Meme is the movie you know in just a couple of months i will be leaving my position. I hope youll forgive me if i take this opportunity to become a loaf list object nostalgic. I had the opportunity to talk to quite a few people on this stage and you can just imagine the quotient and when i had the job of interviewing with a professional interview, some do it for a living the man who routinely watch bret baier conduct an interview each evening on fox news you know exactly what i mean. He is among the very best in the business. [applause] and you may not take my word for it. His newscast is consistently. As the top Cable News Program and that has been the case for many years. But bret has a second career going on as is a bestselling author and we are not talking about the autobiography and how you too can be a rather this publication, his fifth nonfiction of work, its official bret baier is a talented president ial historian and writer with a knack for shining a light on pivotal readers at pivotal moments in American History that always seem to be worth another look. His threeday series gave us a very important glimpse into the lives of three u. S. President s, dwight eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and fdr all of whom changed the course of history and the fate of the nation. His newest book, on our 18th president ulysses s. Grant entitled to rescue the republic is as educational as it is timely and i say educational and that grant was far more important in u. S. History and some historians had given him credit for. And timely and that when it comes to the fragility of our National Unity and the times we live in today their read of his book shows you that we have been here before. It is always a pleasure and an honor to have him with us us so ladies and gentlemen if you would, please join me in welcoming to the Reagan Library mr. Bret baier. [applause] thank you very much. I started with reagan sound bites. The issues that reagan deal with that were big issues when we are dealing with the debt so it kind of all works out pretty well to say hi to my friends and i know i have friends in the audience. We are here to talk about grant. Years ago you wrote your first book in the challenges you had with your son paul, remarkable but please tell me hes okay. Hes doing great. That book is called special hearted journey of hope and courage. Oh my gosh courage and love. Im thinking grand and im thinking, anyway bottom line he is doing fantastic. Hes had four openheart surgeries and 10 angioplasties in this last one was in december and paul is now an inch taller than me. Hes 6 feet tall. He is a golfer and a basketball player and hes doing fantastic so thank you very much. [applause] bret in your book you chose president s to study that are oftentimes at an Inflection Point in their presidency. A moment in time in that particular president uniquely change the course of history. Is that how you go after your subjects . When we started this and in the threeday series of those books the first one was eisenhower and it took a long time to find that but i realized i didnt know about president eisenhower. A knew about general eisenhower so was the discovery for me and i talked about that process of having this team and a researcher who goes into the National Archives that are literally treasure troves of nuggets of historical nuggets in a look focusing on the three days in between eisenhower and kennedys inauguration opened my eyes to moments in history that are either overlooked or not focused on enough so then the second book is about reagan and the final summits with gorbachev and the speech he gives at Moscow State University which in the big of history is an amazing speech if you think about it and it just wasnt focused on a lot of the time and then at the brink is fdr churchill and stalin planning dday at their conference which gets over status by yalta so its another spotlight that i wanted to give to something that i didnt think was focused on. Once that threeday series was done and the beginning and the middle in the end of the cold war i wanted to find something that was also overlooked and i looked at grant and i thought, i know nothing about his presidency other than he was a drunk and it was scandal filled and he basically handed the baton off. I didnt really know and im a student of history and so we started digging in and grant, people will focus on his time as general which is really spectacular and theres Amazing Stories in the book to go through his time. Its 800 pages which im a big fan of but then he spends a lot of time on his presidency which was really consequential. If you think about all that happened in his time he takes over for injured johnson which is by far i think one of our worst president s and if not the worst. Racist. I wont sugarcoat it. Theres not a lot of balance in my description of johnson but lincoln is assassinated and johnson is racing lincolns vision days vision day by day in grant can see that happening before him. He eventually was drafted to run for president in wins in a landslide and when he gets done as he pushes through the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution he fights the kkk with federal troops. He tries to keep the country together and win the peace after the war and that really thrilled me to be able to dig in and to tell that story and the climax is as hes leaving the content tested the election of 1876. I get the sense from the outset you feel like grant was one of the most underappreciated president s so his ranking in those historian rankings has one of 13 spots. Thats before. So eisenhower went up five spots. We have looked back and why the historians choose to look at it again. I think in this day and age when we are in such a partisan divide and everything that we talk about with race looking back at all that he did to hold the country together are really at a pivotal bull pivotal time. Do you think to this day hes known as one of the most if not the most brilliant of american generals. His reputation just overshadowed his presidency . Yes in part because he wrote his