults and trains and offers advice to Government Agencies and cooperation. He received his ph. D in Political Science from duke. Those of you who are basketball fans, we can talk about that later. He has published a wide range of articles, security studies, houston chronicles, appears a National Media regulate a special on fox news channel, fox and friends. This book is a fascinating book and it goes right to one of these key transitional moment in the presidency from roosevelt to today which is the date intelligence briefing. His book is called the president s book of secrets the untold story of Intelligence Briefings to americas president s from kennedy to obama. Of course, there was no daily intelligence briefing at the default as the cold war came. What they did have was a map room. If you go to the museum youll see a my replicate. We dont have a lot of great photographs of the but roosevelt wanted and bathroom because churchill had one. So he wanted one. Churchill also had a great Intelligence Agency which the the states did not so roosevelt wanted one of them as well. I think dave will talk about some of the. I would like you to welcome tried one and i hope we will have a great session welcome david priess. [applause] thank you, paul. And thank you to everyone here at the Roosevelt Library involved with the reading festival. Thank you all for coming. Im learning a bit about our shared history. Im here to talk about the president s book of secrets, a colloquial term for the daily intelligence that the president has received for decades in various forms. The presidency in the modern era is so different than what it was 200 years ago, but theres a few key inflection points along the way. Im going to talk about some of those inflection points focusing of both president roosevelt, looking before him, looking after them. It centers around what we take for granted today which is that the president of the United States received top secret intelligence delivered to him personally, tailored to them personally to allow them to dissipate threats to National Security and hopefully to identify Foreign Policy opportunities and act ahead of them. The Presidency Daily brief, or an pbd come is that every document on top secret intelligence including reporting and assessments from gaza and outside sources alike the cia spies, the National Security agencys listening posts, the nations reconnaissance satellites all gather information and then export take that information in paint a picture about whats going on in a Certain International environment based on the limited information and their own knowledge and expertise of a foreign culture of the foreign leaders they are studying. For this book i did have a chance to get direct input from all of the living expresident s and Vice President s from most of the living cia directors, National Security advisers, white house chiefs of staff, secretaries of state and defense. This story is their story. I found in doing the research what we take for granted today about the president getting this kind of intelligence simply wasnt true a long time ago. Let me watch you do a bit of epic is alleged to do with talk about folks here today, Franklin Roosevelt, and how we planted the seeds for will be noted is the modern delivery of intelligence to the president of the United States. First i will walk back a little bit to give a sense of what fdr faced with come into office relating to the top secret intelligence and can talk about what happening during his administration if they want to briefly through what his successors did with the foundation that he played before i take your questions. Go back to george washington. George washington came into office as president. There was no Intelligence Community but he was no stranger to intelligence. He had been his own spymaster. Once in office he did that anyone accessing International Developments for him and his successors did i the. They face the same hurdles. Seems strange to think about today but if you think about the five successors to george washington, people who lead the nation for the 40 years after his death, they had Extensive International experience for that time. All five had been ambassadors, in some cases to more than one country or secretary of state come often do not all of those things and occasionally acting secretary for. Governor of virginia or author of declaration of independence. Theres a lot of expertise. And yet they didn didnt anyboo open interview was going on around the world. They had to do that all themselves. Over the next several decades Going Forward over 100 years in fact. That didnt change. During the civil war lincoln did walk across to go to get some telegraphs. During the spanishamerican war mckinley could have a small war room set a. President wilson during the First World War did get some assessment. They were from the british who was getting them from the british in washington, not from United States Intelligence Service which did not exist as such. So when fdr enters office thats what he is facing. But he had a dual challenge. The nazi aggression in europe and get the rights of the japanese empire across the pacific. He needed more information and more assessment of that information that he was getting through other means. He started reading the institutions that were lacking. He tapped wild bill donovan to become the head of what became the oss, originally the office of the coordinator of information from a Great Washington bureaucratic title if ever there was one. The coordinator of information becoming the director of the office of Strategic Services. Most stories about office of Strategic Services focus on the cool stuff they did. They focus on the collection of human intelligence, the propaganda efforts around the world. They focus on the sabotage the oss operatives did and they did throughout world war ii. But it was another unprecedented effort in world war ii with the oss. I was in office called the office of research and analysis, or became known rna. Are in a was the analytic effort. Rna was a group that donovan called his professors. These are the people that the oss recruited from some the nations top universities, harvard, yale, princeton, other top universities to assess what was going on around the world to serve the president and top military leaders. They ended up at the peak of oss, and it upholding an almost 1000 political scientists, economists, historians, cartographers, geographers and others to write thousands of memos, handbooks and other information for political and military leaders of the time. Their job was to collate information from their sources at the time the sources they had included diplomatic cables from the state department overseas, they had