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Some of the most inspiring and chilling moments. from john f. kennedy, ronald regan and cold war spy movies. young men are hammering away at the stone in concrete. the berlin wall and brandenberg gate have symbolized repression and triumph of freedom. today president obama drew on the past while making his case for a much different future. tom brokaw and nbc president historian michael beshla. welcome both. >> tom, you and michael have in person and through history experienced all of this. here we had barack obama today, such a platform, such a stage. what did he hope to and need to accomplish...

Ourselves and protect our liberties. >> i've been told that as of 24 hours ago they believe that he had gotten off with thumb drives, whatever, with more than 1 million documents, documents that have attachments, separate documents, so counting on the damage. want to ask you about afghanistan because you've covered the war so intensively and now we have 24 hours ago the first word that there were going to be negotiations with the taliban and now the taliban plants their flag in doha. it's different afghanistan. karzai not unexpectedly says i'm not going there. are we back to square one? >> and...

Big states of the soviet union and the united states but as they are spread across the middle east in pakistan and other places. and that place was the intersection of so much of the 20th century obviously. it's the heart of world war ii. it's a great showdown between the soviet union and the united states and then when the wall came down there was no greater symbolic conjecture or indication that the communist state run out of the soviet union was over. so this was the appropriate place, but it's really about something more about what happened in the past and the impact i think it's going to ...

Nixon would have some good advice for obama about how to properly do a second term? surely you can't be serious. >> there are such things as negative role models in life and nixon is not a bad one. something we forget about is nixon by this huge majority, one of the biggest in presidential history. yet, no support, you know, two houses of congress, controlled by the democrats so he overreached. he did something called impoundment. he said, democrats can vote all the programs they want. i'm not going to spend the money. even if it's not for watergate, nixon might have been impeached for this. i...

Anything about that or should we all sort of chalk this up to didn't happen the first time? >> i think he'll certainly try and bill clinton talked about that directly, this system in washington which makes things so difficult but one of the most telling things, we heard a couple of minutes ago, all of this talk of the white house there's a lot of paid to doing things by executive order, executive action. not necessarily by legislative acts in congress, exactly what clinton did in 1997 when he realized that the possibility of getting things from capital hill was a little bit more limited than h...