memoirs about his time in really eloquent terms. At the end of his life he leaves the presidency without going chronologically in a different spot that when he leaves the presidency he is trusting a lot of people in his time in office and they burned him a couple of times and thats where some of the corruption comes from. After he leaves the presidency he trust someone else whos part of his family to invest and make some money but then invest more and loses everything. He is poor after the presidency and has to start writing articles for a magazine about his time in the civil war and mark twain is his friend. He says how much do you get paid for these articles and he says 500. Twain is really upset so he says you are much better than that. You are the president of best general we have ever had. You need to start a memoir and i will publish it and it was so wellwritten a lot of people thought twain wrote it but he didnt. He said he only edited a few pages. He starts writing his memoir and this this is the civil war part and he gets throat cancer to the point where he can barely swallow and they are spraying cocaine mist into the back of his throat so he can swallow and lives. Hes huddled in blankets and writing in longhand because he wants to finish so that he can provide money for his wife, julia. He finishes his memoir and a few days later he dies. Twain sells it and its the bestselling book of the time and he makes roughly 3000 which equates to about 14 million in todays terms. Thereby he takes care of his family. Amazing. Again when you think of grant as a general i always thought of him as this big imposing figure of a man but he was actually small in stature wasnt he . He was very small, 57, 5 feet 8 inches wet. Adding in the wet part, 130 pounds wet. He was 5 feet 7 inches, 5 feet 8 inches, no offense. But anyway he was really small and he is a soldier never really wanted to be a soldier. His dad forced them to go to west point and he was not that great at much. He went to west point kicking and screaming and when he went there he got the appointment and they said well you have the appointment ulysses s. Grant and he said no my name is Hiram Ulysses grant and they said you can only get this appointment if youre name is ulysses s. Grant so his name became ulysses s. Grant and the s stands for nothing. His name was really hiram and then he changed his name. He kind of stunk in school. He was getting a lot of demerits but he was a really good horsemen and it turned out he was an excellent soldier and he showed that in the mexicanamerican war. He had some tough times. He went to the Northwest Territory and he was really lonely and started drinking as some lonely soldiers might do and he was like. He could not hold his liquor that well and he got busted by a commander, drunk and he said either you resign your post or we will courtmartial you so he resigned. He went back to illinois and went into this spiral where he was bad at farming in that it the leather Building Business and hes finally selling firewood out of the back of a cart to make money. Three years after that he was the head of union forces as the biggest general america has ever seen in a few years after that hes president of the United States. Amazing. Now graduates from west point and this is really interesting. He was in the mexicanamerican war and he fought alongside who . Zachary taylor, robert e. Lee a number of the confederate generals at the audience of fighting against. Thats where the interesting intersections between all of these guys and battles because they have fought with each other before and so they have these established relationships. I will jump forward again. It grants funeral just to show you how well respected he was across the land a Million People show up in new york city and lined the streets and they bring out their old uniforms the union and confederate uniforms and they lined the streets of new york city. His pallbearers are to Union Generals into confederate generals. At the end of his life and thats the relationships they have that went back all the way to the mexicanamerican war. In the book you cover the fact that lincoln wasnt envious but he looked over his shoulder at some point and saw grant and said oh my gosh this guide may run for president against may, right . Yeah you did but grant thought he was that popularity was that popular with the American People but grant never had that aspiration. He really didnt want to run for political office. He was asked all the time to run for president and he said theyll may office i thought about running for was mayor of galena so i could build a wall from my house to the depot. He finishes as the general and goes back to galena illinois. Theres a big sign that says general the sidewalk is gone. [laughter] that was his only political aspiration but he does get recruited. He has this admiration for lincoln and a relationship that lincoln truly believes that even hes an internal softspoken guy and he sees his leadership in grant. Another is that lincoln mrs. Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln and the president and fight the grant to fords theater the night of the assassination and the grant almost went that Mary Todd Lincoln julia grant was not a big fan of Mary Todd Lincoln and mrs. Grant says they have got to go see their children in new jersey, which they did and president lincoln was assassinated that night. Grant is bereft with guilt and he thinks if i had been there married would have been able to save president lincoln. He was also a target, grant was of john wilkesbooth. After he was assassinated grant stands at the time of the most popular figure. By far. Johnson despise that. He despised the grant had that power and grew to really hate him. Johnson did to the point where he was just trying to figure out how to get them out of the way want to send them to mexico and do all tsehings in grant stood up to him and said no. He said if its a military worker i will go but im not going if this is just you sending me. Grant us known as the Northern Union general but you write in your book that because