interNational Media available to them. They had military reporting available. If theres one thing they did not have, they did not have direct access to intercept foreign communications. The kindest of the masses could agency collects now. It was there but they didnt have access to it. The information they were providing used meanings but not all means that the United States had at the time. The leaders of the research and Analysis Division in the oss really struggled with how to make this relevant to the president. They had no trouble getting this information to military leaders in the field who needed it. Network it reports being produced but they did have the good sense of what roosevelt needed. They didnt get a lot of feedback. This is essentially a one way street. Reports were being set up that not a lot of feedback was coming back. Hard to tell of the product in a kind of environment. What the r a leaders did is they tried to make these academically interesting reports that all these professors were producing and turn it into something that could be actionable intelligence but they did struggle with that. Donovan innovated something to try to get around this. He would send some of these are day reports to the president through the president s secretary, and he started putting cover memos on top of them. The cover memos at first were administrative, descriptive. But over time donovans personnel he started to shine through in his memo started including some of the juiciest tidbits of the spy reports that were included in the reading stack underneath him. They start including some of donovans own language putting a spin on the dense academic prose appearing within the report. Don evans language certainly embrace the nonacademic phrases but he was getting roosevelt things like that old fox, and this one, contortions of the putrefying nazi diplomacy. Cia and retrospective published several years ago called the r a effort topped by this colorful memos from donovan one of the few original contributions to the craft of intelligence by the United States throughout its history. This was unique to develop intelligence analysis of this sort for the president. But as i mentioned it was a one way street. Fdr was i getting a lot of feedback certainly to analysts writing these reports not even to the Senior Leadership of oss about what kind of interpretation and assistance he needed to help them prosecute the war effort. So they into providing much more Background Information and insights personally directed for the president. You the end of the war in 1945, os as to its on a bridge produced a Civil Affairs handbook on germany that reached a whopping 2000 pages. Franklin roosevelt like to read. Nobody likes to read that much. [laughter] and yet the foundation for the moderate Intelligence System was laid. For the first time the was an Intelligence Service in the United States which had as one of its objectives serving the president of the United States. Harry truman picked up on that very soon the oss was disbanded quickly after the war but in early 1946, it was back. And adding your name, a new had called the director of Central Intelligence and yet it was called the Central Intelligence group which eventually became the central Intelligence Agency your harry truman started getting what he called a daily summary and this was the document that analysts at cia pulled together based on classified information but this one was more directed at truman did so. That is, they thought about what does truman need and what does he not need. He picked up on what roosevelt had build and get something more focused on him. But even then they were not getting tons of feedback and overtime they didnt get the kind of response they were looking for. Under the next president Dwight Eisenhower to change even more because he was used to a steady profession of briefings. He used a National Security Council System very well. With topics planned out weeks, sometimes months in advance. He was not getting a daily intelligence briefing personalized the he receipts and documents produced by the current Intelligence Office in what was not the cia but those to a close relationship to the intelligence he was receiving. That would only happen under john f. Kennedy but a very different personalities eyes out and get the way of absorbing information. Delight to talk to people. He liked ad hoc meetings about various issues that came a. He could not sit there still for hours for the long meetings that eisenhower was used to. One day as military aid by the challenge of trying to ride him all these documents from the pentagon, the cia, the state department and get it to what the president needed, he called in analyst and so what i needed your help. I need you to they come up with something that i can give the president that will give them everything he needs to know and nothing that he doesnt. That will take this huge stack of reports and boil it down to the essential elements. I would really like it if you put icould put it into a formatt the default input into his suit pocket. We cant seem to keep his attention for more than a few minutes. That way they can read it, put it away from the apple out again between meetings and get through it during the day. One of the office of look at the apple and smiled because you can talk about just such a product anticipating kennedys personnel at the change. He had something in mind. So much so that within 24 hours they had a dry run of new product something unheard of in bureaucracy since. Less than 24 hours they had a new product designed for the president in the hands of military aid sing what you think . He liked it. He liked it so much that the brain next day he took the inaugural copy of what became known as the president intelligence checklist to john f. Kennedy out at the least care the estate of glendora in virginia. Kennedy was sittin was sitting s wimple bodyboard between laps. People do not come look at it, seem to like the short document. True to form, put it down so he could keep swimming. He was hooked. For the rest of the short presidency jfk seemed appreciate the president intelligence checklist, reading it, reacting to it, asking simmons leading officers deduce things based on the items into. He led into the circle of president ial intelligence the secretary of state and defense. One person he did not le look io the inner circle was Vice President Lyndon Johnson. No love off between the two but it was quite a surprise after that day in dallas when the tim johnson smu president and the director of Central Intelligence briefs in the next and chosen the president intelligence checklist giving no indication that this is a new product designed for him. Lyndon johnson was not a statement the figu