the approach that he took to southern soldiers to the confederates i dont want to see the people in the south admired him as much as those in the north but there really was a respect for grant, wasnt there . Very much so. He was seen as if it are in the north, victorious but in the south he was seen as magnanimous because in victory he gave dignity to those soldiers. He let them leave with their gun in their horse. He offered personal support for the generals who he knew from fighting with before and offered to help them out as far as getting them back on their feet so he was considered even in the south is somebody who was well respected to the point of his president ial library at Mississippi State at the university which is near pittsburgh. Near vicksburg. Hes like the antipolitician and this was really interesting but reveal who grant voted for four president when grant ran for president. Hes did not vote for himself. He wrote in names and he was not a self promoter at all. In the least. He was this guy that was so selfdeprecating and so selfeffacing that before hes running for president and by the way it comes from his mom who despised pomp and circumstance and formality to the point where she was seen sweeping her front porch when he was being inauguration. She did not go to the inauguration. She hated all of the pomp and all of that and she actually, crossing books here, he reminds me a lot of the eisenhowers mom who is the exact same way and didnt really care that he was the winning general of world war ii. So maybe theres something in the mom that is just not that into it. Lincoln called him up to washington and he brings his son fred and grant does not dress well. Hes got a rumpled uniformity is muddied boots and he walks into the willard hotel. Thats a really fancy hotel in washington and he walks in and the clerk looks at him and says we do not have a room for you. We dont have any rooms. And he said okay and he said well we might have this little closet on the top floor and grant says that would be fine, that will be fine. He signs the register, u. S. Grant galena illinois and the clerk looks at it in turns white and printing gets the manager and they are quickly escorted to the bridal suite at this hotel. So hes just kind of a selfeffacing guy and hes not that into the moment but in the moment he is someone who exudes this quiet leadership and i think that was the case as president. I think you describe a very complex personality and hard to get to know and didnt didnt have. A couple of. Sherman was a close friend and a man named childs who is a philadelphia businessman who he gets to know and shares time at a Vacation Home and a quick anecdote of his selfeffacing self come hes going to this Vacation Home in Long Branch New Jersey and he gets on a, a boat andes by himself. A woman comes with her two children and shes trying to take them to the other side and put them on the boat but she cant stay. Shes looking around frantically for someone to stay with the children and somebody would pick them up. He walks up to them and he says man might be happy to escort your children to the other side. She looks at him and shes like again this straggly man and she looks at him and says maam, im general grant and she looked at him and he says well, indeed you are. [laughter] what i took away the most was he was very complex. He had this amazing relationship with his wife, julia. For all the people who said he was this big drunk throughout his life he didnt drink at all when julia was with him and julia was with him a lot. So the evidence of him being a drunkard in the white house is not there. And there are so many consequential moments during his presidency not the least of which is the 1876 election that is then dealt. The country is divided. Rutherford b. Hayes is there and three states put up two sets of electors for florida louisiana and south carolina. Those states are saying we are not deciding. We will say both of them won silver couple of weeks of violence starts to bubble up and in the country and they are threatening violence on capitol hill. Its at that moment that grant starts to look a hind the scenes for this grand bargain which really keeps the country together. In the meantime when he enters office you describe theres a piece about grant that youd say i related my ear and he was the antipolitician and he just meant business but at the same time you write because he had zero political experience and he was not interesting not interested in getting an a. Thats what led to monde so many of the scandals that the place during his presidency. Hes trusted a lot of people and he did not have the Political Insider savvy about the possibility of corruption so he put some of those friends of in positions of power and some of whom take advantage of him. There were some decent sized scandals in his administration did nothing tied to him other than his inability to choose the right person or rather choose the wrong person to trust. Talked about the 14th of amendment and the dilemma and essentially that grant needed to and wanted to enforce it but this was not something easy to do. The citizenship for and eventually voting. Its being fought in the Southern States and theres a palpable sense that if you cant enforce it what good is it so thats the argument as hes pushing this. The Supreme Court is a force that is kind of undercutting the 14th and 15th amendments as well and hes really battling to carry the torch from lincolns vision to bring the country together on race and to get past the civil war. In the south these two opposing equal forces and one is the south wanting to return to its ways and grant wanted to push it along and there was the south wanting to return with respect to slavery and the of respect for blacks. That had to be the most difficult issue to deal with. 100 at johnson because of some the things he did to empower the vestiges of the confederacy, he kind of gave them a signal like a hat tip this is it guys. This is the time. When grant takes over he has to unwind what what johnson has done and reminded people of the vision of linc